precise chronology; a former architect and sculptor, Leo Kuleshov, pioneered in the use of open-air scenes, untrained actors, and monumental compositions; and scattered efforts were made to break down the flow of pictures into expressionistic or abstract forms.
But as in all fields of Soviet culture, the rise of Stalin to absolute power in the late twenties led to the adoption of a propagandists official style that brought an end to creative experiment. The new style was perhaps the best example of that blend of Revolutionary message and realistic form that came to be called socialist realism. At the same time, the subject matter of the cinema in the thirties and forties illustrates the increasing drift toward chauvinistic traditionalism in Stalinist Russia.
There were many influences behind the new Soviet film style. In a sense it was a return to the old tradition of the illustrated chronicle (litsevaia letopis') with which the heroic history of the Church Victorious had been popularized in the late Muscovy. It was also a continuation and vulgarization of the traditions of heroic historical painting and mammoth exhibitions that had been developed in the nineteenth century. To these traditions was added the dream of a new type of revolutionary mystery play originated during the exciting days of War Communism. Open-air mass theatrical pageants were improvised as thousands took part in a cycle which attempted to re-enact seven major popular revolutions in Russian history; eighty thousand took part in Maiakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe, and more than one hundred thousand in the ritual re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace. Michelet said that the French Revolution really began not with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, but with the symbolic re-enactment of the event a year later. In like manner, one could say that the Russian Revolution-as a symbol of liberation-was born not in the turbulent events of November, 1917, but in these subsequent scenes of pictorial pageantry and mythic re-creation.
The key cinematic task of Lenin's heir was the transposition to the screen of this monumental myth. As the 'movie trains' of Revolutionary days with their itinerant pictorial propaganda were replaced by stationary theaters, it became essential to have a codified version of the Revolutionary myth. This was provided by three major films, which were all produced in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup and comprise a kind of heroic trilogy: Pudovkin's Last Days of Petersburg, Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Bamet's Moscow in October. Together with the panoramic and equally fanciful picture of the Civil War provided by Alexis Tolstoy's Road to Calvary (which became a trilogy in the film version), these films dramatized for the Russian masses the mystery of the
new incarnation in which the hopes and fears of all the years suddenly found fulfillment in Russia.
Of the cinematic iconographers of the Revolution, Pudovkin and Eisen-stein are deservedly the best remembered. They were both creatures of the experimental twenties and pupils of Kuleshov. Each scored his greatest triumph in 1926-Eisenstein with Battleship Potemkin and Pudovkin with the film version of Gorky's Mother. Each had a long subsequent career of film-making that came to an end only when they died late in the Stalin era - Eisenstein in 1948, Pudovkin in 1953.
Pudovkin was the more thoroughly Stalinist and-as a result-the less memorable of the two. A rugged and athletic child of the Volga region, he was, from the beginning, anxious to expend his energies in the service of the new order. His theoretical writings emphasized the use of technological innovation for practical purposes of indoctrination. He favored the Stanislavsky method of acting realism over more experimental styles and exalted the semi-dictatorial function of the film editor and director.
Though capable of projecting simple and powerful emotions, he increasingly followed Stalin in turning toward monumental subjects. Traditional Russian patriotic themes replaced Revolutionary ones in his most important later works: Suvorov, Minin and Pozharsky, and Admiral Nakhimov. At the same time, he demonstrated in his theoretical writings the passion for statistical self-congratulation in pseudo-Marxist terms which was so characteristic of the Stalin mentality.
On the stage an actor plays before hundreds of persons, in the film actually before millions. Here is a dialectical instance of quantity increasing over the boundary into quality to give rise to a new kind of excitement.64
He expressed a kind of nouveau riche contempt for the older traditions of the theater with his bluff confidence that 'socialist realism is just as immortal, as eternally young and inexhaustible as the people itself.'95
Eisenstein was a far more complex and interesting figure. Born in Riga and educated as an architect, he was more deeply immersed in the experimental tendencies of the twenties and more broadly versed in twentieth-century European culture than Pudovkin. He was influenced by Kandinsky and others to believe that the basic ingredients of line and color could of their own accord bring spiritual qualities into visual art. He drew directly from mystical precursors of Scriabin like Castel and Eckartshausen the belief that true art must affect a 'synchronization of senses.'66 He became active in the constructivist theater of Proletkult and worked as an artistic designer in Meierhold productions before his epoch-making filming of Potemkin.
The film used an enormous cast to depict with poetic license and cinematic skill the brief revolt of the crew of the battleship Potemkin in Odessa during the Revolution of 1905. Based on a scenario written especially for the movie in honor of the twentieth anniversary of that Revolution, Potemkin drew heavily on the old tradition of the open-air mass theater to produce a near-perfect parable of Revolutionary heroism. The battleship itself-rather than any individual-was the hero. Its crew was a triumphant, spontaneous chorus of Revolutionary joy struggling against both the vermin gnawing at their paltry ration of meat, and the priests and officials gnawing at their souls. Just as John the Baptist, 'the precursor,' was placed next to Christ Enthroned on the iconostasis, so this Revolutionary precursor of October acquired a venerated place in the iconography of the Revolution. Few scenes up to that time had so brilliantly engaged the capabilities of the infant cinema industry for political purposes as the famous sequence of a baby carriage coming loose from its mother's grasp and gathering momentum as it rolled down the steps pursued by a mechanically advancing phalanx of dehumanized Tsarist soldiers.
Unlike Pudovkin, Eisenstein experimented with non-realistic forms of cinematic art and incurred official rebukes for several of his efforts in the late twenties and early thirties. But like Pudovkin, he eventually followed the trend toward more conventional patriotic themes in the thirties. His Alexander Nevsky was a milestone in this genre, glorifying the famous monk-warrior so admired by Peter the Great. But whereas the famous cinematic eulogy of Peter the Great produced at the same time merely transposed onto the screen the pictorial images of nineteenth-century painters, Eisenstein's depiction of Peter's patron saint incorporated elements of grotesque hyperbole that suggested continued borrowings from the ex-pressionistic theater.
If Peter the Great, the builder of St. Petersburg and lover of technological innovation, was a natural hero for the early Stalin era, the dark figure of Ivan IV was in many ways a suitable hero for the later years of Stalin, with their macabre reversions to Muscovite ways. Thus, in the late thirties, Eisenstein turned to producing a large-scale life of Ivan the Terrible, assembling an extraordinary array of talent: the music of Prokof'ev, the acting of Cherkasov, the finest black-and-white and color photographers, and even the services of Pudovkin for a minor acting role.
Yet for all its promise, this work became yet another of those unfinished trilogies in which Russian cultural history abounds. The first part was filmed during the war, in the distant haven of Alma Ata, and was hailed with a variety of accolades, including the Stalin Prize First Class shortly after its release in January, 1945. The second part was, however, denounced
by the Central Committee in September, 1946. The eerie sounds and shadows of the first part became
