As the decades passed, the name of Sergei Eisenstein, the most famous and influential of all Russian directors, falls down the critics’ lists of all-time great directors, it is increasingly tempting to revise, downplay or forget part he and his fellow Russian filmmakers and theorists have played in the development of cinema. Yet the impact of the films and ideas they produced during the 1920s, the high point of the silent movie era and the most innovative decade in Russia’s cinematic history to date, was immense. It has been said that their influence was as often cautionary as it was exemplary. The filmmakers, and the films they made, were a product of the conditions prevailing in immediately post-revolutionary Russia. Those conditions-famine; war, both external and civil: political, social and economic upheaval and institutional instability balanced by the dutiful optimism required in the building of a new socialist state-provided an overwhelming necessity that bred a equal level of invention, which flourished it was snuffed out by the iron fist of Joseph Stalin when he came to power.
That invention applied to all elements of film making, in theory and in practice: acting technique and cinematography, costume, art and production design, as well as the two most celebrated advances made by Soviet cinema in documentary film making and in the art of montage (the effects brought by the juxtaposition of images). The innovation, daring and accomplishment of Soviet films released from 1924 to 1930, including such masterpieces as Mat by Vsevolod Pudovkin. Sergei Eisenstein’s Oktyabr, Chelovek S kino-apparatom by Dziga Vertov and Zemlya by Alexander Dovzhenko were the results of a lengthy and arduous apprenticeship.
The film industry the Bolsheviks inherited was in disarray. Many of the pre-October 1917 generations of producers, filmmakers, and actors had fled Russia. The early years of the Soviet era saw the domestic exhibition circuit in disrepair, film distributors, and production companies in limbo in expectation of nationalization, and film stock virtually non-existent until German imports were agreed in 1922. The foreign film imports that had dominated the market before 1917 dried up and the production of domestic movies stalled It was in these conditions that a young avant-garde generation of filmmakers was given opportunity, freedom, and power at unprecedented levels. Many learned their craft making agitki propaganda films, from a combination of old film stock, newsreel, and newly shot documentary footage, to be screened on film trains sent to remote locations around the country. Lev Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Vertov, as well as directors Leonid Trauberg and Grigory Kozintsev, all worked on these agitational films and this experience of making films aimed at largely illiterate audiences with available resources for instructional and ideological purposes had a profound and formative effect on their later radical stylistic intellectual and aesthetic approach to cinema.
That approach was revolutionary in a number of ways. One was the extent to which, and speed with which they were able to absorb, adapt and incorporate some of the frenzied excitement, radical ideas, trends, practices, and techniques of the established arts. Simultaneous revolutions occurred in art, design, poetry, literature, and theatre. The dynamic geometrics of Constructivist art, the work of theatre directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Constantin Stanislavsky, and Futurist writer and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky were powerfully influential. The acrobatics, Grand Guignol episodes, shock effects, narrative fragmentation, choreographed movement and use of symbol and characteristic faces Eisenstein deploys in Stachka can be traced to his experience working and directing for Meyerhold, whose theory of biomechanics’ stressed physical expression rather than the psychological motivation favored by Stanislavsky.
In 1919 Kuleshov, the anti-Naturalist, anti-Stanislavsky father of Russian cinema.co-founded the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography film school in Moscow. The lack of film stock contributed to his early practice of shooting film-less’ movies and encouraging his students to re-edit cutups copies of D. W. Griffith movies. One of the first films Kuleshov’s workshop produced was his witty parody Neobychainye priklyucheniya mistera Vesta v strane bolshevikov relating the madcap adventures of an American in Soviet Moscow. Kuleshov’s most outstanding student was Pudovkin, a skilled user of montage in his films. Kuleshov’s experiments in the assemblage and serial editing of film stock began a debate on the theory and practice of montage that became central to Russian cinema of the 1920s. Kuleshov’s ideas were taken up by others, notably by Eisenstein, who went on to analyse them into their various components-metric, rhythmic, tonal and intellectual-in a debate that was eventually deemed deviationist and dangerously ‘formalist’ by the state film apparatus.
The other central revolutionary element was the development of the documentary film. Vertov worked on Russia’s first newsreel series, Kino-nedelya, and became an avid and vocal advocate of the ‘non-acted’ film, the superior educational role and more perfect presentation of reality provided by a documentary film. With his wife, Elizaveta Svilova, and his Kinoks group he created his own newsreel series, Kino-Pravda. Vertov’s masterwork Chelovek S kino-apparatom is the culmination of his kinetic wizardry and the bravura expression of his innovative montage techniques and camera movement. The use of hand-held and mobile cameras necessitated by the documentary work of Vertov and his collaborators influenced the development of tracking shots used by the new generation of filmmakers, most famously in the shot introducing the fall of the baby’s pram down the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potemkin.
Whether the absence of stars from the revolutionary period films was a necessity-most were in exile, new film stars were hard to establish-or intellectual and aesthetic preference is debatable. Eisenstein adopted a representational approach, elaborating the theory of typage, abstain from the use of trained actors in favour of naturschik ‘models’ who could convey to an audience character, role or class. The director chose to cast the inexpressive worker Vasili Nikandrov to impersonate Vladimir Lenin in Oktyabr purely for his facial resemblance, and the masses themselves to play the collective hero Nevertheless, other directors came to rely far more on the elements of script and performance. Pudovkin’s debut Mat highlights Vera Baranovskaya expressive depiction of the mother, a titular heroine spurred into revolutionary action by personal tragedy and loss. Alumni of the experimental theatre group at the Leningrad FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor), such as Trauberg and Kozintsev, traced the path of individual experience and destiny within the popular dramatic forms of satirical comedy, romantic adventure and melodrama in films such as Chyortovo koleso, Shinel and the eccentric, shop girl’s view of the Paris Commune in 1871 shot by Andrei Moskvin, Novyy Vavilon, for which composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his first film score. The Ukrainian director Dovzhenko fascination with the relationship between man and his natural environment led him. in films such as Arsenal and Zemlya, to adopt a more leisurely, painterly and poetic approach to cinema augmenting his tales of class struggle with elements of ritual, myth and folklore.
Many of the films cited have proved enduring classics but few were popular with ordinary people. They preferred less didactic entertainments in the form of stirring adventure stories, such as Tsiteli eshmakunebi by Georgian-Greek director Ivan Perestiani, science fiction melodramas, such as the popular Constructivist-designed extravaganza Aelita by Yakov Protazanov, and romantic satirical comedies, including Dom na Trubnoy by Kuleshov experimental workshop member Boris Barnet. This film seditiously uses a lively tale of mistaken identity involving a newly arrived Moscow housemaid to mock the absurdities of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which allowed limited free enterprise to boost the Soviet economy.
As the decade progressed, such explicitly or covertly critical visions of life in the USSR became harder, or more dangerous, to produce. The productive debates and expressions of artistic difference between filmmakers were replaced by assertive ideological quarrels and restrictive production covenants between those filmmakers and their political masters. The apparatchiks of the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment, run since 1917 by Anatoli Lunacharsky, focused their attention on coercing the film industry into adapting to the demands of ‘socialist construction’, enforcing ideological conformity and eradicating inaccessible formalist experimentation. The Strictures grew tighter as Stalin consolidated his power: Lunacharsky was replaced in 1930 by the hard-line Boris Shumyatsky, purges in the industry began, and the reign of comparative freedom and experimentation enjoyed by the revolutionary generation of filmmakers came to a close.
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