Early Soviet CinemaStephen NottinghamDuring the 1920s a vibrant film culture arose in the Soviet Union in the period following the Russian Revolution. This resulted in influential developments in film theory and a distinctive body of films. Several of these films stand as landmarks in the history of world cinema. The Soviet film-makers of the 1920s were instrumental in the development of Formalism, the dominant film theory of the silent era. Formalism was applied to a range of arts, including literature and painting, and held that an artwork's meaning existed primarily in its form or language, rather than in its content or subject. Formalists saw their art as a tool of social change. Our view of early Soviet cinema is now dominated by the films and theories of Sergei Eisenstein, in particular his theories on montage which informed his method of film-making. He developed his ideas first in the theatre and then in a series of films: Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1927) and The General Line (1928). Eisenstein constructed these films using shots as his cinematic building blocks. He avoided long takes, which detracted from the control he could exert over his images and the impact they subsequently had on an audience. The short shots were referred to as shocks or attractions because they stood out and commanded attention within a film. These shocks were edited together in a process called montage, to convey a particular meaning. For example, in Strike the nature of the slaughter perpetrated by the Cossack army is conveyed by juxtaposing scenes of advancing soldiers with a bull being slaughtered and ink being spilt over a street-map of the city being attacked. Eisenstein was building on theories of film-making developed by Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov. These pioneers of Soviet cinema, working under economic constraints, re-edited existing film-stock to develop their ideas of film grammar. Kuleshov experimented with how shots before and after an image affected its interpretation. He realized he could modify an audience's reaction to a shot by changed the images either side of it in a montage sequence. Vertov developed an influential theory called Kino-Pravda (film truth) and stressed the importance of rhythm in editing, for example, speeding up a montage sequence towards its climax. Eisenstein extended the initial theory of montage to encompass intellectual montage, by which a film is constructed as a series of colliding shocks (attractions) to convey a specific meaning to the audience. Eisenstein saw montage as a dialectical process, which raised conflicts that needed to be resolved. The specific meaning created in the minds of the audience, by the juxtaposition of two images, was solely due to their juxtaposition and not the content of the individual images. Therefore, intellectual montage is an good example of formalistic thinking in film. It is concerned with creating definite meaning through form, using brief juxtaposed shocks, for an ideological purpose. In Battleship Potemkin the juxtaposition of descending faceless soldiers with close-ups of students, pleading mothers and other identifiable members of society, forcefully conveys a message of repression, whilst explosions at the palace are juxtaposed with statues of lions on the gates that appear to rise up suggesting the awakening of a revolutionary spirit. In October a revolutionary leader is juxtaposed with a gilded peacock to indicate his vanity. The images used in this style of montage could therefore interrupt the narrative to make specific points. A film could be constructed using a series of shocks, according to Eisenstein, to convey any abstract concept to an audience. He claimed that even Marx's Das Kapital could be filmed in this way. His intention was to convey clear messages through the manipulation of images, for example, to strengthen a viewer's political conviction in revolutionary politics. Eisenstein saw that sound and vision could be treated independently in montage, or used in concert to great effect. Shots in a film and phrases of music, for example, could be timed together to increase the impact of a key shot. He also understood the importance of the rhythm of music in accentuating the rhythm of montage, for example, the use of military music in the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin. Another feature of Eisenstein's work was that he was not interested in using professional actors, but used amateurs who were asked to draw on the experience of their own lives. This formed the basis of his theory of "typage". He wanted people in his films to represent archetypes, and cast people who resembled the universal image of groups within society. For example, in Battleship Potemkin archetypes of students, mothers and soldiers are presented. During the making of The General Line, Eisenstein fell out of favour with Stalin. His films had become more concerned with developing his theories than in selling the revolution. The General Line was concerned with the introduction of modern equipment on collectivised farms, but Eisenstein's portrayal of this equipment, for example, a cream separator, in montage sequences with peasants to convey ideas of sexuality and the lottery of life went far behind his official brief. He left the Soviet Union to travel to the US and Mexico, returning to the Soviet Union a decade later. He completed two other major films: Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan The Terrible (1942-46). Eisenstein developed a unique cinematic style, which differed from that of other Soviet film-makers working in the 1920s. Whereas Eisenstein used a montage style which drew attention to itself with colliding images, V.I. Pudovkin developed a different idea of montage in his theory of relational editing. Pudovkin wanted his montage to be seamless, not drawing attention to itself, and be used solely to support the film's narrative. This linkage editing, seen in films like Mother (1926) and The End of St. Petersburg (1927), was similar to the editing style developed by D.W. Griffith in the USA - for example, in Intolerance (1916). Alexander Dovzhenko, on the other hand made Arsenal (1929) and Earth (1930) as a series of tableaux, like a linkage of still photographs. This gave his films a slow pace and a solemn air. In Arsenal, his style is perfectly matched to the film's anti-war theme, with long-shots of advancing archetypal soldiers, often in silhouette, cutting to individuals dead, dying or insane. Despite their individual stylistic differences, however, all Soviet film-makers worked under a unique set of conditions that made early Soviet cinema distinct from the early cinema produced in other countries. In the Soviet Union, after the revolution of 1917, the cinema became regarded as an educational tool, to inform the rural population about the ideals of the new communist order. These propaganda films were shown in special trains that toured the country, thus the cinema reached a wider audience than in most other countries at that time. The production of overtly political films was rarer elsewhere and marked Soviet cinema out as being unique. Direct government money was available for Soviet film-makers and an audience was guaranteed. This is in contrast with the situation in the USA, where films were regarded primarily as a form of entertainment and had to pull in a fee-paying audience to make a profit. Soviet films could also deploy large crowd scenes, thanks to government funding, which would have been beyond the means of film-makers working in many other countries. During the making of October, which was commissioned by the government to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Soviet Union, the city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and thousands of extras were put at Eisenstein's disposal. The images from October came to illustrate Soviet history in textbooks, showing the power Soviet film-makers had to edit history and change society. Soviet film-makers were working during a time of great social upheaval, which saw the collapse of an existing culture and its replacement with a revolutionary world-view. This stimulated film-makers to take fresh and often radical approaches to their work. Soviet film-makers also saw themselves as part of a wider cultural movement, and were therefore receptive to ideas from other disciplines. Eisenstein, for example, sought to produce work that was a synthesis of the art and science of his day. He was influenced by Pavlov, whose theories of the conditioned reflex, whereby stimuli could be used to create particular physiological responses, informed Eisenstein's idea that a controlled sequence of shocks could produce a predictable response in an audience. Freud's theories on the subconscious and Meyerhold's ideas from the theatre were also among the many cultural ideas that informed early Soviet cinema. In Hollywood, in comparison, cinema was more isolated and film-makers did not identify so much with wider artistic or cultural movements. Early Soviet cinema was less concerned with narrative than early cinema in other countries, but great attention was given to the composition of shots. This gave early Soviet cinema a particular aesthetic quality. For example, Eisenstein worked closely with his cameraman Edouard Tisse to frame striking images of faces, crowds and objects. Soviet cinema also adopted a serious tone, in keeping with its social function and its intellectual aspirations, unlike cinema in the USA, where comedy was a popular genre. The state control of film production in the Soviet Union dictated the content of films. Film-makers were essentially limited to one basic story-line: the triumph of the people over bourgeois oppression. Films telling this story had to be understood by a largely illiterate peasant audience. Community was stressed over the individual, in line with communist ideology. In Hollywood, on the other hand, a wider range of stories could be told and the emphasis was on the individual, the hero and the Star. Individual characters seen at odds with the system, like Charlie Chaplin's tramp, the hero, as played for example by Douglas Fairbanks, or the rise of stars like Lillian Gish, had no equivalents in a Soviet cinema that emphasised community over the individual. Soviet film-makers, like Eisenstein, preferred to work with amateurs, unlike film-makers in the USA, like D.W. Griffith, who used actors who had been trained in the theatre. The use of ordinary people, often cast as archetypes, gives early Soviet cinema a particularly distinctive look, in comparison to Hollywood, in which actors are clearly seen to be acting. Soviet film is also essentially different from contemporary European cinema, particularly Scandinavian cinema, where films dealing with complex themes centring on human relationships, for example The Abyss (1910), were made for an educated and sophisticated audience, who were quick to accept cinema as an art equivalent to music or painting. The distinctive cinema, and related film theory, of the Soviet Union in the 1920s continues to inspire film-makers today. The emphasis on the form and process of film, rather than the content of linear narratives, informs the work of Jean-Luc Godard and other 1960s film-makers, while Eisenstein's ideas stimulate a range of directors seeking to experiment with the possibilities of film in the 1990s. Bibliography
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