This work is a study of ten years of native Russian film production through the Revolution of 1917, based almost exclusively on Russian-language primary sources. Showing how these films portrayed and appealed to a new urban middle class, the author examines the organization and evolution of the industry and looks at genres, motifs and themes in 65 of the most important surviving films.

The golden age of Soviet cinema, in the years following the Russian Revolution, was a time of both achievement and contradiction, as reflected in the films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov. Tensions ran high between creative freedom and institutional constraint, radical and reactionary impulses, popular and intellectual cinema, and film as social propaganda and as personal artistic expression. In less than a decade, the creative ferment ended, subjugated by the ideological forces that accompanied the rise of Joseph Stalin and the imposition of the doctrine of Socialist Realism on all the...