The Cinematheque

“Of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important.”

Lenin

November marks the 100th anniversary of Russia’s October Revolution (November by the Gregorian calendar), an event that not only shock the world (to paraphrase John Reed) but revolutionized the world of cinema.

Lenin would famously declare that, ​“Of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important.” For a time, through the 1920s and into the 1930s, a remarkable cinematic revolution flourished in the USSR, led by a visionary vanguard that included pioneers and innovators such as Vertov, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and Pudovkin. Individually and collectively, these artists and thinkers expanded the expressive possibilities of cinema and created some of the most extraordinary films ever made. They also, in their experiments with film editing, with montage, with the juxtaposition (or context) of images as the basis of cinematic meaning and communication, developed one of the paramount theoretical frameworks for understanding the art form and its language.

This creative explosion was both state sponsored and avant-garde. If it was undeniably intended to extol the virtues of the Revolution and advance the Soviet project, it was also, if not immune to official criticism or censorship, still relatively free of the creative shackles that would hamper (and imperil) artists after the early 1930s, under Stalin and the stricter enforcement of Socialist Realism, with its disdain for ​“formalism,” as the approved Soviet aesthetic.

This 100th anniversary program—celebrating not Soviet communism but a historic period in Soviet and world cinema—does not neglect the canonical works, but is built around the rarer opportunity to view lesser-known but important titles that, in the aggregate, demonstrate the breadth of this influential and transformative cinematic movement.