The silent years, 1910–27

During the decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, the history of cinema in pre-Soviet Russia was a neglected subject, if not actively suppressed. In subsequent years, scholars have brought to light and reevaluated a small but vigorous film culture in the pre-World War I era. Some 4,000 motion-picture theaters were in operation, with the French company Pathé playing a substantial role in production and distribution. Meanwhile, Russian filmmakers such as Yevgeny Bauer had developed a sophisticated style marked by artful lighting and decor.

When Russia entered World War I in August 1914, foreign films could no longer be imported, and the tsarist government established the Skobelev Committee to stimulate domestic production and produce propaganda in support of the regime. The committee had little immediate effect, but, when the tsar fell in March 1917, the Provisional Government, headed by Aleksandr Kerensky, reorganized it to produce antitsarist propaganda. When the Bolsheviks inherited the committee eight months later, they transformed it into the Cinema Committee of the People’s Commissariat of Education.

A minority party with approximately 200,000 members, the Bolsheviks had assumed the leadership of 160 million people who were scattered across the largest continuous landmass in the world, spoke more than 100 separate languages, and were mostly illiterate. Vladimir Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders looked on the motion-picture medium as a means of unifying the huge, disparate nation.

Lenin was the first political leader of the 20th century to recognize both the importance of film as propaganda and its power to communicate quickly and effectively. He understood that audiences did not require literacy to comprehend a film’s meaning and that more people could be reached through mass-distributed motion pictures than through any other medium of the time. Lenin declared: “The cinema is for us the most important of the arts,” and his government gave top priority to the rapid development of the Soviet film industry, which was nationalized in August 1919 and put under the direct authority of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

There was, however, little to build upon. Most of the prerevolutionary producers had fled to Europe, wrecking their studios as they left and taking their equipment and film stock with them. A foreign blockade prevented the importation of new equipment or stock (there were no domestic facilities for manufacturing either), and massive power shortages restricted the use of what limited resources remained. The Cinema Committee was not deterred, however; its first act was to found a professional film school in Moscow to train directors, technicians, and actors for the cinema.

The Vsesoyuznyi Gosudarstvenyi Institut Kinematografii (VGIK; “All-Union State Institute of Cinematography”) was the first such school in the world. Initially it trained people in the production of agitki, existing newsreels reedited for the purpose of agitation and propaganda (agitprop). The agitki were transported on specially equipped agit-trains and agit-steamers to the provinces, where they were exhibited to generate support for the Revolution. (The state-controlled Cuban cinema used the same tactic after the revolution of 1959.) In fact, during the abysmal years of the Russian Civil War (1918–20), nearly all Soviet films were agitki of some sort. Most of the great directors of the Soviet silent cinema were trained in that form, although, having very little technical equipment and no negative film stock, they were often required to make “films without celluloid.”

Students at the VGIK were instructed to write, direct, and act out scenarios as if they were before cameras. Then—on paper—they assembled various “shots” into completed “films.” The great teacher Lev Kuleshov obtained a print of Griffith’s Intolerance and screened it for students in his “Kuleshov workshop” until they had memorized its shot structures and could rearrange its multilayered editing sequences on paper in hundreds of different combinations.

Kuleshov further experimented with editing by intercutting the same shot of a famous actor’s expressionless face with several different shots of highly expressive content—a steaming bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin, and a little girl playing with a teddy bear. The invariable response of film school audiences when shown these sequences was that the actor’s face assumed the emotion appropriate to the intercut object—hunger for the soup, sorrow for the dead woman, paternal affection for the little girl.

Kuleshov reasoned from this phenomenon, known today as the “Kuleshov effect,” that the shot in film always has two values: the one it carries in itself as a photographic image of reality and the one it acquires when placed into juxtaposition with another shot. He reasoned further that the second value is more important to cinematic signification than the first and that time and space in the cinema must therefore be subordinate to the process of editing, or “montage” (coined by the Soviets from the French verb monter, “to assemble”). Kuleshov ultimately conceived of montage as an expressive process whereby dissimilar images could be linked together to create nonliteral or symbolic meaning.

Although Kuleshov made several important films, including Po zakonu (By the Law, 1926), it was as a teacher and theorist that he most deeply influenced an entire generation of Soviet directors. Two of his most brilliant students were Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

Eisenstein was, with Griffith, one of the great pioneering geniuses of the modern cinema, and like his predecessor he produced a handful of enduring masterworks. Griffith, however, had elaborated the structure of narrative editing intuitively, whereas Eisenstein was an intellectual who formulated a modernist theory of editing based on the psychology of perception and Marxist dialectic. He was trained as a civil engineer, but in 1920 he joined the Moscow Proletkult Theatre, where he fell under the influence of the stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold and directed a number of plays in the revolutionary style of Futurism. In the winter of 1922–23 Eisenstein studied under Kuleshov and was inspired to write his first theoretical manifesto, “The Montage of Attractions.” Published in the radical journal Lef, the article advocated assaulting an audience with calculated emotional shocks for the purpose of agitation.

Eisenstein was invited to direct the Proletkult-sponsored film Stachka (Strike) in 1924, but, like Griffith, he knew little of the practical aspects of production. He therefore enlisted the aid of Eduard Tisse, a brilliant cinematographer at the state-owned Goskino studios, beginning a lifelong artistic collaboration. Strike is a semidocumentary representation of the brutal suppression of a strike by tsarist factory owners and police. In addition to being Eisenstein’s first film, it was also the first revolutionary mass-film of the new Soviet state. Conceived as an extended montage of shock stimuli, the film concludes with the now famous sequence in which the massacre of the strikers and their families is intercut with shots of cattle being slaughtered in an abattoir.

Strike was an immediate success, and Eisenstein was next commissioned to direct a film celebrating the 20th anniversary of the failed 1905 Revolution against tsarism. Originally intended to provide a panorama of the entire event, the project eventually came to focus on a single representative episode—the mutiny of the battleship Potemkin and the massacre of the citizens of the port of Odessa by tsarist troops. Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) emerged as one of the most important and influential films ever made, especially in Eisenstein’s use of montage, which had improved far beyond the formulaic, if effective, juxtapositions of Strike.

Although agitational to the core, Battleship Potemkin is a work of extraordinary pictorial beauty and great elegance of form. It is symmetrically broken into five movements or acts, according to the structure of Greek tragedy. In the first of these, “Men and Maggots,” the flagrant mistreatment of the sailors at the hands of their officers is demonstrated, while the second, “Drama on the Quarterdeck,” presents the actual mutiny and the ship’s arrival in Odessa. “Appeal from the Dead” establishes the solidarity of the citizens of Odessa with the mutineers, but it is the fourth sequence, “The Odessa Steps,” which depicts the massacre of the citizens, that thrust Eisenstein and his film into the historical eminence that both occupy today. Its power is such that the film’s conclusion, “Meeting the Squadron,” in which the Battleship Potemkin in a show of brotherhood is allowed to pass through the squadron unharmed, is anticlimactic.

Unquestionably the most famous sequence of its kind in film history, “The Odessa Steps” incarnates the theory of dialectical montage that Eisenstein later expounded in his collected writings, The Film Sense (1942) and Film Form (1949). Eisenstein believed that meaning in motion pictures is generated by the collision of opposing shots. Building on Kuleshov’s ideas, Eisenstein reasoned that montage operates according to the Marxist view of history as a perpetual conflict in which a force (thesis) and a counterforce (antithesis) collide to produce a totally new and greater phenomenon (synthesis). He compared this dialectical process in film editing to “the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its automobile or tractor.” The force of “The Odessa Steps” arises when the viewer’s mind combines individual, independent shots and forms a new, distinct conceptual impression that far outweighs the shots’ narrative significance. Through Eisenstein’s accelerated manipulations of filmic time and space, the slaughter on the stone steps—where hundreds of citizens find themselves trapped between descending tsarist militia above and Cossacks below—acquires a powerful symbolic meaning. With the addition of a stirring revolutionary score by the German Marxist composer Edmund Meisel, the agitational appeal of Battleship Potemkin became nearly irresistible, and, when exported in early 1926, it made Eisenstein world-famous.

Eisenstein’s next project, Oktyabr (October, 1928), was commissioned by the Central Committee to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Accordingly, vast resources, including the Soviet army and navy, were placed at the director’s disposal. Eisenstein based the shooting script on voluminous documentary material from the era and on John Reed’s book Ten Days That Shook the World. When the film was completed in November 1927, it was just under four hours long. While Eisenstein was making October, however, Joseph Stalin had taken control of the Politburo from Leon Trotsky, and the director was forced to cut the print by one-third to eliminate references to the exiled Trotsky.

Eisenstein had consciously used October as a laboratory for experimenting with “intellectual” or “ideological” montage, an abstract type of editing in which the relationships established between shots are conceptual rather than visual or emotional. When the film was finally released, however, Stalinist critics attacked this alleged “formalist excess” (aestheticism or elitism). The same charge was leveled even more bitterly against Eisenstein’s next film, Staroe i novoe (Old and New 1929), which Stalinist bureaucrats completely disavowed. Stalin hated Eisenstein because he was an intellectual and a Jew, but the director’s international stature was such that he could not be publicly purged. Instead, Stalin used the Soviet state-subsidy apparatus to foil Eisenstein’s projects and attack his principles at every turn, a situation that resulted in the director’s failure to complete another film until Alexander Nevsky was commissioned in 1938.

Eisenstein’s nearest rival in the Soviet silent cinema was his fellow student Vsevolod Pudovkin. Like Eisenstein, Pudovkin developed a new theory of montage, but one based on cognitive linkage rather than dialectical collision. He maintained that “the film is not shot, but built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its raw material.” Pudovkin, like Griffith, most often used montage for narrative rather than symbolic purpose. His films are more personal than Eisenstein’s; the epic drama that is the focus of Eisenstein’s films exists in Pudovkin’s films merely to provide a backdrop for the interplay of human emotions.

Pudovkin’s major work is Mat (Mother, 1926), a tale of strikebreaking and terrorism in which a woman loses first her husband and then her son to the opposing sides of the 1905 Revolution. The film was internationally acclaimed for the innovative intensity of its montage, as well as for its emotion and lyricism. Pudovkin’s later films included Konets Sankt-Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg, 1927), which, like Eisenstein’s October, was commissioned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Potomok Chingis-Khana (The Heir to Genghis Khan, or Storm over Asia, 1928), which is set in Central Asia during the Russian Civil War. Both mingle human drama with the epic and the symbolic as they tell a story of a politically naive person who is galvanized into action by tsarist tyranny.

Although Pudovkin was never persecuted as severely by the Stalinists as Eisenstein, he too was publicly charged with formalism for his experimental sound film Prostoi sluchai (A Simple Case, 1932), which he was forced to release without its sound track. Pudovkin made several more sound films but remains best known for his silent work.

Two other seminal figures of the Soviet silent era were Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov (original name Denis Kaufman). Dovzhenko, the son of Ukrainian peasants, had been a political cartoonist and painter before becoming a director at the state-controlled Odessa studios in 1926. After several minor works, he made Zvenigora (1928), a collection of boldly stylized tales about a hunt for an ancient Scythian treasure set during four different stages of Ukrainian history; Arsenal (1929), an epic film poem about the effects of revolution and civil war upon the Ukraine; and Zemlya (Earth, 1930), which is considered to be his masterpiece.

Earth tells the story of the conflict between a family of wealthy landowning peasants (kulaks) and the young peasants of a collective farm in a small Ukrainian village, but the film is less a narrative than a lyric hymn to the cyclic recurrence of birth, life, love, and death in nature and in humankind. Although the film is acclaimed today, when it was released, Stalinist critics denounced it as counterrevolutionary. Soon after, Dovzhenko entered a period of political eclipse, during which, however, he continued to make films.

Dziga Vertov (a pseudonym meaning “spinning top”) was an artist of quite different talents. He began his career as an agitki photographer and newsreel editor and is now acknowledged as the father of cinema verité (a self-consciously realistic documentary movement of the 1960s and ’70s) for his development and practice of the theory of the kino-glaz (“cinema-eye”). Vertov articulated this doctrine in the early 1920s in a number of radical manifestos in which he denounced conventional narrative cinema as impotent and demanded that it be replaced with a cinema of actuality based on the “organization of camera-recorded documentary material.”

Between 1922 and 1925, he put his idea into practice in a series of 23 carefully crafted newsreel-documentaries entitled Kino-pravda (“film truth”) and Goskinokalender. Vertov’s most famous film is Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), a feature-length portrait of Moscow from dawn to dusk. The film plays upon the “city symphony” genre inaugurated by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, the Symphony of a Great City (1927), but Vertov repeatedly draws attention to the filmmaking process to create an autocritique of cinema itself.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Vertov welcomed the coming of sound, envisioning it as a “radio-ear” to accompany the “cinema-eye.” His first sound film, Entuziazm—simfoniya Donbassa (Symphony of the Donbas, 1931), was an extraordinary contribution to the new medium, as was Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs About Lenin, 1934), yet Vertov could not escape the charge of formalist error any more than his peers. Although he did make the feature film Kolybelnaya (Lullaby) in 1937, for the most part the Stalinist establishment reduced him to the status of a newsreel photographer after 1934.

Many other Soviet filmmakers played important roles in the great decade of experiment that followed the Revolution, among them Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, Boris Barnet, Yakov Protazanov, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Abram Room, and the documentarian Esther Shub. The period came to an abrupt end in 1929, when Stalin removed the state film trust (then called Sovkino) from the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Education and placed it under the direct authority of the Supreme Council of the National Economy. Reorganized as Soyuzkino, the trust was turned over to the reactionary bureaucrat Boris Shumyatsky, a proponent of the narrowly ideological doctrine known as Socialist Realism.

This policy, which came to dominate the Soviet arts, dictated that individual creativity be subordinated to the political aims of the party and the state. In practice, it militated against the symbolic, the experimental, and the avant-garde in favor of a literal-minded “people’s art” that glorified representative Soviet heroes and idealized Soviet experience. The restraints imposed made it impossible for the great filmmakers of the postrevolutionary era to produce creative or innovative work, and the Soviet cinema went into decline.