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Reel 02USSR1924–1930

Soviet Montage

Советский монтаж · Soviet montage cinema

After the 1917 revolution, the new state saw cinema as a way to educate and mobilise. Short of film stock, Lev Kuleshov's workshop studied old footage and discovered that meaning comes from how shots are cut together.

Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov and Dovzhenko therefore built films out of collisions between images. However, by the early 1930s the regime imposed socialist realism, and the experiment was over.

  • Kuleshov effect
  • Eisenstein
  • Editing as meaning
  • Propaganda and avant-garde
No.FilmDirectorYear
  1. 01

    Stachka

    Strike

    A factory strike and its repression, intercut with the slaughter of a bull.

    Sergei Eisenstein 1925
  2. 02

    Bronenosets Potyomkin

    Battleship Potemkin

    Start here

    The 1905 mutiny on a battleship, and the massacre on the Odessa steps.

    Sergei Eisenstein 1925
  3. 03

    Mat

    Mother

    A mother turns revolutionary after her son's arrest, from Gorky's novel.

    Vsevolod Pudovkin 1926
  4. 04

    Oktyabr

    October

    The 1917 revolution, made for its tenth anniversary.

    Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Aleksandrov 1928
  5. 05

    Chelovek s kino-apparatom

    Man with a Movie Camera

    A day in Soviet cities, with no actors, no story and no intertitles.

    Dziga Vertov 1929
  6. 06

    Zemlia

    Earth

    A Ukrainian village, its first tractor and the struggle over collectivisation.

    Oleksandr Dovzhenko 1930