10 great Soviet films of the 1920s

Lenin famously proclaimed, “Of all the arts, for us, the cinema is the most important.” Impressive films had been made under Nicholas II, as the BFI’s 1991 VHS collection Early Russian Cinema testified. But the sheer size of the country, a shortage of equipment, and the Tsar’s deep suspicion of the new medium had hindered cinema’s development.  

Having nationalised the film industry after the revolution, Lenin founded the State Film Institute (VGIK) to train filmmakers and established studios in Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus, as well as Moscow. Agit-prop trains and trucks took newsreels and educational films to the farthest corners of the USSR. From virtually a standing start, productivity rose from 38 features in 1922 to 109 in 1928 and these were shown in 2,730 cinemas and 4,680 workers clubs, along with selected foreign imports, which were carefully edited to avoid spreading dangerous notions.

The popular conception of Soviet cinema in the 1920s involves rows of huddled comrades nodding earnestly at propaganda tracts for fear of being dispatched to a gulag. The leading filmmakers also lived in dread of committing formalist errors. Several of them wrote intense theoretical tomes that outlined the influence of the Marxist dialectic on their creative choices and the connection between the revolutionary intentions of the Bolsheviks and the five approved types of montage that had been showcased with such innovative zeal by Sergei Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin (1925). 

But, while features were made to disseminate political messages and inspire the masses through the deeds of revolutionary heroes, there were also plenty of dramas and comedies on show. Even the odd satire slipped past the censors. The directors at work in the silent era were passionate cineastes and their ideas about linking and colliding images had a profound influence on the rest of Europe and even Hollywood. Indeed, a century later, the Soviet legacy is still evident in pop promos, commercials, video games, and those flash-cut sequences in action blockbusters.

Director: Lev Kuleshov

Lev Kuleshov is enshrined in the history books as the father of montage, as his ‘Kuleshov effect’ became the cornerstone of 1920s Soviet cinema after demonstrating the associational, psychological, intellectual and metaphorical potential of juxtaposed or linked images. Rooted in constructivist and futurist theory, montage transformed silent filmmaking and remains potent today. 

For all the loftiness of his legacy, however, Kuleshov was a twentysomething who just wanted to make films. His tastes didn’t always coincide with the scrutineers in the Kremlin, and this highly amusing blend of slapstick and satire from 1924 was banned for neglecting pressing revolutionary ideals. Yet, amid the parodic homages to Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith, there are veiled criticisms of Bolshevik rule, as West (Porfiri Podobed), has to be rescued by sidekick Cowboy Jeddy (Boris Barnet) after being fleeced by Zhban (Vsevolod Pudovkin), a Muscovite thief who exploits the affluent American patriot’s conviction that all Soviet citizens are barbarians.

Director: Yakov Protazanov

Feted as a landmark in cinematic sci-fi, Yakov Protazanov’s radical reworking of an Alexei Tolstoy novel says more about the Soviet Union in the aftermath of Lenin’s death than it does about life on Mars. A returned émigré, Protazanov sought to expose the societal shortcomings of the 1921 New Economic Policy (NEP) by revealing how corrupt bourgeois Erlikh (Pavel Pol) alienates engineer Los (Nikolai Tseretelli) from his wife Natasha (Valentina Kuindzhi), and sends him on a space voyage to the realm of Queen Aelita (Yuliya Solntseva). 

The mysterious interstellar message, “Anta Odeli Uta” anticipates “Klaatu barada nikto” in the 1950s sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), while the constructivist Martian sets and costumes have influenced everything from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and the 1930s Flash Gordon serials to Liquid Sky (1982) and beyond. Yet the fascination of this commercially successful but critically denounced fantasy lies in its docu-realist depiction of NEP-era Moscow.

Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin

When filmmaker Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky failed to cast Mezhrabpomfilm’s adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s novel about a mother who becomes radicalised by her son’s death during the 1905 Revolution, it was entrusted to Vsevolod Pudovkin, despite his having only co-directed the comic short Chess Fever (1925).

A disciple of Lev Kuleshov, Pudovkin had developed an editing style predicated on the linkage rather than the collision of images. Moreover, he sought to create character through montage – fellow director Grigori Roshal claimed he had done for cinema what Charles Dickens had done for the novel. Charlie Chaplin borrowed the flagwaving episode for Modern Times (1936) and Mother ranked eighth on the influential Brussels list of the 12 greatest films compiled for the 1958 World Expo (a list topped by Battleship Potemkin). But critics now tend to prefer its companions in Pudovkin’s ‘revolutionary trilogy’, The End of St Petersburg (1927) and Storm over Asia (1928). 

Director: Esfir Shub

Between 1922 and 1925, Esfir Shub re-edited around 200 imported and tsarist-era films to make them suitable for Soviet cinemagoers. In the process, she developed a keen memory for the content of shots and their rhythm and tempo and this proved vital when she was commissioned to compile a documentary to mark the 10th anniversary of the February revolution. 

Shub spent two months in Leningrad sifting through archive footage, much of which had been filmed by the official court cinematographers appointed by Nicholas II to chronicle his reign, even though he considered cinema “to be an empty, useless and even pernicious diversion” that “only an abnormal person” could call art. In conjunction with Mark Tseitlin, a research associate at the Museum of the Revolution who wrote the intertitles elucidating Nicholas’s reactionary rule, the Great War and the Petrograd spring, Shub edited some 60,000 metres of celluloid down to 1,500 metres and, thus preserved material that would otherwise have been lost forever.

Director: Abram Room

In early 1927, Lithuanian director Abram Room worked on the documentary short Jews on Land with poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was infamously involved in a ménage à trois. Yet the source of Room’s controversial three’s-a-crowd saga was a tabloid report about two men claiming paternity of the same child, which had been spotted by screenwriter Viktor Shklovsky. 

As the Russian title, Third Meschanskaya, suggests, he set out to critique the rise in petty-bourgeois materialism (‘meschantsvo’) under the New Economic Policy. However, later scholars have claimed the film as a feminist tract because oppressed housewife Lyuda (Lyudmila Semyonova) abandons both construction worker husband Kolya (Nikolai Batalov) and printer lodger Volodya (Vladimir Fogel). In fact, Room had sought to condemn the very relaxed moral standards that would lead to his drama being banned at home and abroad. Indeed, the debate surrounding the precise interpretation contributed to the introduction of socialist realism in the arts at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.

Director: Sergei Eisenstein

Commissioned to mark the October Revolution’s 10th anniversary, Sergei Eisenstein envisaged an epic. As with Battleship Potemkin, however, he was forced to narrow his focus, as he and assistant Grigorii Aleksandrov pored over newspaper reports, archive footage and John Reed’s book Ten Days That Shook the World. Yet the greatest inspiration was The Storming of the Winter Palace, a spectacular 1920 public reconstruction in which Lenin himself had participated. 

New historical facts forced Eisenstein to edit out Leon Trotsky, but the Kremlin, critics and the public resisted the use of intellectual montage to re-enact the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Alexander Kerensky was played by student Nikolai Popov, while cement worker Vasili Nikandrov portrayed Lenin. Neither had acted before. But formalist fault was found with every aspect of the picture, which one review compared to “a horde of dead objects covered with the dust of museums”. The verdict of history has been somewhat kinder.

Director: Boris Barnet

When it comes to Boris Barnet comedies, there’s not much to choose between this NEP satire and the Anna Sten romcom The Girl with a Hat Box (1927). Accommodation shortages provide the link between the pair, with The House on Trubnaya seeing country girl Paranya Pitunova (Vera Maretskaya) arrive in Moscow with her duck. She is fortunate to find lodgings with an old village neighbour, but hairdressing tenants the Golikovs (Vladimir Fogel and Yelena Tyapkina) seek to exploit her as their skivvy. 

The scene in which this Soviet Cinderella is radicalised during an amdram storming of the Bastille starring her self-regarding boss is hilarious. It tilts the unionised Paranya towards becoming the embodiment of Lenin’s contention that every cook should be ready to govern. But Barnet isn’t content with mocking petty-bourgeois individualism. He also employs every avant-garde gambit at his disposal to lampoon the sanctified montage technique, most notably during the glorious staircase sequence that ribs Eisenstein and ranks with the best Hollywood slapstick. 

Director: Alexander Dovzhenko

Coming between Zvenigora (1928) and Earth (1930) in Alexander Dovzhenko’s ‘Ukraine trilogy’, this non-linear reflection on the 1918 January uprising in Kyiv relies less on montage to convey its revolutionary-cum-nationalist sentiments than a Goya-esque expressionism forged from contrasts between documentary realism and poetic symbolism. 

With its abrupt juxtapositions of sequences of propulsive movement and disarming stillness, and embracing cliché and caricature without always avoiding contradiction and confusion, the celebration of emancipation is tempered by the stark horrors of the sacrifices made to oust Tsarism. More avant-garde than agit-prop, the allusions and analogies make demands on the audience and leave plenty of room for debate about both theme and content. But, as Timosh Stoyan (Semyon Svashenko) returns from the front and turns to Bolshevism after witnessing the suffering of the children and the callously corrupt mismanagement of the bourgeoisie, images such as the statue of the Cossack warrior coming to life are among the most iconic of the period.

Director: Dziga Vertov

Dziga Vertov considered himself a mechanical eye and he ends this self-reflexive city symphony with an eye being superimposed over a camera lens. Having previously dedicated himself to revolutionary truth while making the Kino-Pravda newsreels, Vertov was so taken by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) that he set out to capture fleeting impressions of work and play in Moscow, Kyiv, Kharkov and Odessa. 

Often working in perilous places, brother Mikhail Kaufman wielded the camera, while editor wife Yelizaveta Svilova helped create an absolute language of cinema by using an innovative array of editorial gambits to juxtapose 1,775 individual shots with an average length of 2.3 seconds, when the mainstream norm was 11.2. Contemporary viewers were baffled by the montage technique and its generated meaning. But, in 2014, Vertov’s masterpiece was voted the finest documentary ever made in Sight and Sound, while it placed ninth in the 2022 decennial poll of the greatest films of all time.

Directors: Grigoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg

A year after Ukrainians Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg founded the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) in Petrograd, they issued the 1922 Eccentrist Manifesto, which informed this fifth FEKS film. Set during the 1871 Commune, the picture seeks to create a ‘Paris of the Mind’ rather than provide an historical reconstruction. Vsevolod Pudovkin cameos as a salesman at the eponymous department store, where Louise (Yelena Kuzmina) watches the rich binge shopping with a frenzied energy that is contrasted with the dancing at a nearby music-hall. She loves Jean (Pyotr Sobolevsky), a disillusioned veteran of the Franco-Prussian War. But he refuses to join her on the barricades, where a pitched battle is cross-cut with an aristocratic picnic at Versailles. 

Shifting between expressionism and realism, Trauberg and Kozintsev refract the spirit of Zola, Renoir and Manet through a Marxist prism, while also referencing D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin. Scored by Dmitri Shostakovich, this potent treatise on imperialism, moral decadence and sacrifice remains headily provocative.