ABSTRACT
If, as Benedict Anderson (1983) has suggested in his classic Imagined Communities, the idea of a nation is in large measure imagined retrospectively, the Soviet Union offers an interesting counterpoint-that of a nation imagined prospectively. The Soviet Union literally had to be invented. As is well known, cinema was expected to play a crucial role in this process. Surely it was for such a purpose that Lenin anointed cinema the premier socialist art-form. Many Soviet films of the 1920s were devoted to consolidating a tradition for the new nation, commemorating its revolutionary founding in historical spectacles, like V.I.Pudovkin’s The End, of St. Petersburg (1927) and Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1927). But certain other films, like Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera. (1929) and Eisenstein’s The Old and the New (1929) (originally called The General Line),1 looked primarily to the future, rather than to the past, in order to imagine what the Soviet Union could become. In this essay, we intend to look at the ways in which Eisenstein attempted in The Old and the New to contribute to the construction of the Soviet Union by means of what might be called ‘cinematic nation-building’.2
