ABSTRACT
I The history of the early Soviet cinema has become a prisoner of its own mythology. When western historians and critics speak of 'Soviet revolutionary cinema' , they are invoking a very specific construct which, together with German Expressionism and Italian Neo-Realism, constitutes a cornerstone of the artcinema tradition. 3 But the issue at stake is more than the adequacy of a movement's definition or periodisation. It opens on to the wider question of the western preoccupation with early Soviet 'modern art' , and the extent to which this actually stems from an underlying anti-Sovietism. For it is axiomatic in most western views of Soviet culture that the revolutionary modernism which flourished in the 1920s was a short-lived phenomenon, soon crushed by the imposition of a doctrinaire 'socialist realism' in the 1930s.4 But the 'left' avant-garde of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov and Dovzhenko - which probably attracted more enthusiastic and less qualified support abroad than at home - was never a unified movement. Nor did it have a monopoly on innovation, or on creative responses to the manifold challenges facing the infant Soviet cinema. Yet the continuing western preoccupation with a small group of 'masters' and their early work in the silent period, together with what seems like a wilful ignorance of their less famous contemporaries and of the furious debates that raged around Soviet cinema's policy direction throughout the decade before 1935 - these suggest that the actual history of Russian and early Soviet cinema has long been the victim of a selfconfirming diagnosis, now enshrined in a persuasive mythology.
