 Russian Revolutionary Cinema
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Still and poster of Battleship Potemkin.
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The ethnic nationality and socio-economic class ascribed to villains in Soviet films have in general coincided with those of real enemies under attack by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In addition, screen villains have usually been depicted as motivated by social goals in the realm of political power. Soviet film heroes, on the other hand, as a rule shared the ethnic nationality and socio-economic class of Communist Party members and their allies.
They were portrayed as strong, active and capable of resistance to the villains. As Communist control over Soviet film content stiffened with the passage of time, the Party periodically required changes in the characterizations of film heroes and villains to keep pace with new developments in the domestic and foreign policies of the Bolshevik regime. Quantitative content analysis of Soviet films provides evidence that these demands have guided film-makers in the U.S.S.R. for many years.
"Of all the arts", said Lenin, "for us the cinema is the most important." The energy of the Russian Revolution was closely attached to the impact of rapid industrialization, and nowhere were the effects of that conjunction more firmly felt than the arts. For a brief period in its early years, the October Revolution produced an atmosphere in which, it seemed, the nature of perception itself had changed. Revolutionary artists endorsed the polemical purposes of new art forms for the people - poster art, popular theater and poetry, but most of all film.
Newsreels not only spread the new regime's propaganda message but also revealed the vast diversity and resources of the Soviet Union to its people for the first time.In their technique, too, Soviet filmmakers enthusiastically adopted the machine esthetic.
For purposes of content analysis a sample of heroes and a sample of villains in Soviet films have been classified as to their ethnic nationality, socio-economic class, motivation, age, and sex. Motivation was divided into goals, in terms of a personal-social dichotomy, and into areas such as politics, economics, romantic love, family, and culture. Classification was based on total judgments which considered all clues pertaining to heroes and villains. The units chosen for analysis were complete full-length feature films produced between 1923 and 1950.
A chronic shortage of filmstock during the Civil War made necessity the stepmother of Lev Kulushay's inventive theory of montage,but he took the main part of his inspiration the automobile-factory assembly line. He maintained that two film pieces of any kind, edited together, inevitably combined into a new concept arising out of their juxtaposition. Soviet filmmakers used montage to produce a cinema which rejected Hollywood's conventional construction of space and time and celebrated the fragmentary perception of modem life in the metropolis.
Practically all Soviet films discussed in available English-language publications were included in the two samples, provided that an adequate description of their content was obtainable. The titles of over 400 Soviet films were found by perusal of books, magazines and newspapers in the English language, but information about the villains depicted was available for only 130 films, and about heroes for only 240. The representativeness of these samples cannot be determined. It is estimated, however, that they are based on about 10 and 20 per cent, respectively, of all feature films produced in the Soviet Union during the period 1923-1950.
In Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927), films which mythologized the Revolution for the general public in Soviet Russia, Sergei Eisenstein assembled his images in dynamic collision. He insisted that a film should be constructed in the spectator's imaginatidn, through an association of ideas generated by the clashing of shots.
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