The traveling series " Soviet Cinema in the ’60s " originated at Lincoln Center last year; it reaches the MFA this Wednesday. The series celebrates a creative flowering that took place in the Soviet Union under the improved climate that set in after Stalin’s death in 1953.

The entrenchment of socialist realism in Stalin-era film meant an emphasis on positive heroes, whose on-screen lives hardly went beyond their glorious contributions to collective struggles. Behind the scenes, the process of getting films approved, made, and released was hobbled by fear, rumor, and arbitrary bureaucratic intervention. The perils and roadblocks had a deadening effect: only nine feature films were released in 1951. The Twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956 — at which Khrushchev denounced the " cult of personality " that had formed around Stalin — marked a new Soviet era. It became possible for filmmakers to abandon the monotonous clichés and rote optimism of the Stalin era and open up the private lives of characters.

The earliest item in the MFA’s series is one of its essential films, Mikhail Romm’s Nine Days of One Year (1961; September 8 at 3:45 p.m.). Romm, a veteran of the Soviet cinema’s darkest years, proved with Nine Days that he had survived them with his artistic instincts intact. The film’s hero is Gusev (Alexei Batalov), a nuclear-physicist at an underground research station in a provincial town. Slowly dying from a massive dose of radiation, Gusev persists in his work, and he becomes more and more estranged from his wife, Lyolya (Tatyana Lavrova). The third central character is his friend, Kulikov (Innokenty Smoktunovsky), a cynical intellectual who questions Gusev’s commitment to a project that he sees as furthering mankind’s penchant for destruction.

This cool yet fervent film at once establishes an otherworldly atmosphere. Low-angle tracking shots create an effect of liberation from the ground and from gravity; you get the sense that life is becoming a question of ideas, of urgent decisions being made in freedom. As the film progresses, Romm’s compositional diagonals become more and more extreme and inventive, less moored to ordinary perceptions of space. The film multiplies smooth, shining, reflective surfaces, creating an environment in which an irradiated scientist’s contemplation of his own " strange death " ( " invisible, inaudible, no color, no smell " ) resonates with discreet anguish.

The keynote is sounded in a scene early on in which the three main characters eat at a fancy restaurant. It’s obvious that this is a place for the elite, and that our three heroes not only belong there but constitute an elite apart from the elite. (Looking around the room, Kulikov pronounces all their neighbors " Neanderthals. " ) The characters are doubly privileged: architects of the conditions in which the rest of the world lives, they are also free to judge and comment on these conditions. Gusev’s return to his home town late in the film leads to a confrontation with more traditional " Russian " values, as embodied in his father and in a little boy. But it’s to the film’s credit that it refuses to view Gusev’s tragedy in an unequivocal manner. And of all possible endings Romm could have devised for the film, the one he comes up with is the most low-key, the most open-ended, and the most touching imaginable.

Almost as remarkable is Marlen Khutsiev’s I Am Twenty (1964; September 22 at 12:45 p.m.), which is also known as Ilyich’s Gate. As it follows three young friends in Moscow who spend their time dancing, riding streetcars, falling in love, calling up to one another’s windows from courtyards, and going to parties (where the records played are mostly American or French), the film gives a sense of freedom and happiness — but a happiness tempered by doubt over the future and by a feeling of rootlessness. Fluid, surprising, and offhand, I Am Twenty enjoys a tactile immersion in the passage of time; it has the melancholy of an elegy for the present. In the last phase of this extremely long (175 minutes) film, the main character receives a visit from the ghost of his father, a martyr of the Great Patriotic War. This scene came in for censure from Khrushchev, who took it as a message to young people that " there is no point in turning to their fathers for advice. " His interpretation is almost incredible, so heavily patriotic is the note sounded in this scene and in the film’s coda.

Khutsiev was born in 1925, and he fought in the war; he was thus of the generation of the hero’s father. This may be a key to understanding the point of view of the film and in particular why, despite its affinities with both the French New Wave and with certain tendencies of the British cinema of the period, I Am Twenty is so ambivalent toward the young urban Russians of the ’60s.

The directors of the remaining movies in the series belong (with one exception) to the generation after Khutsiev’s. The war is the setting for Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 film Ivan’s Childhood (also known as My Name Is Ivan; September 5 at 6 p.m.), the intense account of an orphaned boy who goes behind enemy lines as a scout. Most admirers of this director consider his first feature a lesser work, too humanist and overt, its interest consisting mainly in prefigurations of his later films — the ennobled, enchanted figures of boy and mother; the vertiginous dream sequences; the emphases on height, depth, trees, water. But this series provides a context in which Ivan’s Childhood can come into its own again as the overpowering film it is.

Issue Date: August 30 - September 6, 2001