for the new film journals. The leading director-theorists were Kuleshov, Eisenstein (1898-1948), Vsevolod Pu-dovkin (1893-1953), Dziga Vertov (1896-1954, born Denis Kaufman), and the “FEKS” team of Grig-ory Kozintsev (1905- 1973) and Leonid Trauberg (1902-1990). Kuleshov wrote most clearly about the art of the cinema as a revolutionary agent, but Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s theories (and movies) had
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an impact that extended far beyond the Soviet Union’s borders.
The debates between Eisenstein and Vertov symbolized the most extreme positions in the theoretical conflicts among the revolutionary avant-garde of the 1920s. Eisenstein believed in acted cinema but borrowed Kuleshov’s idea of the actor as a type; he preferred working with non-professionals. Vertov privileged non-acted cinema and argued that the movie camera was a “cinema eye” (kino-glaz) that would catch “life off-guard” (zhizn vrasplokh)-yet he was an inveterate manipulator of time and space in his pictures. Eisen-stein believed in a propulsive narrative driven by a “montage of attractions,” with the masses as the protagonists, whereas Vertov was decisively anti-narrative, believing that a brilliantly edited kaleidoscope of images best revealed the contours of revolutionary life.
Eisenstein’s first two feature films, Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1926), enjoyed enormous success with critics and politicians but were much less popular with the workers and soldiers whose interests they were supposed to service. The same was true of Vertov’s pictures. The intelligentsia loved Forward, Soviet! and One- Sixth of the World (both 1926), but proletarians were nonplussed.
Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Kozintsev, and Trauberg (who directed as a team) were more successful translating revolutionary style and content for mass audiences because they retained plot and character at the heart of their films. The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), one of Kuleshov’s earliest efforts, appeared as a favorite film in audience surveys through the end of the 1920s. The same was true of Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), a loose adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s famous novel. Kozintsev and Trauberg’s The Overcoat (1926) is a good example of the extremes to which young directors pushed the classical narrative.
Despite this wealth of talent, Soviet avant-garde films never came close to challenging the popularity of American movies in the 1920s. Douglas Fairbanks’s and Charlie Chaplin’s pictures drew sell-out audiences. In response to the pressures to make Soviet entertainment films-and the need to show a profit-Goskino and the quasi-private studio Mezhrapbom invested more heavily in popular films than in the avant-garde, to the great dismay of the latter, but to the joy of audiences. The leading popular filmmaker was Protazanov, who returned to Soviet Russia in 1923 to make a string of hits, starting with the science fiction adventure, Aelita (1924).
Also very successful with the spectators were the narrative films of younger directors such as Fridrikh Ermler (1898-1967, born Vladimir Breslav), Boris Barnet (1902-1965), and Abram Room (1894-1976). Ermler earned fame for his trenchant social melodramas (Katka’s Reinette Apples, 1926 and The Parisan Cobbler, 1928). Barnet’s intelligent comedies such as The Girl with the Hatbox (1927) sparkled, as did his adventure serial Miss Mend (1926),. Room was perhaps the most versatile of the three, ranging from a revolutionary adventure, Death Bay (1926), to a remarkable melodrama about a m?nage ? trois, Third Meshchanskaya Street (1927, known in the West as Bed and Sofa).
It must be emphasized that moviemaking was not a solely Russian enterprise, although distribution politics often made it difficult for films from Ukraine, Armenia, and Georgia to be considered more than exotica. The greatest artist to emerge from the non-Russian cinemas was certainly Ukraine’s Alexander Dovzhenko (1894-1956), but Armenia’s Amo Bek-Nazarov (1892-1965) and Georgia’s Nikolai Shengelaya (1903-1943) made important contributions to early Soviet cinema as well.
In 1927, as the New Economic Policy era was coming to a close, Soviet cinema was flourishing. Cinema had returned to all provincial cities and rural areas were served by cinematic road shows. There was a lively film press that reflected a variety of aesthetic positions. Production was more than respectable, about 140 to 150 titles annually. Six years later, production had plummeted to a mere thirty-five films.
Many factors contributed to the crisis in cinema that was part of the Cultural Revolution. First, in 1927, sound was introduced to cinema, an event with significant artistic and economic implications. Second, proletarianist organizations such as RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, and ARRK, the Association of Workers in Revolutionary Cinematography were infiltrated by extremist elements who supported the government’s aims to turn the film industry into a tool for propagandizing the collectivization and industrialization campaigns. This became apparent at the first All-Union Party Conference on Cinema Affairs in 1928. Third, in 1929, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the leading proponent of a diverse cinema, was ousted as commissar
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of enlightenment, and massive purges of the film industry began that lasted through 1931.
These troubled times saw the production of four great films, the last gasp of Soviet silent cinema: Ermler’s The Fragment of the Empire, Kozint-sev and Trauberg’s New Babylon, Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (all 1929), and the following year, Dovzhenko’s Earth.
By the end of the Cultural Revolution, it was clear to filmmakers that the era of artistic innovation had ended. Movies and their makers were now “in the service of the state.” Although Socialist Realism was not formally established as aesthetic dogma until 1934, (reconfirmed in 1935 at the All-Union Creative Conference on Cinematographic Affairs), politically astute directors had for several years been making movies that were only slightly more sophisticated than the agit-films of the civil war.
In the early 1930s, a few of the great artists of the previous decade attempted to adapt their experimental talents to the sound film. These efforts were either excoriated (Kuleshov’s The Great Consoler and Pudovkin’s The Deserter, both 1933) or banned outright (Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow, 1937). Film production plummeted, as directors tried to navigate the ever-changing Party line, and many projects were aborted mid-production. Stalin’s intense personal interest and involvement in moviemaking greatly exacerbated tensions.
Some of the early cinema elite avant-garde were eventually able to rebuild their careers. Kozintsev and Trauberg scored a major success with their popular adventure trilogy: The Youth of Maxim (1935), The Return of Maxim (1937), The Vyborg Side (1939). Pudovkin avoided political confrontations by turning to historical films celebrating Russian heroes of old in Minin and Pozharsky (1939), followed by Suvorov in 1941. Eisenstein likewise found a safe historical subject in the only undisputed masterpiece of the decade, Alexander Nevsky (1938). Others, such as Dovzhenko and Ermler, seriously compromised their artistic reputations by making movies that openly curried Stalin’s favor. Ermler’s The Great Citizen (two parts, 1937-1939) is a particularly notorious example.
New directors, most of them not particularly talented, moved to the forefront. Novices such as Nikolai Ekk and the Vasiliev Brothers made two of the enduring classics of Socialist Realism: The Road to Life (1931) and Chapayev (1934). Another relative newcomer, Ivan Pyrev, churned out Stalin-pleasing conspiracy films such as The Party Card (1936), about a woman who discovers her husband is a traitor, before turning to canned socialist comedies, of which Tractor Drivers (1939) is the most typical.
Some of the new generation managed to maintain artistic standards. Mikhail Romm’s revisionist histories of the revolution, Lenin in October (1937) and Lenin in 1918 (1939), which placed Stalin right at Lenin’s side, were the first major hits in his distinguished career. Mark Donskoy’s three-picture adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s autobiography, beginning with Gorky’s Youth (1938) also generated popular acclaim. The most beloved of the major directors of the 1930s was, however, Grigory Alexandrov. Alexandrov, who had worked as Eisen-stein’s assistant until 1932, successfully distanced himself from the maverick director, launching a series of zany musical comedies starring his wife, Lyubov Orlova, in 1934 with The Jolly Fellows.
When the German armies invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the tightly controlled film industry easily mobilized for the wartime effort. Considered central to the war effort, key filmmakers were evacuated to Kazakhstan, where makeshift studios were quickly constructed in Alma-Ata. With very few exceptions-Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944-1946) being most noteworthy- moviemaking during the war years focused almost exclusively on the war. Newsreels naturally dominated production. The fiction films that were made about the war effort were quite remarkable compared to those of the other combatant nations in that they focused on the active role women played in the partisan movement. One of these, Ermler’s She Defends Her Motherland (1943), which tells the story of a woman who puts aside grief for vengeance, was shown in the United States during the war as No Greater Love.
