ABSTRACT
When people talk about Soviet cinema they brandish a banner on which is written: The Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, October, The Mother, The End of St Petersburg and they add the recent New Babylon, Zvenigora and The Arsenal. Do 120 million workers and peasants march beneath this banner? I quite categorically state that they do not. And never have done. I am not denying the virtues of these films. These virtues do of course exist and they are not negligible. Great formal virtues. We must study these films just as we study the bourgeois classics. But making them the banner of Soviet cinema is premature. It is not with these films that we must initiate Soviet cinema.
