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Rear Window: Soviet Cinema

  • The poster from

    The poster from "Battleship Potemki," a landmark film in Soviet cinema history. | Photo: Archive

Published 7 April 2016
Opinion

Ian Christie, a professor of film at the University of London discusses the appropriation of Soviet techniques in the cinema of Latin America.

Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History at the Birkbeck College in the University of London spoke to teleSUR English about the long and important history of Soviet Cinema.  

Christie explains that the term "propaganda" didn't have the same negative connotation in the years following the Russian Revolution of 1917 that it does today.  

He stresses that Soviet cinema showed the world how the silver screen and revolution go together.  

According to the professor, Lenin said in 1923 that cinema was the most important of the arts for the newfound Soviet Union.  

Many important works of Soviet "propaganda" films emerged in this period. Notable director Sergei Eisenstein, whose "Battleship Potemkin" is widely known, also produced other important works. "October," his take on the revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, is charged with sexuality, and caused a stir, Christie explains.  

Then, Dziga Vertov, a lesser-known but equally important director who ran in opposition to Eisenstein, is discussed.  

The main dispute between the directors was that Eisenstein wanted to tell stories, and Vertov wanted to show real life. He referred to mixing cinema and storytelling as "spiritual poison". 

Even today, Soviet cinema serves as an inspiration for people under revolutionary conditions. Christie says this is noticeable in Latin American film, especially that of Cuba, which took much from the Soviet school.

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Ian Christie
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Eisenstein task in 1930 was to film abstract ideas through a series of images. To make them concrete, not through story, but emotions which “triggers a series of ideas. From image to emotion, from emotion to thesis."
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