II.

Post-Revolution Cinema

When the revolution began in February 1917, film-makers quickly took advantage of relaxed censorship to tackle previously banned religious and political subjects, such as Tolstoy’s Father Sergius (Protazanov, 1918) and The Revolutionary (Bauer, 1917). However, as civil war spread after the October revolution, many producers moved first to the Crimea before emigrating to Europe and the United States. The nationalization of the film industry in 1919 by Vladimir Lenin did not restrict private production, but made the state responsible for rationing scarce supplies and producing agitational short films, which were shown on special propaganda trains and boats.

In 1919 Gardin founded the world’s first state film school and was soon joined by Lev Kuleshov, who taught montage as a radical new way of assembling film from its basic components—a similar theory to that of the Constructivist artists. Among Kuleshov’s pupils were the future leaders of the Soviet montage school, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergey Eisenstein. Another early influence was the newsreel editor Dziga Vertov (Denis Kaufman), who proclaimed the purity of unstaged documentary (“kino eye”) observation over acted cinema.

Soviet cinema developed rapidly after 1924 in two main directions. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko used montage to create a dynamic new visual language in films such as The Battleship Potemkin (1925), The Mother (1926, an adaptation of Gorky's novel), and Arsenal (1929), which were internationally admired even as they incurred political censorship. At home, the Mezhrabpom-Rus studio invited Protazanov back from exile and under his leadership launched a popular series of progressive melodramas and satirical comedies. But until the end of the 1920s, Russian audiences watched mainly imported American and German films, while Soviet classics were hailed abroad as examples of a new art.

Political censorship had started at the end of the 1920s when Stalin ordered the role of Trotsky to be cut entirely from Eisenstein’s October (1928). The comparatively late development of sound technology came midway through the first Five-Year Plan in 1931 and, although at first resisted by the montage group, led to cinema becoming a higher state priority. Under Boris Shumyatsky there were grandiose plans for a “Soviet Hollywood” in the Crimea. Chapayev and The Youth of Maxim (both 1934) were praised as examples of the new doctrine of Socialist Realism, Grigory Aleksandrov’s jazz-influenced musical The Happy Guys (1934) was commended for its entertainment value, while Dovzhenko’s Siberian adventure story Aerograd (1935) found favour with Stalin because it dealt stirringly with Soviet development of the Far Eastern part of the USSR.

Stalin’s increasing interference in production, which included actors portraying him in many films after Lenin in October (Romm, 1937), soon threatened to paralyse Soviet cinema. The German invasion in 1941 enabled Soviet film-makers to work more urgently on morale-boosting films, and gave them greater freedom from interference when the studios were evacuated to Kazakhstan. But the post-war years, before Stalin’s death in 1953, saw production reach its lowest ebb, dominated by ponderous biographies and paranoid historical epics, and with many Jewish film-makers driven from the industry.

Khrushchev made cinema a focus of his attack on Stalin in 1956, condemning the false image it had been forced to give of the achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In 1958 The Cranes Are Flying (Kalatozov), the lyrical story of a girl’s loyalty to her soldier fiancé’s memory, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival and proclaimed a new era in Soviet cinema. A new post-war generation of film-makers had been taught at film school by Mikhail Romm to follow their own consciences. The result was a flood of subjective, satirical, and often highly experimental films by Vasily Shukshin, Andrey Tarkovsky—who won the Golden Lion in Venice with Ivan’s Childhood in 1962—Andrey Konchalovsky, Elem Klimov, Larisa Shepitko, and many others, together with new talent from the Soviet republics, such as Eldar and Georgy Shengelaya in Georgia and Sergo Paradzhanov in Armenia. In 1964 a powerful Hamlet, directed by one of the survivors of Stalin’s disapproval, Grigory Kozintsev, made Innokenty Smoktunovsky the first international Russian star.

The reaction came in 1967, after Khrushchev’s forced retirement, when some completed films, such as Askoldov’s sympathetic portrayal of Jewish life in The Commissar, were abruptly banned, and Soviet cinema was urged to preach conformity. But when Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev was held up for five years (from 1966 to 1971) there were international protests. Soviet film authorities were caught between conflicting demands: to earn hard currency from foreign sales, to encourage interest in even controversial Soviet cinema as a form of diplomacy, or to follow what often seemed arbitrary political orders. On the home front, a growing number of films were critical of Soviet society, attacking corruption, immorality, drunkenness, and teenage wildness.