In 1924, the Soviet motion-picture industry passed at one stride from making crude propaganda shorts to making cine-masterpieces. Three great directors came up: Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko. They and others soon produced such silent film classics as Potemkin, The End of St. Petersburg, Ten Days That Shook the World, and one magnificent documentary film, A Shanghai Document. News of these movie marvels began to leak into the outside world, and business-minded Bolsheviks jumped at the chance to make propaganda and money at once. To distribute Soviet pictures in the U. S. they set up a U. S. company, called it Amkino (American Cinema).
Even when audiences were not conscious of the Soviet pictures' wonderful dynamic structure, they were stirred by their deep adult seriousness, the elemental sweep of their action and passion, their handling of great masses of people, their cunning use even of inanimate objects to reinforce drama. In all of them were moments which could never be forgotten: the disheveled hair of a dead woman slowly falling, straight and perpendicular, between the massive halves of a drawbridge as they rise (Ten Days That Shook the World); the medical officer's pince-nez, dangling from its black cord with pendulum-like regularity after catching in the rigging when the officer is thrown overboard by the crew (Potemkin).
Thousands of people, who disliked their propaganda, recognized in these films a fresh burst of the fierce, Russian creative energy, which, 50 years before, produced Dostoievski, Turgenev, Tolstoi in literature. Ten years later people still went to see them again and again, just as they reread the great Russian novels.
Fortnight ago Amkino announced abruptly that henceforth U. S. cinemaddicts would not see these or any other Russian films again. With very un-Russian haste Amkino was shutting up shop, liquidating. In explanation reticent officials of Amkino had little to say. Boiled down that little was: business is bad-Soviet talkies have always been less popular in the U. S. than Soviet silent films; Soviet films are not so good as they used to be; the Moscow-Berlin pact and the invasion of Finland finished Russian pictures in the U. S. One admission Amkino officials made might or might not be direly significant: for some time Russia has not been sending Amkino any new films.