Marina Goldovskaya, 80, Dies; Filmmaker Documented Russian Life

Marina Goldovskaya, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who exposed the harsh underbelly of the Soviet Union’s labor camps and later chronicled the heady days that followed the state’s collapse — days that promised democracy but bordered on anarchy — died on March 20 in Jurmala, Latvia. She was 80.

Her death was confirmed by her son, Sergei Livnev, who said she died at his home after a long illness.

Ms. Goldovskaya, who often operated as a one-woman band, made some 30 documentaries — as writer, director, cinematographer and producer — and was a film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, for two decades. Her wide-ranging films include a portrait of a Russian circus aerialist (“Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress,” 1970); a chronicle of six weeks in the life of a television journalist during the Soviet thaw known as perestroika (“A Taste of Freedom,” 1991); and the story of a Russian prince who returns to live in his family’s former estate, now in ruins (“The Prince Is Back,” 2000).

In a review of “Solovki Power,” her 1988 film about a Soviet labor camp in northern Russia, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the work “first-rate film journalism” and “a remarkable documentary about the prison camp said to have been the prototype for all of the gulags that came after.”

With a style that calls to mind the films of Ken Burns, “Solovki Power” juxtaposes the cold, white beauty of the gulag’s remote White Sea location with the memories of eight survivors and an official 1928 propaganda film that touted the camp’s clean linens and enlightened teachings. Theologians, historians, poets, mathematicians and economists were among those who were sent to the camp, which operated from 1923 to 1939.

In the film, an economist recalls the night she had to wake up her children, ages 4 and 6, to tell them that she was going “away to work.” Her son told her that his papa had already gone away. If they took her, “Who will stay with us?” he asked.

And then there was the night, recalled by an academician, when 300 shots were fired in a botched execution — the executioners were too drunk to aim properly — leaving bodies squirming in a dirt pit the next morning.

Ms. Goldovskaya began making “Solovki Power” in 1986, when it still could be dangerous to examine the dark side of the Soviet past, since her film would expose the camps as an integral part of the Soviet system, not as an aberration created during the Stalin era.

When she told her mother what she was planning to do, “she started crying,” Ms. Goldovskaya recalled in a 1998 interview. “‘You are committing suicide,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember what happened to your father?’”

In 1938, her father, then a deputy minister of film, had been overseeing construction of the Kremlin’s movie theater when a lamp exploded. Stalin believed it was an assassination attempt and sentenced him to five months in prison.

Speaking from Latvia, her son, Mr. Livnev, who is also a film director and producer, said: “The film really became very important not just as a film, but as an event in the life of a country. For many, many people it opened up so many unknowns, about how terrible our past was.”

Another Goldovskaya film, “A Bitter Taste of Freedom” (2011), was about her friend Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and fierce critic of Vladimir V. Putin who was shot at point blank range in her Moscow apartment block in 2006. The film included diaristic footage that the filmmaker took in Ms. Politkovskaya’s home over many years.

There is “a scene in the kitchen with Anna and her husband, where you can almost smell the food and the coffee, and they’re talking about how they’re afraid,” said Maja Manojlovic, who worked with Ms. Goldovskaya as a teaching assistant and now teaches at U.C.L.A. “Boy, did Marina capture the energy of this fear, the fear of repercussions for her criticism of Putin.”

Marina Evseevna Goldovskaya was born on July 15, 1941, in Moscow. Her father, Evsey Michailovich Goldovksy, was a film engineer who helped found, and taught at, VGIK, the All-Union State Institute of Film. Her mother, Nina Veniaminovna Mintz, studied actors’ interpretations of Shakespeare and helped develop and curate theater museums.

The family lived in an apartment building built by Stalin in the 1930s to house filmmakers “so that he could keep an eye on them,” Ms. Goldovskaya said in a 2001 interview. She attended VGIK, one of only a few women to study cinematography there. After graduating in 1963, she began working for state television. She became a member of the Communist Party in 1967 and remained one for 20 years.

Otherwise, “I would not have gotten ahead in television,” she wrote in her 2006 autobiography, “Woman With a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker.” “In an ideological organization like television, a camera operator who was not a Party member could never be promoted.”

She made close to a dozen films for state television before leaving her job to make “Solovki Power.”

“I grew up in a house filled with filmmakers and cinematographers,” she said in the 1998 interview. “Many cameramen died during the war; it was so romantic to die for your country. There were so few women in the profession. My father told me that if I went into it, I would never have a family, that I would be unhappy all my life. But I was young, it was romantic, and I loved to push the button.”

In addition to her son, Ms. Goldovskaya is survived by two stepdaughters, Jill Smolin and Beth Herzfeld; two grandsons; and three step-grandchildren. Her first marriage, to David Livnev, a theater director, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Alexander Lipkov, a film critic. Her third husband, Georg Herzfeld, died in 2012.

Mr. Livnev recalled his mother “always with a camera.”

“She was shooting all the time,” he said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.”

In 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, Ms. Goldovskaya was a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, when she was introduced to Mr. Herzfeld, an Austrian engineer and businessman. Six days later, he proposed.

Ms. Goldovskaya moved to Los Angeles in 1994 and began teaching at U.C.L.A., returning to Moscow in summers to work on her films. Guests to her classes, and then to her sunny, sprawling home nearby, often included noted documentary filmmakers like Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock. And she was closely engaged with her students.

“She opened up her classes to anthropology students and students from other disciplines,” said Gyula Gazdag, a Hungarian-born filmmaker who was on the U.C.L.A. faculty and teamed up with Ms. Goldovskaya to make a documentary about Allen Ginsberg, “A Poet on the Lower East Side” (1997). “She felt they would bring a new perspective to documentaries,” he added, in a phone interview. “She knew all her students by name, what their motivation for making a particular documentary was.”

Ms. Goldovskaya’s film “Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress” featured an aerialist who “was in a way very similar to my mother,” Mr. Livnev said. The aerialist died of a heart attack as she was taking her bow after a performance.

“She never used a rope for protection,” Mr. Livnev said. “My mom loved this woman, she was a role model, and all her life she lived like this. She would work, work, work all the time. Her dream was to die with the camera rolling, and she would never use this security rope in her life.”