The history of Russian
propaganda films is a history rooted from the upheaval in the Russian political arena. The two Russian revolutions, the second one saw the rise of socialism to national dominance, became a persistent milieu for most films made in that time, as the new regime saw it as a far-reaching instrument in conveying the new ideology to the masses. Perhaps the films made by Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and the documentaries by Dziga Vertov stand above the rest as one of the most brilliant of them all. These films also ranked as among the world's greatest ever made. Eisenstein's approach is the use of an
editing technique called the
montage-juxtaposition of several picture frames in succession to affect a suggestive statement- in
Battleship Potemkin (1925). Pudovkin, on the other hand, used the technique for the same purpose with
The End of St. Petersburg (1927). Their films became the benchmarks for modern film editing.
Documentary filmmaker Vertov developed the concept of the
Kino Eye or the
camera eye; the image that the camera captures is the
truth. He then established a weekly newsreel the
Kino Pravda (the camera truth) which espouses reality through the lenses opposed to the fictional feature films which he terms as "
cinema nicotine", as evident in his documentary
The Man With A Movie Camera.
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