VI - A subtextual reading of Kuleshov's satire The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924)

Summary

All of us made movies — Kuleshov created the Soviet cinema.

Vs. Pudovkin

While Dziga Vertov is considered the founder of the Soviet revolutionary newsreel and the unstaged cinema (neigrovoi fil'm), Kuleshov is acknowledged as the one who radically changed Russian staged cinema (igrovoi fil'm), by introducing a completely new approach to the film narrative and the actors' performance. While Vertov came to cinema with a technological background, after experimenting with sound recording (the “Laboratory of Hearing”), Kuleshov began his career as a set designer for Evgeni Bauer, the most prominent Russian film director of the tsarist period. As a result of their different backgrounds, Vertov dedicated his entire life to advancing Soviet cinema toward a “truly international and ultimate language of cinema, absolutely separated from the language of theater and literature,” while Kuleshov invested his energies in proving that movies can function both as an entertainment and a “genuine cinematic art with its specific language of expression.” Between these two — in many ways antithetical — attitudes belong the work and theory of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Ermler, Kozinsev, and Trauberg. Consequently, a critical examination of these filmmakers could not be fully understood without taking into consideration the practices and concepts promoted by Vertov or Kuleshov.