The possibilities of cinema as a propaganda, agitational and educational tool intrigued the Soviet leaders. Their fascination with new technology in general as a means of transforming a backward society probably contributed as well. Lenin dictated this note to the Commissariat of Education, which was responsible for the cinema, with a request that it draw up a programme of action based on his directives. A definite proportion should be fixed for every film-showing programme.
And while it recognised that film is very much a medium of entertainment, in programming it insisted that there must be a strong educational and propaganda component. The young film medium, based as it was on mechanical proficiency and industrial expertise, captured the interest of the new generation of communist artists who realised that the new society they wished to construct could only be built on the basis of rapid industrial development and technological innovation.
These directors were inspired by Marxist theory and saw that they could apply Marxist ideas to the making of films, but each film-maker did so in their own individual way. Eisenstein was, though, the only one to elaborate an all-embracing Marxist theory of film-making. He put this into practice in his own film-making, in terms of selection of camera angle, juxtaposition of images during the editing process, movement within the frame and later in terms of sound and music also.
For the first time the ideas of Marx and Marxist theory were applied to film-making. Eisenstein was undoubtedly the most influential of the new young Soviet film-makers — a trained architect, he took to film like a duck to water.
Seeing far beyond the idea of moving pictures, he developed a whole new science of film-making based on Marxist dialectics. Eisenstein was a pioneer in the use of montage, a specific technique for film editing. He, alongside his colleague and contemporary, Lev Kuleshov, were two of the earliest film theorists to argue that montage was the very essence of cinema, and, used effectively, could enable us to see and comprehend a deeper reality.
By using a unique form of montage i. Film was for him much more than just a useful tool in expounding a scene through a linkage of related images. His iconic film Battleship Potemkin is probably the most famous example of this approach, but Strike was his first film. It depicts life at a factory complex in Tsarist Russia and the conditions under which the workers laboured. The plot is centred on the workers organising a strike which in response to repression escalates into a full-blown occupation.
Such a blunt depiction of ruling class repression had never before been visualised in this way. It is difficult to imagine today when you look at old grainy prints of Battleship Potemkin , that audiences were so stirred by its imagery that they swarmed out of the cinema determined to make their own revolution. The ruling classes were so frightened of it that its public showing was banned for many years almost everywhere outside the Soviet Union. After the success of Strike , Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet government to make a film commemorating the unsuccessful revolution of He chose to focus on the crew of the battleship Potemkin.
Fed up with the extreme cruelties of their officers and their maggot-ridden meat rations, the sailors mutiny. This, in turn, sparks an abortive citizens' revolt on the mainland against the Tsarist regime. The film's centrepiece is the classic massacre on the Odessa Steps, in which the Tsar's Cossacks methodically shoot down innocent citizens. The image of a dying mother who lets go of the pram she is pushing, leaving it to career down the steps with the baby still in it, has become one of the most iconic and moving shots in the history of cinema.
He was the first cinematographer to develop a proper film language, one appropriate to the challenges facing the new Soviet republic. His best known films, Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October , Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible all bear testament to his contribution and the power of his imagery. Many of his plans were, sadly never brought to fruition. While there, though, he developed cordial relations with Charlie Chaplin who introduced him to the socialist writer Upton Sinclair.
Their subsequent attempt to jointly produce a film in Mexico was also, in the end, unsuccessful although the footage they were able to shoot was later, posthumously, edited into the film, Que Viva Mexico. With all this wasted effort, Eisenstein was getting itchy feet to return home, as the Soviet Film industry was, in the meantime, already experimenting with soundtracks on film. Back in the Soviet Union he embarked on his epic Alexander Nevsky with a musical soundtrack composed by Sergei Prokoviev.
Unfortunately he died at the age of 50 so was unable to realise his mature potential. It is a moot point whether his specific cinematic language could have been adapted to a post-revolutionary period, and in a different historical context. But there is no doubt that his work has influenced numerous film-makers down the ages and still does. Soviet film-makers and their use of film inspired film-makers and cultural workers throughout the world.
What characterised them, in contrast to their many colleagues in the West, was that they viewed film, in the first instance, as an educational medium. They were more interested in the use of film in its educational, propaganda and informative roles than as pure entertainment.
The influence of Russian film-makers can be seen throughout the succeeding history of film. The Italian Neo-realist wave leant heavily on its Russian forerunners. Directors like de Sica, Rossellini, Visconti and Rosi had all studied the way in which Soviet film-makers had been able to capture life on screen in a totally new, gripping and realistic way that superseded its former theatrical straitjacket.
At a lecture she gave in December , she and Naum Kleiman, Director of the Moscow Cinema Museum, discussed the ways in which Soviet and Russian film have interacted with the American film industry. As Michelson pointed out, Eisenstein never made a film in the US, after Paramount Pictures invited him to Hollywood in , but the then never took on any of his projects. Nevertheless, she argues that Eisenstein's use of montage influenced American film, and is visible, she says, in such well-known scenes as the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
Hitchcock and other American directors re-interpreted montage usage. Kleiman underlined that many US filmmakers in the s and 30s had seen and admired Eisenstein's films. He noted that in the s, Francis Ford Coppola had told him that he had found artistic inspiration in October and Ivan the Terrible.
Both Kleiman and Michelson felt that Eisenstein's influence was even more noticeable in movies made outside Hollywood. Michelson argued that montage was an important intellectual and artistic device in independent films produced after the Second World War, such as those by Maya Deren.
In his opinion, Nazimova's film Salome clearly reflected traditions of Russian literature, theatre and set design. This movie, along with other movies featuring Russian actors and directors, was seen by American filmmakers and influenced their future work in many subtle ways. Elsewhere in the West, in response to the dramatic transformation taking place in the young Soviet Union and the new films emerging from the country, progressives grasped the opportunity to use this new potent medium in their own way.
Communists here in Britain became centrally involved early on in setting up workers' film societies from the twenties onwards, as a means of creating opportunities for working people to watch Soviet and other progressive films. This was followed by other, equally powerful and iconoclastic films from the Soviet Union. However, these films were banned for public showing in many countries, including the UK, as they were deemed too inflammatory and seen as dangerous communist propaganda.
Such societies had already been active on the continent of Europe. A portrait of Lenin. The near-complete absence of all democratic traditions in the country was both the cause and the consequence of this backwardness. Russia had been the classical antithesis to a potentially revolutionary society and only an extraordinary conjunction of explosive circumstances had hastened the dismantling of the old political order.
But the new political structure had necessarily to draw upon the culture of the ancient regime for as long as the troubling legacy of cultural backwardness had not been fully extirpated. Lenin and his close allies had hoped for that extirpation to happen quickly and for a new, forward-looking and more democratic culture to take its place. The problems of backwardness did, however, prove to be far more intractable than they had anticipated.
The old bureaucracy with its arrogance of power, its penchant for red-tape and self-aggrandisement and its cynical disregard of the needs of a new society, was back at most levers of power within the government. Worse, its contagion had been spreading to the Party as well, and a new culture of privilege and personal hegemony was emerging within Party apparatuses at some places. Packing important positions with favourites, unquestioning deference to powerful leaders, jockeying for important positions and even low intrigue were not only no longer unthinkable, they were even becoming commonplace at many levels.
Narrow-mindedness and intolerance began to show up often in intra-party affairs. Lenin could not have been unaware of these developments. As the Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin had been charged with the responsibility of creating for the Union a platform based on mutual respect and equality. He was therefore pushing for a structure which would accommodate the smaller states only as lesser partners. Lenin and Stalin in Gorky.
The news reached Lenin in bits and pieces as he was convalescing after his second stroke, and he was appalled. And further enquiries from his sickbed now suggested to him that Stalin was not only behaving imperiously with colleagues here and there, but seemed also to be steadily gathering up all the threads of power in his hands. Lenin decided that he had to act, no matter that his capacity to influence the course of events was sadly circumscribed by his failing health and his remoteness from the main theatre of action — Moscow.
His last writings were the product of this resolve. And much of what he wrote — or dictated to his secretary — was done by actually cheating his doctors, who were trying to enforce a strict no-work regimen on their very sick patient. This was chiefly because the leadership of the Russian Communist Party was persuaded by Stalin to suppress the potentially most incendiary parts of what Lenin wrote in his last months.
The articles that were made public — a few of them, though, with significant time-lags — were not widely disseminated or discussed, either. They no doubt hoped that some of the problems Lenin had flagged in these pieces would be straightened out over time.
Later events, of course, showed how wrong these optimists had been, how misplaced their hopes. Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52 gmail. About Us. Support Us Login. Become A Supporter. Hindi Marathi Urdu.
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