The Soviet Union 1920-1930
As German talent drained away to America in the late 1920s, Russian cinema emerged as an exciting, radical alternative to the Hollywood inspired mainstream. The chaos that followed the collapse of the Russian economy in the First World War and subsequent Civil War virtually put an end to film production in the new revolutionary Union of Soviet Socialist Republics . Nevertheless, faced with foreign invasions, trade embargoes and famine, leaders such as Lenin, saw film as the most effective means of rallying the nation’s 160 million, mostly illiterate, people (speaking over 100 different languages) to the Bolshevik cause. Lenin’s declaration that, ‘the cinema is for us the most important of the arts’ was reflected in the scarce resources put at the disposal of Soviet filmmakers. ‘Agitki’ newsreels celebrating the victories of the Revolutionary Army against foreign invasion and ‘White’ terror were shown in mobile agit-trains, trucks and steamboats around the country in the years of the civil war (1918-20).
Dziga Vertov and Documentary
Dziga Vertov had taken charge of agit-filmmaking during the Revolution and, by the 1920s, he and his ‘Kino-Eye’ group had made three innovative feature length documentary films and a thirteen part ‘History of the Civil War’ (1921). In a series of radical manifestos which were influenced by the constructivist call to ‘eliminate art itself’, Vertov declared that conventional narrative film should be replaced by documentary material: ‘life taken unawares’, ‘revolution by newsreel’ (Nussinova 1996). He also suggested that the camera’s recording abilities (‘the literature of fact’) and capacity for special effects, made it superior to the human eye. He elaborated on Lenin’s somewhat vague ‘film proportion’ (that there should be a greater ratio of information available to the public than entertainment film) by insisting that ratio should be set at four to one.
In the 1920s, Vertov released a number of newsreel documentaries collectively entitled ‘Kino-pravda’ (‘film truth’) which were designed to test his theories. They employed various experimental techniques which can all be found in his most famous work ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’ (1929). As Cook explains, in ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’ Vertov had progressed from documentarist to cine-poet, creating work which prefigures the films of the French New Wave:
‘This film utilizes every resource of editing and camera manipulation known to silent cinema to create a portrait of ‘life as it is lived’ on a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. But ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’ is less about Moscow than about cinema itself, for it constantly seeks to reveal the process of its own making. The film contains recurrent images of cameramen shooting it, Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova editing it, and people in the theatre watching it. Point of view is manipulated to such an extent that it breaks down, and the camera’s power to transform reality is flaunted in a continuous burst of cinematic pyrotechnics which include variable camera speeds, dissolves, split screen effects, the use of prismatic lenses, multiple superimposition, animation, microphotography, and elaborately structured montage.’ (Cook 1996)
Soviet Montage
Aside from documentary, the Soviet fictional film output developed theoretically, rather than physically for the first years of the 1920s. In fact the influential Kino-Eye group had renounced altogether the very concept of an actor (‘a danger’, ‘an error’) and the idea of ‘play’ films with a storyline. In the immediate post-revolutionary period film students attended lectures (notably Vladimir Gardin on re-editing), wrote scenarios and even directed and acted out ‘films’ without celluloid or cameras to record them ! Films were only made ‘on paper’ as every remaining scrap of celluloid was used for agit-films or prints of D.W. Griffith’s ‘Intolerance’, which Lenin admired greatly and had ordered to be shown around the country. Incidentally, according to Jay Leyda (1960), no Soviet film of importance was to be completely outside ‘Intolerance’s’ sphere of influence and Lenin went so far as to offer Griffiths the directorship of the Soviet film industry.
The shortage of raw stock and film-making equipment had forced filmmakers like Lev Kuleshov to develop their editing techniques on existing films when they became available. In Kuleshov’s handbook ‘Film Technique’ (1954) he explains how the school of filmmakers he taught screened and re-edited Hollywood classics, in particular, ‘Intolerance’, repeatedly, (until they literally fell to pieces) to analyse their construction and observe how changes in the editing affected the intent of the original. One of the results of such experimentation was the so-called ‘Kuleshov effect’ which suggested that spectators inferred continuity from the editing together of unrelated shots. Hence, the same shot of an actor’s neutral face edited together with shots of food, a baby playing, or a dead body, resulted in praise for the actor’s performance of hunger, happiness or sorrow, respectively. The emotional effect of a sequence, Kuleshov concluded, relied as much upon the editing, or ‘montage’, of shots as to the shots themselves. This discovery was tested in remarkably effective films made on tiny budgets such as Kuleshov’s 1926 production ‘By the Law’.
One of the most talented student from the Kuleshov workshop, V.Pudovkin, experimented further with montage to draw out his characters’ attitudes and personality. Pudovkin looked for visual means (which he called ‘plastic material’) to reveal character. A puddle is used, amongst other things, in ‘Storm Over Asia’ (1927) to suggest a British soldier’s inner emotional state. Following orders, the soldier reluctantly takes his Mongol prisoner out to a sand pit to be shot. On his way the Mongol splashes through a muddy puddle, while the Englishman, dressed in his carefully tied puttees, makes a wide detour around it. Returning from the execution however, the English soldier drags his rifle behind him and trudges straight through the same puddle - one of his puttees untied, without knowing or caring.
Pudovkin and other directors in the Soviet Montage movement compared their art to that of an engineer using tools to construct a machine, or building, out of different parts. This was typical of artist’s attitudes in the new workers’ state who were obliged to abandon any elitist claims for their work. Popular entertainment or ‘low genres’ such as the circus and the variety stage became more important as influences than high art forms such as opera. Bizarre grimaces, angular gestures and acrobatic or slapstick styles of acting were preferred, known as ‘biomechanical’ and ‘eccentric’ acting. The realist ‘method’ style developed by Stanivlaski for the theatre was rejected, partly because montage films downplayed the role of individual characters.
Montage editing was also in complete contrast to Hollywood ’s smooth ‘continuity’ style, which Dziga Vertov dismissed as ‘cine-nicotine’. Where Hollywood editing gave the impression of seamless continuity, and was used primarily for narrative and representational purposes, the Soviet Montage filmmakers understood that wholly dissimilar images (with no spatial or narrative link) could be spliced together to produce metaphors, or non-literal meaning. This notion of ‘dialectical’ or ‘ideological’ montage was most fully developed by the Soviet Union ’s most famous filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein.