ABSTRACT
Hollywood films have dominated the world market since the 1920s, but the United States has had no monopoly on the historical. One can also see innovative historicals as part of a search for a new vocabulary in which to render the past on the screen, an effort to make history more complex, interrogative, and self-conscious. The first and arguably the greatest director of innovative historicals was Sergei Eisenstein. His early films, clearly aimed at providing founding myths for the fledgling Soviet State, wholly ignore the contribution of individuals and instead bring the masses into history and history into the masses. The well-known origins of the film can be used to lend support to those who wish to see it as propaganda. The style Eisenstein employed in that film, a kind of heroic collectivism rather than individualist drama, and his brilliant editing techniques, were widely admired – among artists and film-makers, if not the general public.
