MOVIES - May 13, 1988

Glasnost only goes so far. The head of the Soviet state film monopoly, Goskino, has called on film directors to show restraint in depicting sex, saying permissiveness was not part of Kremlin reforms. In the latest edition of the bimonthly Sovietsky Ekran, Goskino chairman Alexander Kamshalov writes that the release of several mildly erotic films had provoked complaints from the public. Films showing “intimate episodes” and drinking scenes threatened the aesthetic standards of the cinema and the moral health of viewers, he says. “Permissiveness has nothing in common with perestroika (economic and social reforms) and can only compromise its ideas in the sphere of art,” Kamshalov says in a letter to the magazine.