Soviet films of the 1920s did much to define the cinematic vocabulary of modern Hollywood, producing a range of effects designed to emotionally manipulate the audience. It's a debt that's not forgotten, and even today's crop of American directors have at various times paid direct or indirect homage to their Russian cinematic forebears.

Although many of these Soviet works were intended as propaganda and many of the directors truly believed in communism, the films usually brought out fiercely independent streaks in their creators. In fact, most of the classics of the period went down badly with the communist authorities of the time who disagreed with the directors' own visions of what communism should and shouldn't be and distrusted the film language of these works. Ironically, as these works were getting bad receptions in Moscow from the apparatchiks, they were also being censored by the West, and restoration of films from the period to their proper, original form is still ongoing.

After the explosion of creativity in the 1920s, the advent of sound presented a stumbling block to Soviet cinema. Now with a clear technical disadvantage and with Stalin's Great Terror setting in, the 1930s produced only a few memorable classics. Many directors who had become famous in 1920s were either forced to alter their style or simply could not work.

The Second World War was a boost for Soviet cinema, and it acquired international prestige of sorts with its anti-Nazi propaganda. Mark Donskoi's The Rainbow (Raduga, 1944), for example, won a prestigious US Motion Pictures and Radio Association Prize and President Roosevelt praised the film, although as an aesthetic work of art, it is justly forgotten today. After the war, Soviet cinema's meager production rate was dominated by works glorifying Stalin.

Yet the bare trickle of works of interest in the 1930s, 40s and early 50s only serves to underline the achievement of directors who in the 1920s were able to propagate their artistic vision in the face of a controlling state that was at best apathetic to their talent and at worst downright hostile.

Tsarist Cinema

Russian cinema did not begin with the communists. The first films were shown in Russia in 1896 and within ten years domestic interest in cinema-going was so strong that it led to the beginnings of domestic production. With its origins as a novelty in stalls at fairs, cinema was seen as entertainment rather than an art form.

Certainly, the experience of watching cinema was different: series of short films would run continuously and people would flit in and out as they fancied. The audience was often raucous and, despite the fact that cinema was "silent" (or "dumb" as Russians, perhaps more accurately, call it), a number of the early films were based around songs that viewers could sing along with. There were a number of historical productions and adaptations of well-known works of literature as well, since cinema was seen as working better when the audience was already familiar with the plot.

The real breakthough for Russian cinema was the start of the First World War. Imports were hindered, and demand for domestic films rocketed. The length of productions had by this time increased, and Evgeny Bauer became the first Russian director to insist that he have overall creative control for all of his films' elements (set design, lighting, costumes, script, editing) and not just marshal the actors in the shooting process.

Although firmly rooted in melodrama and often exploiting such clichés as the little country girl corrupted by the big city, Bauer's films are of much interest, rooted as they are in symbolism, Greek tragedy and the great Russian novels of the 19th century. Even today, his choice of themes seems adventurous, albeit morbid, and his sense of mise-en-scène is striking.

The sensitive treatment of the degradation of women by a patriarchal society give the works an almost feminist bent to them. Twilight of a Woman's Soul (Sumerki zhenskoi dushi, 1913), for example, is about a woman who kills her rapist; but when she marries, her husband rejects her when she lets him in on her dark secret. The husband later realizes his mistake and begs forgiveness. Too late.

The communists hated these opulent, bourgeois films, and they languished in vaults unseen until a recent revival. This film, and two others by Bauer, are on a DVD collection appropriately entitled Mad Love.

After the Revolution

The Tsarist authorities and the Orthodox Church were extremely distrustful of cinema, popular and bawdy as it was. The communists, who seized power in October 1917, knew only too well its power and were keen to tap into it. Initially though, the politicians were more concerned with consolidating their shaky power base (civil war raged in the country until 1921), and the Tsarist filmmakers were more concerned with fleeing the communists. Moreover, early Soviet film was hampered by a shortage of film stock.

The first films after the revolution were "agit-prop" (agitation-propaganda) works that sought to educate a largely illiterate population about the goals of communism. With few cinemas in the areas that most needed educating, screenings took place on specially converted "agit trains" that toured the country.

With the old guard of filmmaking largely in exile and a new political order in place, young emerging filmmakers sought to create a new way of looking at reality (as did those working in other art forms, such as music, poetry, architecture and fine art). The result was one of the most intense periods of creativity in cinema history.

Early Soviet directors were highly influenced by the "cinema-ness" of American films of the time: Keystone Kops chase scenes made in the early teens, for example, included such stunts as jumping off a bridge onto a bus passing underneath - a scene that totally transcended the possibilities of the conventional theater. D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), which had to be smuggled into the country, was also a huge influence, despite grave reservations about the director's racism.

In a 1922 article entitled "Americanism," pioneering director Lev Kuleshov called for filmmaking with an "organic link with contemporary life," "the maximum amount of movement," shorter scenes and therefore more rapid cutting, close-ups and attention to how individual shots worked when combined together - montage. Russian directors responded to Kuleshov with a series of works that, despite the heavy influence of American cinema, came to be known as Soviet montage.

Lev Kuleshov

Kuleshov cut his teeth working under Evgeny Bauer during the Tsarist period, first as a set designer and then as an actor. Although Kuleshov repudiated "the Bauer method," he consolidated the notion of the director as artist in total control and he doubtless learned much from Bauer.

His first films were newsreels and enacted documentaries for the nascent Soviet state and he then went on to found "Kuleshov Collective" at the State Film School. However, shortages of film stock were chronic and agit-prop work had priority. Starved of the ability to make art films, Kuleshov went through an intense period of theorization about cinema and experimented with a form of theater that mimicked the visual language of cinema - "films without film." When he made his first film in 1924, Neobychainye prikliucheniya mistera Vesta v strane bol'shevikov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, 1924) he was able to claim that it was a "verification of [his workshop's] methods." As well as being notable for its montage, Mr. West illustrates Kuleshov's interest in actors and acting, something that sets him aside from montage directors such as Eisenstein.

A hilarious romp that transferred the tropes of American westerns onto the streets of Moscow, the film was ostensibly a satire of international misconceptions about Russia and communism. However, on another level, the film showed a great deal of ambivalence towards the new order, a critical view that would wax and wane throughout Kuleshov's career as the regime tightened and loosened its grip on him.

After a science fiction thriller, The Death Ray (Luch smerti, 1925), Kuleshov made By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926), based on a Jack London story about the Gold Rush (thus once again showing Kuleshov's interest in America). It's a film that graphically demonstrates the ends to which Kuleshov and his team of actors would go in order to make cinema. The cabin in which the action takes place was built alongside an actual Russian river in the full knowledge that it was about to flood. Kuleshov intended there to be a couple of inches of water on the cabin floor, but it rose to a couple of feet. Nevertheless, the team continued shooting, despite occasional electric shocks from the lighting cables that had to run underwater and the freezing conditions for the soaked actors. The only film currently available on video from Kuleshov's oeuvre, By the Law demonstrates his huge talent, imagination and energy.

Vsevelod Pudovkin

Pudovkin, like his teacher Kuleshov, also cherished the role of the actor. His first film was the comic short Chess Fever (Shakhmatnaya goryachka, 1925), which seemlessly blended documentary footage of real-life Grand Master Jose Raul Capablanca (shot at a tournament in Moscow) to make it seem he is part of the story.

His most famous film is Mother (Mat, 1926), based on a story by leading light of communist literature, Maxim Gorky. It follows a mother in Tsarist Russia who is unable to understand her son's opposition to the regime. Only when he is imprisoned does the need for revolution dawn on her. The final scene, with the son escaping down a river on an ice floe and the prison guards in hot pursuit, is one of the best known from Soviet silent cinema.

The End of St Petersburg (Konets Sankt-Peterburga, 1927) was one of a string of films made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. In this version, a peasant arrives in pre-war Saint Petersburg to find work just as strikes break out across the capital. He joins the strike-breakers and turns one of the organizers in to the police, but he soon realizes he's wrong and tries, in vain, to make amends. Until, that is, some years later when revolution breaks out.

Storm over Asia (Potomok Chingis-khana, 1928) was filmed on location in Mongolia and is set during the period when British rule was being destabilized by the Civil War. The wily British believe they have found the heir to Ghengis Khan and install him as a puppet leader to try and introduce stability. The ethnographically shot scenes are still notable, and this cautionary tale of ill-advised imperialism may strike some as strikingly resonant with today's global politics.

Pudovkin's reputation is now less than that of his fellow montagists, perhaps because, unlike directors such as Kuleshov, Eisenstein or Dovzhenko, he never made a film that had a decidedly anti-regime subtext and was always the dedicated artist in the service of the state. Furthermore, during the Great Terror he "was not always averse to protecting his own interests at the expense of others," as Richard Taylor phrases it. Still, his films from the 1920s are undoubted masterpieces of the era and, if they look less spectacular now than they once did, it is because Pudovkin's experimentations with editing have been more evenly successful and incorportated into the mainstream of cinema vocabulary than have those of other directors from the period.

Sergei Eisenstein

No film director has had more words written about them than Sergei Eisenstein, the undisputed master of Soviet montage, and no director has written so much about film. His works are still referenced and borrowed from by modern directors such as Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma, not to mention advertising.

Yet none of the films he made exist in the final form in which he wanted them. The negatives to his first two features Strike (Stachka, 1924) and Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925) were sold by Russia to Germany to raise hard currency, and were censored and edited there. His next two features, including October (Oktyabr, 1927), had to be radically revised in an attempt to meet official approval. Two films from the 1930s were never completed. His attempt to rehabilitate himself, Aleksandr Nevsky (1938) was shown to Stalin before it was completed and the dictator was so pleased with the unfinished work that nobody dared alter it further. Eisenstein died without finishing his final project, the Ivan the Terrible trilogy (1943-46). Like that other pioneering auteur Orson Welles (with whom he shared a passion for Shakespeare), Eisenstein left behind a long list of unrealized projects and ideas for films with his death.

Eisenstein started in experimental theater but soon drifted towards cinema. His first film, Strike (Stachka, 1924), although in some ways still marked by his background in theater - Eisenstein would also prefer to use character "types" rather than let his actors explore the personalities of complex individuals - employed some boldly cinematic techniques. The film depicts the titular industrial action, which takes place in Tsarist times, and its suppression by the police. While some of the experiments in film language fail (the dramatic sweeps and shapes to change or frame action would go in his later films), others are as vivid and memorable as anything he would do in his more famous films. Though Strike is a little more uneven than Eisenstein's later works, veteran critic Derek Malcolm considers it his best, as it shows his basic humanity far better than his later masterpieces.

Eisenstein's most famous and influential film is Battleship Potemkin (1925). Although originally conceived as one of a number of films celebrating the 20th anniversary of the 1905 uprisings against Tsarist rule, Battleship Potemkin was the only one of the series made. The film's plot is loosely based on the mutiny aboard the titular war vessel in response to appalling conditions and an uncaring and aloof officer class.

Battleship Potemkin

Odessa, in the film, comes out in support of the militant sailors, and the Tsarist army brutally suppresses the jubilant shoreline encouragement - the infamous "Odessa Steps" sequence (in fact, a fictional invention by the film's makers rather than a historical event). The battleship then heads out to sea; in the final act, another memorable and endlessly copied sequence, the battleship faces the combined might of the imperial navy with its red flag (hand tinted on the film) fluttering proudly in the wind. The true end was rather more ignominious, with the sailors docking in Romania and being arrested and transferred to Russia.

Eisenstein's conception of montage was that by understanding that the shot is the basic unit of filmmaking you could play the audience's emotions like a violin, making them feel rage or calm as the director desired. This, for Eisenstein, was the basis of a revolutionary cinema, galvinizing the masses to support the political changes in society. The film was seen as so effective at rousing the emotions against the tyranny of capitalism that it was banned in some parts of the world; in England, the film couldn't be shown until 1954.

The director's next project was also a commemorative work, marking the tenth anniversary of the October 1917 revolution in which the Bolsheviks seized power. Its original title was simply October, but for international distribution the film is also often given the title of communist journalist John Reed's account of the events, Ten Days that Shook the World. More intellectual than Battleship Potemkin, the film uses striking juxtapositions of symbols to comment on the events.

The film had to be violently recut, though, in order to severely downplay the role played in the revolution by Trotsky, who had fallen out of political favor and been expelled from the Party by the time the film was finished. A similar fate would befall The Old and the New (Staroe I novoe, 1929), which was originally entitled The General Line (General'naya liniya) and was to portray the advantages of collectivized farms over individual peasant small-holdings.

With the advent of sound, Eisenstein would travel abroad to investigate the new techniques. Although he was feted in Hollywood as a genius, his proposals to make a film there never led to anything concrete; if his attempts to make films under Stalin were perpetually hindered, in Hollywood they were thwarted completely.

Out of luck in Hollwood, Eisenstein tried to shoot a film, ¡Qué Viva Mexico!, in and about Mexico for his first sound project. But the money ran out, and Stalin refused the director access to the footage he had shot. The film was reconstructed in 1979 from the available footage and the director's notes.

When the director returned to Russian in 1932, under the orders of Stalin, he was distinctly out of favor, with his work branded as "formalist," a favorite term of abuse by the regime for directors who were more concerned with film language than talking to the masses. Although he lived for another 16 years, he would work on only three more film projects, one of which, Bezhin Meadow (Bezhin lug), was only partially completed before the footage was destroyed. His other two works are covered in the section "Sound Cinema and the Great Terror."

Continue reading: Part Two.