42
PARTISAN REVIEW
to produce films that were either flat journalism or highly mannered
tours de force.
It
remained for a less fanatical and broader talent,
L.
Kuleshov, to first show the unlimited possibilities of montage.
Kuleshov was a pupil of the pre-Revolutionary director, Baer, and,
like Vertov, he made newsreels of the Red Army during the Civil War.
He arrived at montage by a curious route: the shortage of film in the
War years led him to experiment with making new movies by cutting
up and rearranging parts of old ones. While he came to agree with
Vertov on the basic importance of montage, Kuleshov opposed the
"No illusions!" dogma and advocated the study of American
films,
especially the "Westerns" and the work of D. W. GriffithY In
1920
he formed a group to work in the movies. Its most talented member
was V.
I.
Pudovkin.
All of these tendencies were synthesized in the work of Sergei M.
Eisenstein, without question the greatest master the movies have yet
produced. From the FEKS group--Kozintsev and Trauberg later
became his students-he took stylization and the use of symbols, from
Vertov a preference for non-professional actors and an aversion to
studio sets, from Kuleshov the principle of montage. He began
his
career in the Meyerhold Theatre, which he left in
1921
to direct the
Workers Proletcult Theatre, a 'constructivist' group to the left even of
Meyerhold. His last theatrical production was · a play by Tretiakov
called
Gas Masks.
In his own words, "The cart dropped to pieces and
its driver dropped into the cinema. This all happened because one day
the director had the marvelous idea of producing this play about a
gas factory- in a real gas factory.
As
we realized later, the real in–
teriors of the factory had nothing to do with pure theatrical fiction.
The plastic charm of reality in the factory became so strong that
actuality .. . took things into its own hands, and finally had to leave
an art where it could not command."13 Eisenstein joined Kuleshov
and Pudovkin in their experiments with the cinema. In
1924
he
directed his first film,
The Strike,
a tentative and, from what I can
gather, not wholly successful picture. And in
1925
he produced
The
Armored Cruiser Potemkin,
which immediately made a world-wide
sensation. In this film the new tendencies found mature and powerful
expres;ion. The heroic, golden age of the Soviet cinema had begun.
Harvest
In the five years
1925-1929
the Soviet Union produced a series
of movies which not only far surpassed anything that has been done
there or elsewhere either before or since, but also were entirely differ–
ent ih technique. The esthetic theories on which these films were based
have already been indicated. A
few
facts will give us an idea of the
