Theory and film

Abstract

By the end of the 1920s discussions within the Soviet cinema were being conducted primarily, if not yet exclusively, in Party terminology. This was a new phenomenon. Although the arguments about the cinema's rôle in relation to the theatre and about its function as the art form of the machine age had been put in political terms, against the background of a belief in the cinema as the art form of the Revolution itself, these terms had not previously been imposed on the cinema world from outside. The views expressed in these polemics reflected a genuine and spontaneous desire to assist the revolutionary cause and the construction of the new society.