Civil War (c. 1918-21), the newly dominant Communist Party declared that the new Soviet state demanded a new Soviet citizen, to be created by a new Soviet culture. In the first rush of idealism, artists hastened to invent this culture. From the canvases...

Vertov, for example, called the work of the esteemed Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein "the same old crap tinted red" and was given to statements like: "Down with the bourgeois fairy-tale scenario. Long live life as it is!" Though Vertov (who died in...

This week: Sergei Eisenstein. “Montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots” wherein “each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other.” Otherwise he would have followed his father into...

It's not where the material comes from, it's what you do with it that counts. A classic example: Brian de Palma may have stolen from Sergei Eisenstein in The Untouchables but he added a a good deal of his own style to the classic Odessa Steps sequence;...

PoochieWoochiez! It was one of those glorious flukes of moviegoing, in which two unrelated works combine—by way of a few shared attributes and the virtue of proximity—to create a unified lesson in film history. In this case, I saw two films guided by...

Louis Feuillade was the Christopher Columbus of cinema—a pioneer explorer of newly uncovered lands, a touchstone to all who followed in his footsteps. Generations of filmmakers after him called him out as an inspiration: Fritz Lang, Georges Franju,...