Cinema: Movies for the Masses

Film makers must edify as well as entertain

Cinema is for us the most important of the arts," declared Lenin in 1922, and not since Pope Julius ii commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling had the proclamation of a chief of state resulted in such a sunburst of high art. A troika of young film maker-theoreticians—Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko—seized the movie toy and remade it into a sophisticated machine that dazzled the world intelligentsia, even as it instructed the Russian proletariat. As long as the party hierarchy was...