Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era 1918-1935

<p>The golden age of Soviet cinema in the years following the Russian Revolution was a time of both achievement and contradiction as reflected in the films of Eisenstein Pudovkin and Kuleshov. Tensions ran high between creative freedom and institutional constraint radical and reactionary impulses popular and intellectual cinema and film as social propaganda and as personal artistic expression. In less than a decade the creative ferment ended subjugated by the ideological forces that accompanied the rise of Joseph Stalin and the imposition of the doctrine of Socialist Realism on all the arts.</p> <p><i>Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era 1918-1935</i> records this lost golden age. Denise Youngblood considers the social economic and industrial factors that influenced the work of both lesser-known and celebrated directors. She reviews all major and many minor films of the period as well as contemporary film criticism from Soviet film journals and trade magazines. Above all she captures Soviet film in a role it never regained-that of dynamic artform of the proletarian masses.</p>