Cinema Soviet 1920s

 Soviet Cinema in the 1920s

TERMS/PEOPLE

Alexander Dovzhenko
Alexander Petrovich Dovzhenko; September 10 [O.S. August 29] 1894 – November 25, 1956), was a Ukrainian[2] Soviet screenwriter, film producer and director. He is often cited as one of the most important early Soviet filmmakers, alongside Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, as well as being a pioneer of Soviet montage theory. Foremost Ukranian director
Dovzhenko's Earth has been praised as one of the greatest silent movies ever made. The British film director Karel Reisz was asked in 2002 by the British Film Institute to rank the greatest films ever made, and he put Earth second. The film portrayed collectivization in a positive light. Its plot revolved around a landowner's attempt to ruin a successful collective farm as it took delivery of its first tractor, though it opened with a long close-up of an elderly, dying man taking intense pleasure in the taste of an apple - a scene with no obvious political message, but with some aspect of autobiography. The film was panned by the Soviet authorities. The poet, Demyan Bedny, attacked its "defeatism" over three columns of the newspaper Izvestia, and Dovzhenko was forced to re-edit it

Bolshevik
During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, led by leftist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, seized power and destroyed the tradition of csarist rule. The Bolsheviks would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Boris Barnet
Boris Vasilyevich Barnet (Russian: Бори́с Васи́льевич Ба́рнет; 18 June 1902 – 8 January 1965) was a Soviet film director, actor and screenwriter of British origin. He directed 27 films between 1927 and 1963. Boris Barnet was born in Moscow. His grandfather Thomas Barnet was a printer who moved to the Russian Empire from Great Britain back in the 19th century.[1] A student of the Moscow Art School, he volunteered to join the Red Army at age 18 and was then professionally involved in boxing. In 1927 he shot his first feature, a comedy film, The Girl with a Hatbox, starring Anna Sten. His 1928 melodramatic film The House on Trubnaya, starring Vera Maretskaya, was rediscovered in the mid-1990s and now ranks as one of the classic Russian silent films.

Encouraged in his early efforts by Yakov Protazanov, Barnet emerged in the 1930s as one of the country's leading film-makers, working with the likes of Serafima Birman and Nikolai Erdman. Outskirts (1933), a pacifist story acclaimed at the first Venice Film Festival, is considered one of Barnet's masterpieces.
Boris Barnet  

1)Another Kuleshov workshop member, Boris Barnet (born 1902) had studied painting and sculpture, and he trained as a boxer after the revolution.
2)He acted in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks and other mid-1920s films, and he also directed The House on Trubnaya (1927) and other Montage-style films.

Communist Manifesto 
Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 1848
The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that in their own words "[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism. In the last paragraph of the Manifesto, the authors call for a "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions", which served as a call for communist revolutions around the world

Constructivism

Constructivism
1)The years after the revolution saw enthusiastic experimentation by artists in every medium.
2) They tried to approach artistic creation in a way appropriate to a completely new kind of
    society.
3)One result was a trend in the visual arts called Constructivism, to which the Montage movement in the cinema was closely linked.

A Socially useful art
1)The search for a socially useful art resulted in the rise of Constructivism around 1920.
2)Manifestos and articles declared that artists who had been exploring abstract styles
   need not abandon their ways of working—
3)they simply needed to apply them to useful ends.
4)For the Constructivist, art inevitably fulfilled a social function.
5)It was not an object of rapt contemplation or a source of some enduring higher truth,
   as many nineteenth-century views of art had held.
6)The artist was not an inspired visionary;
 The Influence of Constructivism

Constructivism
1)The years after the revolution saw enthusiastic experimentation by artists in every medium.
2) They tried to approach artistic creation in a way appropriate to a completely new kind of
    society.
3)One result was a trend in the visual arts called Constructivism, to which the Montage movement in the cinema was closely linked.

A Socially useful art
1)The search for a socially useful art resulted in the rise of Constructivism around 1920.
2)Manifestos and articles declared that artists who had been exploring abstract styles
   need not abandon their ways of working—
3)they simply needed to apply them to useful ends.
4)For the Constructivist, art inevitably fulfilled a social function.
5)It was not an object of rapt contemplation or a source of some enduring higher truth,
   as many nineteenth-century views of art had held.
6)The artist was not an inspired visionary;
7)he or she was a skilled artisan using the materials of the medium to create an artwork.
8)Artists were often compared to engineers, using tools and a rational, even scientific
   approach.

Artwork = Machine
1)The Constructivists often compared the artwork to a machine.
2)While earlier views of art frequently saw the artwork as analogous to a plant,
    with an organic unity and growth,
3)the Constructivists stressed that it was put together from parts.
4)This process of assemblage was sometimes referred to as montage,
    from the French word for the assembly of parts into a machine.
5)Filmmakers applied the term montage to the editing of shots into a film.
6)This analogy between artwork and machine was seen positively.
7)Because Soviet society focused on enhancing the USSR’s industrial output,
   and also because Communism stressed the dignity of human labor,
8)the factory and the machine became symbols of the new society.
9)Artists’ studios were often seen as factories where laborers built useful products.

Arts to Promote Communist Society
1)Because all human response was seen as based on scientifically determinable processes,
2)the Constructivists considered that an artwork could be calculated to elicit a particular reaction.
3)Thus artworks could be used for propagandistic and educational purposes promoting the new Communist society—if only the right ways of making them could be discovered

Constructivism and theater
1)Constructivism affected the theater as well.
2)The most important Constructivist theatrical director was Vsevolod Meyerhold,
3)an established figure who offered his services to the Bolshevik government immediately
   after the revolution.
4)Meyerhold’s bold methods of staging were to influence Soviet film directors.
5)Set and costume designs in several major Meyerhold productions incorporated Constructivist
    design principles.
6)In his 1922 production of The Magnanimous Cuckold, for example, the set somewhat
   resembled a large factory machine;
7)it consisted of a series of bare platforms and a large propeller turning during the play.
8)The actors performed in ordinary work clothes.
9)In keeping with Constructivism, Meyerhold also pioneered the principle of
   biomechanical acting.
10)The actor’s body was assumed to be like a machine, and thus a performance consisted of
    carefully controlled physical movements rather than of the expression of emotions.

Dziga Vertov
the radical

1)Vertov was far more radical.
2)A committed Constructivist, he emphasized the social utility of documentary film.
3)Vertov saw fiction films as “cine-nicotine,” a drug that dulled the viewer’s awareness of
   social and political reality.
4)For him, “life caught unawares” would be the basis of a cinema of fact.
5)Montage was less a single technique than the entire production process:
   5-1)choosing a subject,
   5-2)shooting footage, and
   5-3)assembling the film all involved selection and combination of “cine-facts.”
6) As for editing, Vertov emphasized that the filmmaker should calculate the differences
   between shots—
   6-1)light versus dark,
   6-2)slow motion versus fast motion, and so on.
7)These differences, or “intervals,” would be the basis of the film’s effect on the audience. Man with a Movie Camera (1929) the 8th best film ever made.[1]

Dziga Vertov – man with a movie camera 1929
1)The other important filmmaker who, along with Kuleshov, had started directing about the
   time of the revolution was Dziga Vertov (born 1896).
2)During the mid-1910s, he wrote poetry and science fiction, composed what we now call
   musique concrète, and became influenced by the Cubo-Futurists.
3)From 1916 to 1917, however, he studied medicine until becoming the supervisor of
   Narkompros’s newsreel series in 1917.
4)He went on, in 1924, to make feature-length documentaries, some employing the Montage
   style. 

The First Five Year Plan 1928
 and the End of the Montage Movement

A turning point for the Soviet film industry came in March 1928, when the First Communist Party Conference on Film Questions was held. Until then, the government had left film matters largely to the control of Narkompros and other, smaller organizations scattered through the republics. Now the USSR was instituting the First Five-Year Plan, a major push to expand industrial output. As part of the plan, the cinema was to be centralized. The goal was to increase the number of films and to build factories to supply all the industry’s needs. Eventually, it was hoped, imports of raw film stock, cameras, lighting fixtures, and other equipment would be eliminated. Similarly, exportation would not be necessary, and all films could be tailored strictly to the needs of the workers and peasants.

The implementation of the First Five-Year Plan in the cinema came slowly. Over the next two years, the government still put little money into the industry. This delay probably helped prolong the Montage movement. Soon, however, circumstances changed.Also in 1929, control over the cinema was taken away from Narkompros and turned over to the Movie Committee of the Soviet Union. Now Lunacharsky had little input, being only one of many members of the new body. In 1930, the film industry was further centralized by the formation of Soyuzkino, a company that would handle all production, distribution, and exhibition throughout the republics of the Soviet Union. The head of Soyuzkino was Boris Shumyatsky, a Communist Party bureaucrat without film experience. Unlike Lunacharsky, Shumyatsky had no sympathy for the Montage filmmakers.

Karl Marx
Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 1848
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx's critical theories about society, economics, and politics, collectively understood as Marxism, hold that human societies develop through class conflict
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. 
Eisenstein imitation of Karl Marxist Concept
1) For Eisenstein, this conflict imitated the Marxist concept of the dialectic,
2)in which antithetical elements clash and produce a synthesis that goes beyond both.
3)Montage could compel the spectator to sense the conflict between elements and
   create a new concept in his or her mind.

Kuleshov Experiment/Effect

The Kuleshov effect
1)is based on leaving out a scene’s establishing shot and leading the spectator to infer spatial or temporal continuity from the shots of separate elements.
2)Often Kuleshov’s experiments relied on the eyeline match.
3)The workshop’s most famous experiment involved recutting old footage with the actor Ivan Mozhukhin.

4)A close view of Mozhukhin with a neutral expression was selected.
5)This same shot was repeatedly edited together with shots of other subject matter,
   variously reported as a bowl of soup, a dead body, a baby, and the like.
6)Supposedly, ordinary viewers praised Mozhukhin’s performance, believing that his face
    had registered the appropriate hunger, sorrow, or delight—even though his face was the
    same in each scene.

Les Kuleshov
1)The oldest Montage director in years and experience was Lev Kuleshov, who had designed and directed films before the revolution and then taught at the State Film School.
2)Kuleshov’s own Soviet films were only mildly experimental in style, but his workshop produced two important Montage directors.
was a Russian and Soviet filmmaker and film theorist, one of the founders of the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School. He was given the title People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1969. He was intimately involved in development of the style of film making known as Soviet montage, especially its psychological underpinning, including the use of editing and the cut to emotionally influence the audience, a principle known as the Kuleshov effect. He also developed the theory of creative geography, which is the use of the action around a cut to connect otherwise disparate settings into a cohesive narrative.

1918 The Project of Engineer Prite1924 The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks 1925 The Death Ray

“Montage of Attractions”
Eisenstein the complicated
1)Eisenstein developed the most complicated conception of montage.
2)Initially he believed in what he called the “montage of attractions.”
3)As in a circus, the filmmaker should assemble a series of exciting moments to stimulate the viewer’s emotions.
4)Later he formulated elaborate principles by which individual filmic elements could be combined for maximum emotional and intellectual effects.

Montage editing 
1)can also create conflict through spatial relationships.
2)Again, the filmmakers do not guide the spectator through a clear, straightforward locale,
    as in a Hollywood film.
3)Rather, the viewer must actively piece together what is going on.
4)In the plate-smashing scene from Potemkin, for example,
5)Eisenstein creates a contradictory space by mismatching the sailor’s position
   from shot to shot.
6)The sailor swings the plate down from behind his left shoulder and then is seen in the next shot with the plate already lifted above his right shoulder.
7)The cuts violate the axis of action,
8)with the officer facing left, then right, and then left again.

Elliptical cutting 
1) creates the opposite effect.
2) A portion of an event is left out, so the event takes less time than it would in reality.
3) One common type of elliptical editing in Montage films is the jump cut,
    whereby the same space is shown from the same camera position in two shots,
    yet the mise-en-scène has been changed.
4)The contradictory temporal relations created by overlapping and elliptical editing
    compel the spectator to make

sense of the scene’s action.
5)A jump cut in The House on Trubnaya:
   5-1)two successive close-ups show a woman’s terrified face as she sees a streetcar bearing
          down on her;
   5-2)in the first her eyes are tightly closed,
   5-3)but a cut reveals them suddenly open.

Overlapping Editing - on test
1)the second shot repeats part or all of the action from the previous shot.
2)When several shots contain such repetitions, the time an action takes on the screen expands
   noticeably.
3)Eisenstein’s films contain some of the most famous examples of this tactic.
4)Potemkin deals with a mutiny by sailors oppressed by their Tsarist officers;
5)in one scene a sailor washing dishes gets upset and smashes a plate.
6)This gesture, which would take only an instant, is spread across ten shots.
Such overlapping helps emphasize the first rebellious action of the mutiny.

Nondiegetic Insert 

1)The slaughter scene in Strike makes use of another common Montage device:
    the nondiegetic insert.
2)The term diegesis refers to the space and time of the film’s story:
3)anything that is part of the story world is diegetic;
4)a nondiegetic element exists outside the story world.
5)In a sound film, for example, the voice of a narrator who is not a character in the film
   employs nondiegetic sound.
6)A nondiegetic insert consists of one or more shots depicting space and time unrelated to

  those of the story events in the film. 

7)The bull being slaughtered in Strike has no causal, spatial, or temporal relation to the
   workers.
8)Its nondiegetic image is inserted to make a metaphorical point: the workers are being slaughtered like animals.
9)The use of such nondiegetic shots to make a conceptual point was central to Eisenstein’s theory of “intellectual montage.”

Sergei Eisenstein the complicated

1)Eisenstein developed the most complicated conception of montage.
2)Initially he believed in what he called the “montage of attractions.”
3)As in a circus, the filmmaker should assemble a series of exciting moments to stimulate the viewer’s emotions.
4)Later he formulated elaborate principles by which individual filmic elements could be combined for maximum emotional and intellectual effects.
5)He insisted that montage was not limited to editing or even to Constructivist art in general.
6)In a bold essay of 1929, he scoffed at Kuleshov and Pudovkin as treating shots like bricks that are joined to build a film.
7)Bricks, he pointed out, do not interact with each other as film shots do.
8)He asserted that shots should not be seen as simply linked but rather as conflicting sharply
   with one another.
9)Even Eisenstein’s writing style, with its short sentences and paragraphs, tried to convey the
   principle of collision:

·         The shot is by no means an element of montage.

·         The shot is a montage cell.

·         Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo, so on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage.

·         By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell—the shot?

·         By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision.

·         For Eisenstein, this conflict imitated the Marxist concept of the dialectic, in which antithetical elements clash and produce a synthesis that goes beyond both. Montage could compel the spectator to sense the conflict between elements and create a new concept in his or her mind.

·         In “collision montage,” Eisenstein foresaw the possibility of an “intellectual” cinema. It would attempt not to tell a story but to convey abstract ideas, as an essay or political tract might. He dreamed of filming Marx’s Capital, and certain of his films took first steps toward intellectual filmmaking.

Vladimir Lenin
WWI - Bolshevik Cause

1)When the provisional government failed to halt Russia’s hopeless and unpopular struggle against Germany in World War I,
2)the Bolshevik cause gained support, especially from the military.
3)In October, Vladimir Lenin led a second revolution that created the
   Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). 
After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.
a member of the majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which was renamed the Communist Party after seizing power in the October Revolution of 1917.

Vsevolod Meyerhold    Constructivism and theater
1)Constructivism affected the theater as well.
2)The most important Constructivist theatrical director was Vsevolod Meyerhold,
3)an established figure who offered his services to the Bolshevik government immediately
   after the revolution.
4)Meyerhold’s bold methods of staging were to influence Soviet film directors.
5)Set and costume designs in several major Meyerhold productions incorporated Constructivist
    design principles.
6)In his 1922 production of The Magnanimous Cuckold, for example, the set somewhat
   resembled a large factory machine;
7)it consisted of a series of bare platforms and a large propeller turning during the play.
8)The actors performed in ordinary work clothes.
9)In keeping with Constructivism, Meyerhold also pioneered the principle of
   biomechanical acting.
10)The actor’s body was assumed to be like a machine, and thus a performance consisted of
    carefully controlled physical movements rather than of the expression of emotions.

Vsevolod Pudovkin
1)had intended to train as a chemist until he saw D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance in 1919.
2)Convinced of the cinema’s importance, he soon joined Kuleshov’s workshop and trained as
   both an actor and a director.
3)His first feature film typified the Constructivist interest in the physical bases of
   psychological response;
4)he made Mechanics of the Brain, a documentary about Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiments on
   stimulus-response physiology.
5)In 1926, Pudovkin (born 1893) helped found the Montage movement with his first fiction
   feature, Mother.
6)Within the USSR, Mother was the most popular of all Montage films.
7)As a result, Pudovkin enjoyed the highest approval from the government of any of the
   movement’s directors, and
8)he was able to keep up his experiments with Montage longer than any of the others—up until
   1933.

Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky
who had gotten his start directing agitki,

The year 1924 saw a further increase in production. Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky, who had gotten his start directing agitki, made Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom, a contemporary comedy in which a street cigarette seller becomes a movie star by accident. Several scenes reflect the Soviet film situation of the day. In this sequence from Cigarette-Girl of Mosselprom, set in a movie studio, a director reading a script sits in front of a German film poster.At the end, the heroine’s film premieres in what may have been a typical movie theater of the day (Cigarette-Girl of Mosselprom).

Agitki are the propaganda films made by the Bolsheviks in support of their revolution. ... The trains used by the Bolsheviks to distribute, advertise, promote, and project the films were called agitki-trains. The word agitki is related to the English expression "agit-prop."
Agitprop definition is - propaganda; especially : political propaganda promulgated chiefly in literature, drama, music, or art. 

FILMS

Arsenal

Battleship Potemkin

Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom

Earth

The End of St. Petersburg

Engineer Prite’s Project

The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolshevik

The House on Trubnaya

Man with a Movie Camera

Mother

My Grandmother

October

The Old and the New

Strike