During the Russian Civil War (t 918-20) nearly all Soviet films were agitki of some sort, and most of the great directors of the Soviet silent cinema were trained in that form.
An outstanding teacher at the school was Lev Kuleshov, who formulated the groundbreaking editing process called montage, which he conceived of as an expressive process whereby dissimilar images could be linked together to create non-literal or symbolic meaning. As a teacher and theorist Kuleshov deeply influenced an entire generation of Soviet directors.
Two of Kuleshov's most brilliant students were Sergey Eisenstein and Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin. Eisenstein, one of the great pioneering geniuses of the modern cinema, approached his art from an intellectual angle, formulating a modernist theory of editing based on the psychology of perception and Marxist dialectic. His first theoretical manifesto, "The Montage of Attractions", was published in the radical journal Lef: the article advocated assaulting an audience with calculated emotional shocks for the purpose of agitation.
In 1924 Eisenstein produced his first film, Strike, a semi- documentary representation of the brutal suppression of a strike by tsarist factory owners and police. This was the first revolutionary mass-film of the new Soviet state. Conceived as an extended montage of shock stimuli, the film concludes with the now famous sequence in which the massacre of the strikers and their families is intercut with shots of cattle being slaughtered in an abattoir. The film was an immediate success, and Eisenstein was next commissioned to direct a film celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the failed 1905 Revolution against tsarism. Originally intended to provide a panorama of the entire event, the project eventually came to focus on a single representative episode - the mutiny of the battleship
Potemkin and the massacre of the citizens of the port of Odessa by tsarist troops. Battleship Potemkin (1925) emerged as one of the most important and influential films ever made, especially in Eisenstein's use of montage. Although agitational to the core, Battleship Potemkin is a work of extraordinary pictorial beauty and great elegance of form. With the addition of a stirring revolutionary score by the German Marxist composer Edmund Meisel, the appeal of Battleship Potemkin became nearly irresistible, and, when exported in early 1926, it made Eisenstein world-famous.
Although more state commissions followed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, increasingly Eisenstein's work drew critical disapproval. Stalin himself despised Eisenstein because he was an intellectual and a Jew: only the director's international stature prevented him from being publicly purged. Instead, Stalin used the Soviet state-subsidy apparatus to foil Eisenstein's projects and attack his principles at every turn, a situation that resulted in the director's failure to complete another film until Alexander Nevsky was commissioned in 1938. With a score by Sergey Prokofiev, the film became a classic. Eisenstein's later films included the operatically stylized Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (1944-6), a veiled critique of Stalin's autocracy.
Pudovkin developed a new theory of montage, but one based on cognitive linkage rather than dialectical collision. He maintained that "the film is not shot, but built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its raw material". His films are more personal than Eisenstein's: the epic drama that is the focus of Eisenstein's films exists in Pudovkin's films merely to provide a backdrop for the interplay of human emotions. Pudovkin's major work is Mother (1926), a tale of strike-breaking and terrorism in which a woman loses first her husband and then her son to the opposing sides of the 1905 Revolution, The film was internationally acclaimed for the innovative intensity of its montage, as well as for its emotion and lyricism, Pudovkin's later films included The End of St Petersburg (1927) and The Heir to Genghis Khan (or Storm over Asia; 1928). Although Pudovkin was never persecuted as severely by the Stalinists as Eisenstein, he, too, was publicly charged with formalism for his experimental sound film A Simple Case (1932), which he was forced to release without its sound track. Pudovkin made several more sound films but remains best-known for his silent work.
Two other seminal figures of the Soviet silent era were Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov, whose kino-glaz ("film-eye") theory - that the camera, like the human eye, is best used to explore real life - had a huge impact on the development of documentary film-making and cinema realism in the 1920s. But with the restraints imposed on Soviet filmmakers by Stalin's insistence on socialist realism from 1929 onwards, it became impossible for the great film-makers of the post-revolutionary era to produce creative or innovative work.
Soviet cinema went into rapid decline after the Second World War: film production fell from 19 features in 1945 to 5 in 1952. Although Stalin died the following year, the situation did not improve until the late 1950s, when such films as Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying {1957) and Grigory Chukh- rai's Ballad of a Soldier (1959) emerged to take prizes at international film festivals. Some impressive literary adaptations were produced during the 1960s (Grigory Kozintsev's Hamlet, 1964; Sergey Bondarchuk's War and Peace, 1965-7), but the most important phenomenon of the decade was the graduation of a whole new generation of Soviet directors from the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, many of them from the non-Russian republics. By far the most brilliant of the new directors were Sergey Paradzhanov and Andrey Tarkovs- ky, who both were later persecuted for the unconventionally of tlieir work, Paradzhanov's greatest film was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), a hallucinatory retelling of a Ukrainian folk legend of ravishing formal beauty, Tarkovsky created a body of work whose seriousness and symbolic resonance bad a major impact on world cinema - Andrey Rublyov (1966), Solaris (1971), Mirror (1974), Stalker (1979), Nostalgia (1983) - even though it was frequently tampered with by Soviet censors. During the 1970s the policy of socialist realism was again put into practice, so that only two types of films could safely be made - literary adaptations and bytovye, or films of everyday life, such as Vladimir Menshov's Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980).
Although under the glasnost policy introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev Russian film-makers were free from the diktat of the communist authorities, the industry suffered from drastically reduced state subsidies. The state-controlled film- distribution system also collapsed, and this led to the dominance of western films in Russia's theatres. Private investment did not quickly take the place of subsidies, and many in Russia complained that the industry often produced elitist films primarily for foreign film festivals while the public was fed a steady diet of second-rate movies.