Soviet montage

Kuleshov showed his students the same actor's face followed now by a bowl of soup, now by a coffin, and viewers read hunger or grief into it: meaning comes from the cut, not from the shot. From that discovery came the Soviet cinema of the twenties, where montage becomes a machine for producing emotion and politics. Eisenstein sends a pram hurtling down an Odessa staircase, Vertov films a whole city from waking to night while showing his own camera, Dovzhenko sets a tractor in the middle of the wheat.

works 5

• CinemaThe Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the BolsheviksНеобычайные приключения мистера Веста в стране большевиковLev Kuleshov · 1924A silent comedy of 1924 in which an American who has come to Soviet Russia falls into the hands of swindlers who exploit his fears.Cinema
• CinemaBattleship PotemkinБроненосец «Потёмкин»Sergei Eisenstein · 1925A silent film of 1925 about the mutiny of a Russian battleship during the first revolution, made for its twentieth anniversary.Cinema
• CinemaMotherМатьVsevolod Pudovkin · 1926Silent film of 1926 based on Gorky: a worker's mother caught between her husband and her revolutionary son, in 1905.Cinema
• CinemaMan with a Movie CameraЛюдина з кіноапаратомDziga Vertov · 1929A silent film of 1929 produced by the Ukrainian studio, whose credits announce that it has no script, no actors and no intertitles.Cinema
• CinemaEarthЗемляOleksandr Dovzhenko · 1930A silent film of 1930 about a village that collectivisation passes through, built in cycles of birth and death rather than around a plot.Cinema