Yahha, documentary film

Rashid Nugmanov’s documentary film, which was a final project for Sergei Solov’ev’s film directing workshop at VGIK (Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow). Echoing the cinematic experiments of Dziga Vertov and the French New Wave, the film uses a visually and temporally nonlinear plotline to tell a story of a typical day in the lives of Leningrad rock musicians and their fans. Yahha was one of the first Soviet documentaries to tackle the subject of USSR’s rapidly expanding underground rock music culture and its surrounding community, which at that point in time was concentrated in Leningrad. The film contains concert footage of the bands Alisa, Zoopark, and Kino, while also capturing scenes of the musicians’ and their fans’ everyday interactions and movements across the city. Unlike other documentaries focusing on rock music in the USSR, the film downplays the movement’s sociopolitical significance, focusing instead on its daily rhythms and environs, painting a veritable youth subculture oasis unencumbered by its repressive totalitarian environment. Any tensions with officialdom that the musicians and music fans encounter (when, for instance, a Kino concert is unceremoniously cancelled), are presented as largely comical interludes, with the film’s subjects always finding unofficial venues in which to gather, converse, and make music. The Perestroika period’s now legendary geographical locations where Soviet underground rock music originated and developed – The Leningrad Rock Club, Tsoi’s “Kamchatka” boiler room, and private apartments are all featured prominently in the film. The second clip, which includes Kino’s performance of “Tomorrow We Take Matters Into Our Own Hands” (“Zavtra deistvovat’ budem my”) in the Leningrad boiler room, where Viktor Tsoi works, merges images of late-socialist menial labor with underground musical production, combining seemingly disparate ideological spheres into a seamless whole, and in this way encapsulating the cultural contradictions of perestroika.