When the new Bolshevik regime began to organize its own governmental agencies in early 1918, the leadership took stock of the nation's extant cinema resources in the hope the medium could serve as an instrument of political persuasion. Authority for cinema affairs was assigned to the Commissariat of Education and its energetic head, Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (who served in that post from 1917 to 1929) who found the Russian film industry had plunged into recession. Movie theaters closed during the last year of World War I and the tumultuous early months of the revolution. Veteran film personnel fled the country, taking film assets with them. Resources dwindled through the late 1910s and early 1920s, and the Soviets could not resupply because of a trade embargo mounted in Western Europe. Although a White Russian film community succeeded in making movies in regions outside of Bolshevik authority (such as the Crimea) in the late 1910s, the nation's film industry all but shut down by 1920. Vladimir Lenin's famous decree nationalizing cinema in 1919 was something of an empty gesture, since there were precious few film assets to take over.
Lunacharsky set about rebuilding the film industry in the early 1920s when Lenin instituted the semicapitalist New Economic Policy (NEP), in which market practices returned to the Soviet economy. This revived the urban economy and the Russian middle class. Lunacharsky calculated that city dwellers, who had provided the audience base of pre-revolutionary cinema, would return to movie theaters if new foreign product could be brought in. He arranged for the renewed importation of foreign films beginning in 1922, the same year the trade embargo ended. German, French, Scandinavian, and especially American movies once again filled commercial movie theaters in Russia, attracting paying audiences. Income went to the purchase of new film supplies and to the refitting of movie studios. Soviet productivity increased gradually through the 1920s, even as foreign movies enjoyed long commercial runs. In 1923 the USSR released just thirty-eight homemade features; by 1928 that figure was up to 109.
Meanwhile, the regime campaigned to "cinefy" the countryside by spreading the exhibition network to reach the entire Soviet population. By 1928 urban spectators could see movies in 2,730 commercial movie theaters, almost twice the number from 1913. This commercial exhibition network was complemented by worker clubs, a Soviet innovation to provide industrial workers and their families with entertainment and cultural enlightenment during leisure hours. Some 4,680 worker clubs regularly showed movies at discount prices to proletarian audiences. And for the first time, cinema was reaching the vast peasant population. Both fixed and portable projectors served villages by the late 1920s: in 1928, 1,820 villages had permanent installations and another 3,770 portable units toured rural circuits.
The union-wide film market was also reorganized to encourage the USSR's member republics to develop their own film studios and distribution networks. The Russian Republic remained dominant with 70 percent of the USSR's film market and the leading studios Sovkino and Mezhrabpom. But other republics in the Soviet system developed indigenous film activity during the middle 1920s. Leading non-Russian studios included Georgia's Gosinprom Gruzii and Ukraine's VUFKU. This rehabilitated infrastructure made possible the great creative achievements of Soviet silent cinema, including the innovations of the montage directors Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), V. I. Pudovkin (1893–1953), Alexander Dovzhenko (1894–1956), and Dziga Vertov (1896–1954). All produced their most acclaimed works in the brief period of film prosperity in the mid- to late-1920s.
The seeds for the montage movement had been planted earlier. The State Film Institute in Moscow was established in 1919 to train a new generation of filmmakers during the rebuilding period. Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970) joined the faculty in 1920 and surrounded himself with a promising group of students, including Pudovkin and (briefly) Eisenstein, who studied with him in the early 1920s, and then began their own filmmaking careers in the middle 1920s once the film industry resumed productivity. Kuleshov and his students took note of the sophisticated editing techniques evident in the American movies playing in Moscow's cinemas. They embraced editing as the key to successful filmmaking and as a welcome contrast to the theatrical style of pre-revolutionary Russian cinema. Rapid editing also seemed to offer a dynamic style that paralleled some of the modernist techniques of the USSR's artistic avant-garde.
Among the montage directors, Pudovkin is commonly regarded as having followed a more conventional narrative line, consistent with his acknowledged interest in Hollywood-style continuity editing, whereas his colleague Eisenstein explored a more radical montage possibility. Pudovkin's preference is evident in his adaptation of the Maxim Gorky novel Mat ( Mother , 1926). This account of the 1905 uprising treats revolutionary activity through the experiences of a single title character and often subordinates editing to the demands of character development. Eisenstein's more aggressive aesthetic is illustrated in his parallel treatment of the 1905 rebellion, Bronenosets Potyomkin ( Battleship Potemkin , also known as Potemkin , 1925). He eschews conventional protagonists in favor of a collective hero, and his more discontinuous editing stresses conflict rather than linear development.
Alexander Dovzhenko is regarded as Ukraine's premier filmmaker and the nation's most revered artist of the twentieth century. In nine fiction films and three documentaries, as well as a number of literary works and drawings, Dovzhenko gave creative form to Ukraine's difficult historical progress toward modernity during the Soviet era. His film work takes up themes of the social and economic modernization program sustained by the Soviet regime, while also invoking traditional motifs from Ukraine's national heritage.
Dovzhenko was born in rural Ukraine and raised in a conservative peasant culture that stressed national and folk traditions. By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917–1918, however, he was drawn into radical political activism and allied himself with the Bolshevik Party. He subsequently sought to fashion a role in the community of revolutionary artists who emerged in the early years of the Soviet system. After a brief career as a painter and political cartoonist, Dovzhenko entered the cinema in 1926, working first on comic shorts and then on a series of features that addressed the effect of Soviet modernization and industrialization on Ukrainian society.
He is best known for his three silent epics on the Ukrainian revolution and its consequences, Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1929), and Zemlya ( Earth , 1930). The films manifest support for revolutionary change under the Soviets, but they also reference Ukrainian pastoral art and folklore. This is evident in the conclusion of Arsenal , for example, which celebrates the heroic last stand of a group of Ukrainian Bolsheviks battling nationalist counterrevolutionaries in 1918. When the Bolshevik hero proves invulnerable to enemy bullets in the final scene, Ukrainian audiences would have recognized the reference to a venerable folk legend about an eighteenth-century peasant uprising.
Dovzhenko sustained his account of economic development during the sound era. Ivan (1932) deals with the construction of a massive hydroelectric complex in Ukraine that served as a symbol of the region's move toward industrialization, and Aerograd ( Frontier , 1935) takes up Soviet efforts to secure the Siberian frontier as a step toward developing the Soviet far east. Dovzhenko returned to the Ukrainian revolution with his 1939 film Shchors ( Shors ), treating the exploits of a martyred Red Army commander, and he spent World War II making propaganda documentaries on behalf of the war effort. In his only postwar feature, Michurin ( Life in Bloom , 1948), Dovzhenko revisits the modernization theme in a biopic about a Soviet horticulturist whose research promised to improve nature's bounty through modern science.
The increasingly stringent censorship of the Stalin regime frustrated Dovzhenko through the second half of his career, and he completed only four features in the last twenty-five years of his life. He left behind a number of scripts and unfinished projects at the time of his death, some of which were eventually filmed by his wife and creative collaborator, Julia Solntseva. His greater legacy was the body of finished work that chronicled his homeland's uneasy developmental progress under the Soviets.
Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1929), Zemlya ( Earth, 1930), Ivan (1932), Aerograd ( Frontier , 1935), Shchors ( Shors , 1939)
Dovzhenko, Alexander. Alexander Dovzhenko: The Poet as Filmmaker . Edited and translated by Marco Carynnyk. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973.
Kepley, Vance. In the Service of the State: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
Liber, George. Alexander Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film . London: British Film Institute, 2002.
Vance Kepley, Jr.
The montage style was embraced in different ways by other filmmakers beyond Kuleshov's Muscovite circle. At the VUFKU studio, Dovzhenko developed a trilogy of films on the Ukrainian revolutionary experience— Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1929), and Zemlya ( Earth , 1930)—and employed a highly elliptical montage style that challenged audiences at the level of narrative comprehension. Working in the documentary domain, Vertov decried the norms of linear narration that he found in most fiction cinema. He called for reality-based cinema and for an editing practice that articulated social and economic relations rather than narrative events, an ambition that is illustrated in his, VUFKU documentary Chelovek s kino-apparatom ( Man with a Movie Camera , 1929).
Montage was not the stylistic norm for Soviet silent cinema, however. Most Soviet features of the 1920s followed more conventional norms of storytelling, and many clearly imitated the Hollywood entertainment pictures that enjoyed such success in the Soviet commercial market. Boris Barnet (1902–1965), for example, made genre films in the Hollywood mode, such as the crowd-pleasing comedy Devushka s korobkoi ( The Girl with the Hatbox , 1927). And the veteran director Protazanov, who returned to the USSR in 1924 after a period of exile, worked successfully in various popular genres, including science fiction ( Aelita , 1924).
Such mainstream genre pictures and Hollywood imports drew a larger audience share than the more avant-garde work of the montage directors. Reports filtered back to the film industry leadership that many Soviet spectators were genuinely confused by the elliptical editing of the likes of Dovzhenko, and they professed a preference for narrative continuity. Meanwhile, the movie audience continued to expand to include a larger share of the peasantry, still the USSR's demographic majority. Cinema officials feared correctly that such new movie viewers would be alienated by the cinema avant-garde, and this sparked a debate in the film community about which style would finally secure the loyalty of the Soviet masses. The debate would be resolved by the force of policy under the regime of Joseph Stalin.
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