Soviet Cinema 1910-1925

"The one country that the American Hollywood cinema was unable to pillage was the Soviet Union." (Robinson, 1971, p.123)

Russian cinema: a background

the Russian society had always had a tremendous appetite for films, though it had been fed with monotonous sentimental melodramas and costume films (safe from censorship)
The decade before the Russian Revolution saw a stir of more creative and futurist approaches, as well as experimentations of the cinema as arts
Lenin declared in 1920, "The cinema is for us the most important of all the arts." Film schools - the first in the world - were set up in Soviet Russia, where short propaganda and agitational films were produced. An impetus to the revival of production and the beginnings of Soviet cinema came with Lenin's New Economic Plan (NEP) of 1921. With this partial return to private ownership, film stock and equipment that had vanished returned to light. Despite this, the revival generated a creation of revolutionary cinema.
The film industry was nationalized in 1919 as Stalin recognized it as the 'greatest medium of mass propaganda.' The revolutionary young felt an obligatory, religious duty to replace the past with the present, the old Russia with the new Russia, though film materials, talent and equipment was very rare.

The Kuleshov Effect

In 1920, Lev Kuleshov was given a studio (workshop) to study film methods
Came up with the 'Kuleshov Effect' - experimnts in montage: a close-up shot of an emotionless actor staring blankly is juxtaposedly cut to various shots of unrelated objects/people e.g. a bowl of soup, a child, a dead person. When shown to an audience, the audience was able to insert additional emotions, meanings, and even narratives which were not present in any of the shots.
This proved the arrangement of shots itself alters the intrinsic meanng of the shots (i.e. a step further beyond Griffith's continuity editing to create temporal realism) and creates new meanings and is powerful in manipulating the narrative

well known for its use of the montage to create tension, suspense and drama
Eisenstein developed this montage techniques through theory rather than practice.
shows the 1905 mutiny carried out by the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin against their Tsarist officers
The montage editing successfully created the greatest emotional response from the audience, as well as sympathy of the rebels and hatred for the Tsarist regime. This proved the power of montage.
The Odessa Steps sequence: A fictional scene showing the Tsarist troops opening fire of a scared crowd; the most celebrated scenes in the film is the massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps as well as the most influential in the history of cinema

Eisenstein developed his theories of "intellectual montage", the editing together of shots of unrelateted objects in order to create abstract ideas or intellectual comparisons between them.
One of the most celebrated examples of this technique is an image of Jesus that is compared to Hindu deities, the Buddha, and Aztec gods, in order to suggest the sameness of all religions; the idol is then compared with military regalia to suggest the linking of patriotism and religious fervour by the state. In another sequence Alexander Kerensky, head of the pre-Bolshevik revolutionary Provisional Government, is compared to a preening mechanical peacock.

his concept of Kino-Glaz, or "Cine Eye" in English, would help contemporary "man" evolve from a flawed creature into a higher, more precise form. He compared man unfavorably to machines
the Kino-Eye would influence the actual evolution of man
The Man with the Moving Camera has neither story nor actors.

pioneer in documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist. Vertov's practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary making.
Man with a Moving Camera presents urban life in the cities Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have "characters," they are the cameramen of the title, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they discover and present in the film.
famous for the range of Vertov’s cinematic techniques, e.g. double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style

Source:

Robinson, David. The History of World Cinema. 1971.

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