include Abel Gance’s The Wheel (1923), which
embodies naturalistic philosophy and reflects Grif-
fith’s editing style, and Napoléon(1927), an almost
6-hour epic of astonishing cinematic beauty and
power; Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet(1930);
Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice(1930); René Clair’s An
Italian Straw Hat(1928); and the strangely powerful
films of Danish-born Carl Theodor Dreyer, particu-
larly his formalist masterpiece The Passion of Joan
of Arc(1928). These films, especially the short ones,
which are often screened in film history courses,
offer an excellent introduction to the diverse art of
the French silent movie in the 1920s.
1924—1930: The Soviet Montage
Movement
The Soviet Montage movement represents, with the
German Expressionist film movement, one of the
twin high points of cinematic experimentation, inno-
vation, and achievement in the years between the
end of the First World War in 1918 and the coming
of sound in 1927. After the Bolshevik (Communist)
Revolution of October 1917, led by Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin, the challenge was to reunify a shattered
nation. Lenin famously proclaimed that cinema
would be the most important of the arts in this
effort and valued the movies’ power to both attract
and indoctrinate audiences. He nationalized the
film industry and established a national film school
to train filmmakers to make propaganda films in
a documentary style. Between 1917 and 1929, the
Soviet government supported the kind of artistic
experimentation and expression that is most effec-
tively seen in the work of four directors: Dziga Ver-
tov, Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vsevolod I.
Pudovkin. What they all share in varying degrees is
a belief in the power of montage (they adopted the
French word for “editing”) to fragment and reassem-
ble footage so as to manipulate the viewer’s percep-
tion and understanding.
Vertov was the first great theorist and practi-
tioner of the cinema of propaganda in documentary
form. In 1922, the year of Robert J. Flaherty’s
Nanook of the North, Vertov launched kino-pravda
(literally, “film truth”). He was influenced by the
spirit of Flaherty and the Lumières, which focused
on everyday experiences, as well as by the avant-
garde pursuit of innovation. Vertov is best known
today for The Man with the Movie Camera(1929).
Kuleshov, a legendary teacher who was influenced
by the continuity editing in Griffith’s Intolerance
(1916), built significantly on Griffith’s ideas. As a
result, he became less interested in how editing
helps to advance the narrative than in how it can
create nonliteral meaning and thus more interested
in discontinuity rather than continuity. Among his
many feature-length films is The Extraordinary
Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks
(1924). Pudovkin took a third approach to montage,448 CHAPTER 10FILM HISTORY
A day in the life of the RussiansDziga Vertov’s The
Man with the Movie Camera(1929) is about life (how the
Russians live) and movies (how they are made) and, on first
viewing, does not seem to distinguish between the two. In
this image, we see the real subject: the man with the movie
camera. As a record of human life, it is the prototypical
movie. Vertov shows us how to frame reality and movement:
through the human eye and the camera eye, or through
windows and shutters. But to confound us, he also shows
us—through such devices as the freeze-frame, split screen,
stop-action, slow motion, and fast motion—how the
cinematographer and editor can transform the movements of
life into something that is unpredictable. He not only proves
that the camera has a life of its own, but also reminds us of
the editor, who is putting all of this footage together. Reality
may be in the control of the artist, his camera, and its tricks
but it also finds definition within the editor’s presentation
and ultimately the viewer’s perception.