Like other industries, the film production and distribution systems took years to build up a substantial output that could serve the aims of the new government. During World War I, there were a number of private production companies operating in Moscow and Petersburg. With most imports cut off, these companies did quite well making films for the domestic market. The most distinctive Russian films made during the mid- 1. Such films showcased the talents of Ivan Mozhukin and other popular stars and were aimed mainly at the large Russian audience, seldom being seen abroad. These film companies resisted the move made directly after the Revolution to nationalize all private property. They simply refused to supply films to theaters operating under the control of the government. In July 1. 91. 8, the government's film subsection of the State Commission of Education put strict controls on the existing supplies of raw film stock. As a result, producers began hoarding their stock; the largest firms took all the equipment they could and fled to other countries. Some companies made films commissioned by the government, while hoping that the Reds would lose the Civil War and that things would return to pre- Revolutionary conditions. The Peoples Commissariat of Education, or Narkompros, was the government agency given responsibility for supervising the development of the arts and education within the Soviet Union, and, in August 1. In their writings and films, Soviet montage directors championed the powers of editing, using different ways to approach it. Sergei Eisenstein Biography. Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film Occupation: Director, theoretician Also: screenwriter, editor Birth Name. HOME VIDEO BOXSETS CONTAINING SILENT ERA FILMS: Alfred Hitchcock: The Collection Volume 1 (1927-1955) Alfred Hitchcock: The Collection Volume 2 (1926-1962). Russian film: Videotapes in the Media Resources Center, UC Berkeley. Corporations, Wall Street, and Sundry Capitalism in the Movies. Labor Themes in the Movies. Arsenal (Soviet Union, 1928-29) Directed by Alexander Dovzhenko. Eisenstein intellectual montage october. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Eisenstein was born in Riga, Latvia but his family moved a lot in his early years. Eisenstein continued to move often during his life. Eisenstein's father Mikhail. Lenin issued a decree which nationalised the film industry, and charged Narkompros with the responsibility of regulating 'the entire photo and cinema trade and industry'. That same year Narkompros established the Moscow State Film School, from which many of the most important montage film- makers would later emerge. A new genre of film- making which appeared during the civil war period was the agitka, or 'small agitational works'. Single- reel agitka such as Za krasnoye znamya (For the Red Banner, 1. Red Army, and drew on formats already developed within the prerevolutionary propaganda films which had appeared during the First World War. However, although the agitka were modest, straightforward propaganda pieces, they provided emerging filmmakers with experience of a new, and different form of film- making. Films shot at the front had a documentary quality which distinguished them from more studio- bound, pre- revolutionary forms of film- making; whilst the imperative to complete films quickly led to the development of innovative editing, acting and other stylistic practices. The agitka film- makers also became actively involved in the fighting process, often filming in the midst of battle, and this degree of involvement was to breed a school of highly committed, politically engaged film- makers, which included Lev Kuleshov, Alexander Levitsky, Grigori Giber, Edward Tiss. The mission of this particular train was to raise the morale of troops fighting to defeat the White Guard forces on the Eastern Front. To this end, the agit- train was equipped with a printing press, a troupe of actors, and a film crew headed by a cameraman later to become one of the most important within the Soviet cinema: Edward Tiss. Later agit- trains contained complete film- making systems, including laboratories and editing rooms, and this enabled films to be shot, processed, edited and projected at the front within a short space of time. For them, the revolution was a crucial formative event partly because they were extraordinarily young. Indeed, Sergei Eisenstein was nicknamed . Born in 1. 89. 8, Eisenstein came from a middle- class family in Riga, Latvia. His education gave him fluency in Russian, English, German, and French. He recalled that, while on a visit to Paris at age 8, he saw a Melies film and became interested in the cinema. Two years later he visited the circus and became similarly obsessed with this popular spectacle. Following his father's wishes, he began studying engineering in 1. Eisenstein participated in the revolution and during the civil war put his engineering skills to work building bridges. He was drawn to the arts, however, and during this same period he also decorated agit- trains and helped design many theatrical skits for the Red Army. The combination of engineering and artistic work seemed anything but contradictory in the era of Constructivism, and throughout his life Eisenstein likened the production of his films to the building of those bridges. In 1. 92. 0, at the end of the civil war, Eisenstein went to Moscow and joined the Proletkult Theater (short for Proletarian, or Workers' Cultural Theater). There he designed and co- directed many plays. In 1. 92. 1, Eisenstein (along with his friend, Sergei Yutkevich, another future Montage film director) enrolled in a theater workshop under the supervision of Meyerhold, whom he would always consider his mentor. In 1. 92. 3, Eisenstein directed his first theatrical production, Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man. Although the play was a nineteenthcentury farce, Eisenstein staged it as a circus. The actors dressed in clown costumes and performed in the acrobatic biomechanical style, walking on a tightrope above the audience or doing handstands as they spoke their lines. Eisenstein also produced Dnevnik Glumova (Glumov's Diary, 1. At the same time that this play was performed, Eisenstein gained some early experience as a film editor: along with Esfir Shub (soon to become an important maker of compilation documentaries ), he reedited a German Expressionist film, Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, for Soviet release. Eisenstein always maintained that his move from the theater to film came in 1. S. M. Tretyakov's Gas Masks, not in a theater but in a real gas factory. According to Eisenstein, the contrast between the reality of the setting and the artifice of the drama was too great. A few months later, he began work on Stachka (Strike, 1. It was the first major film of the Montage movement, and Eisenstein went on to make three more important works in that style: Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin), Oktyabr (October aka Ten Days That Shook the World in an abridged version), and Staroye i novoye (Old and New). Potemkin was extremely successful abroad, which gave Eisenstein and his colleagues considerable leeway for experimentation over the next few years. Many Montage films proved more popular abroad than in the USSR, where they were often accused of being too difficult for workers and peasants to understand. He was eighteen years old at the time of the Bolshevik uprising - the revolution was, in effect, his university (nearly all the major Soviet filmmakers were under twenty- five during the formative period of political upheaval) The year before, when he was seventeen, the young art student had landed a job as set designer with Evgeni Bauer. He also acted, completed directing a film after Bauer's death, and directed one on his own. When the old film companies left Moscow, Kuleshov remained, casting his future with the revolution He worked on agit- trains and on agitkas, the films made for agit- train screenings. One of the founders of the Film School in Moscow, he formed the Kuleshov Workshop to work on cinematic theories and techniques. In the workshop, Kuleshov developed his views on montage. He took the position that the material of cinema was the celluloid film strip pieces of film. Film art consisted of putting these pieces together to create, through montage and the spectator's perception, a cinematic composition or idea. The legendary Kuleshov effect was an illustration of this principle. The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mosjoukine's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was 'looking at' the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Actually the footage of Mosjoukine was the same shot repeated over and over again. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co- creator of the experiment) described in 1. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same. The Kuleshov effect thus describes a phenomenon whereby shots acquire their meaning only in relation to other shots. Kuleshov's own Soviet films were only mildly experimental in style, but his workshop produced two important Montage directors. Vsevolod Pudovkin had intended to train as a chemist until he saw D. W. Griffith's Intolerance in 1. Convinced of the cinema's importance, he soon joined Kuleshov's workshop and trained as both an actor and a director. His first feature film typified the Constructivist interest in the physical bases of psychological response; he made Mekhanika golovnogo mozga (Mechanics of the Brain), a documentary about Ivan Pavlov's famous experiments on stimulus- response physiology. In 1. 92. 6, Pudovkin (born in 1. Montage movement with his first fiction feature, Mat (Mother). Within the USSR, Mother was the most popular of all Montage films. As a result, Pudovkin enjoyed the highest approval from the government of any of the movement's directors, and he was able to keep up his experiments with Montage longer than any of the others - up until 1. Another Kuleshov workshop member, Boris Barnet (born 1. He acted in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks and other mid- 1. Dom na Trubnoy (The House on Trubnoya, 1. Montage- style films. The other important filmmaker who, along with Kuleshov, had started directing about the time of the revolution was Dziga Vertov (born 1. During the mid- 1. Cubo- Futurists. Where Kuleshov had gone from the agit- train experience through film school teaching to fiction filmmaking, and Eisenstein through theater to historical films, Vertov learned the creative importance of film editing and became a lifelong advocate of the documentary film.
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