The Icon and the Axe

The key cinematic task of Lenin's heir was the transposition to the screen of this monumental myth. As the "movie trains" of Revolutionary days with their itinerant pictorial propaganda were replaced by stationary theaters, it became essential to have a codified version of the Revolutionary myth. This was provided by three major films, which were all produced in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup and comprise a kind of heroic trilogy: Pudovkin's Last Days of Petersburg, Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Bamet's Moscow in October. Together with the panoramic and equally fanciful picture of the Civil War provided by Alexis Tolstoy's Road to Calvary (which became a trilogy in the film version), these films dramatized for the Russian masses the mystery of the

new incarnation in which the hopes and fears of all the years suddenly found fulfillment in Russia.

Of the cinematic iconographers of the Revolution, Pudovkin and Eisen-stein are deservedly the best remembered. They were both creatures of the experimental twenties and pupils of Kuleshov. Each scored his greatest triumph in 1926-Eisenstein with Battleship Potemkin and Pudovkin with the film version of Gorky's Mother. Each had a long subsequent career of film-making that came to an end only when they died late in the Stalin era -Eisenstein in 1948, Pudovkin in 1953.

Pudovkin was the more thoroughly Stalinist and-as a result-the less memorable of the two. A rugged and athletic child of the Volga region, he was, from the beginning, anxious to expend his energies in the service of the new order. His theoretical writings emphasized the use of technological innovation for practical purposes of indoctrination. He favored the Stanislavsky method of acting realism over more experimental styles and exalted the semi-dictatorial function of the film editor and director.

Though capable of projecting simple and powerful emotions, he increasingly followed Stalin in turning toward monumental subjects. Traditional Russian patriotic themes replaced Revolutionary ones in his most important later works: Suvorov, Minin and Pozharsky, and Admiral Nakhimov. At the same time, he demonstrated in his theoretical writings the passion for statistical self-congratulation in pseudo-Marxist terms which was so characteristic of the Stalin mentality.

On the stage an actor plays before hundreds of persons, in the film actually before millions. Here is a dialectical instance of quantity increasing over the boundary into quality to give rise to a new kind of excitement.64

He expressed a kind of nouveau riche contempt for the older traditions of the theater with his bluff confidence that "socialist realism is just as immortal, as eternally young and inexhaustible as the people itself."95

Eisenstein was a far more complex and interesting figure. Born in Riga and educated as an architect, he was more deeply immersed in the experimental tendencies of the twenties and more broadly versed in twentieth-century European culture than Pudovkin. He was influenced by Kandinsky and others to believe that the basic ingredients of line and color could of their own accord bring spiritual qualities into visual art. He drew directly from mystical precursors of Scriabin like Castel and Eckartshausen the belief that true art must affect a "synchronization of senses."66 He became active in the constructivist theater of Proletkult and worked as an artistic designer in Meierhold productions before his epoch-making filming of Potemkin.

The film used an enormous cast to depict with poetic license and cinematic skill the brief revolt of the crew of the battleship Potemkin in Odessa during the Revolution of 1905. Based on a scenario written especially for the movie in honor of the twentieth anniversary of that Revolution, Potemkin drew heavily on the old tradition of the open-air mass theater to produce a near-perfect parable of Revolutionary heroism. The battleship itself-rather than any individual-was the hero. Its crew was a triumphant, spontaneous chorus of Revolutionary joy struggling against both the vermin gnawing at their paltry ration of meat, and the priests and officials gnawing at their souls. Just as John the Baptist, "the precursor," was placed next to Christ Enthroned on the iconostasis, so this Revolutionary precursor of October acquired a venerated place in the iconography of the Revolution. Few scenes up to that time had so brilliantly engaged the capabilities of the infant cinema industry for political purposes as the famous sequence of a baby carriage coming loose from its mother's grasp and gathering momentum as it rolled down the steps pursued by a mechanically advancing phalanx of dehumanized Tsarist soldiers.