In July, counter-revolutionaries put down a spontaneous revolt, and Lenin's arrest is ordered. In documentary style, events in Petrograd are re-enacted from the end of the monarchy in February of 1917 to the end of the provisional government and the decrees of peace and of land in November of that year. By this time, the government had placed film as a priority, with Lenin famously saying 'Of all the arts, for us the cinema is most important.' Kino-Eye (1924) by director Dziga Vertov Under the New Economic Policy, a limited amount of privately owned production companies were allowed to create films.

His task was to train those who the Soviets deemed more important to the film industry, including filmmakers and actors alike. With this in mind, the nation's State Film School was founded in the same year, and director Lev Kuleshov, who had previously made an impression with his film Engineer Prite's Project, was invited to create his own workshop within the institute. This meant, however, that an entire generation of filmmakers would disappear. Lenin would finally nationalize the film industry entirely in 1919, causing production companies to be dissolved. The Soviet Union was still in a state of civil war at this point, and the industry continued to struggle. meant that Russia would not have a coherent, sustainable movement until the 1920s.Īfter the Bolshevik revolution, Narkompros (the People' Commissariat of Education) was established until the new government could take complete control the film industry. While France and Germany embraced avant garde cinematic techniques immediately after WWI, the political turmoil of the U.S.S.R. The ways in which communism shaped the use of montage theory is inseparable to the movement as a whole, and without the historical context it would be hard to differentiate the desires of the Soviet Union and the experimental intrigue from filmmakers residing within it. and the Russian Revolution, reading up on the early beginnings of the movement can feel more like a history in politics and propaganda than the history of making films, but this is bound to happen when a state attempts to seize complete control of a nation's entire film industry's production, distribution and exhibition.

Because Soviet Montage is so entwined with the history of the U.S.S.R.

Battleship potemkin soviet montage