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‘A conglomeration of aggressive personalities’: Savchenko's students at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (1945–50) and the cinema of the Thaw

Igor' Savchenko died in 1950, a time when it was difficult – even dangerous – to imagine the existence of Soviet society without Stalin. Savchenko’s largescale productions, Bohdan Khmel'nytskyi (1941), Tretii udar/The Third Blow (1948) and Taras Shevchenko (1951) had been officially acclaimed as models of Stalinist ‘high style’ with its distinctively unified film language and, as such, had been honoured with Stalin Prizes. Yet it is difficult to overemphasize Savchenko’s contribution to the subsequent development of Soviet cinema during the Thaw, which deliberately and consciously defined itself in opposition to the Stalinist style that preceded it. This is due only in part to the fact that two thirds of the students in Savchenko’s directing class at the All-Union State Institute of Cinema (VGIK) became successful professionals in the 1950s and 1960s. This fact becomes even more significant if we remember that at times there were as many as 30 students in his course, among them Aleksandr Alov, Lev Danilov, Latif Faiziev, Nikolai Figurovskii, Genrikh Gabai, Marlen