r--in a 22-year career he made only 7 films, and four of these were made in a period of four and a half years (Swallow 43).
The motion picture was not yet three decades old when Eisenstein started his filmmaking activity, but in that time film had stopped being a novelty and had already achieved some recognition among the arts. The Soviet cinema had achieved an international reputation even before World War I. After the Revolution, a move was made to nationalize the film industry, which at first was resisted but which was eventually effected. The Soviet regime exercised tight control over film production: "Films with a revolutionary content began to appear marked by the cloying, eulogistic manner then in vogue" (Barna 76). Over the next several years, the industry struggled to find a voice and a structure, and critical and theoretical arguments over issues of artistic integrity and what we might today call "political correctness" were legion. The two major theoretical threads that emerged were held by Dziga Vertov on the one hand and Sergei Eisenstein on the other, and the division occurred with the release of Eisenstein's first film, Strike, in 1925:
Strike unleashed a veritable furor of comment and controversy, centering on the role of the individual in the fiction film, a question that had been implicit in the polemics over both the actor and the popularity of foreign films. The issue now became explicit, and Dziga Vertov had a worthy rival in Eisenstein, the inventor of a new kind of fiction film (Youngblood 80-81).
Strike illustrates certain important elements in Eisenstein's aesthetic. One of his favorite reflections went as follows:
Biologically we are all mortal, but we become immortal in what we achieve for society--in those contributions we make towards carrying the torch of social progress from one generation to the next (Swallow 46).
A second prescription offered by Eisenstein was as follows an...