Dream Factory and Film Factory: The Soviet Response to Hollywood 1917–1941

A group of young film-makers emerged in the early years of the Soviet state who were wedded both to cinematic experiment and political change. At the same time, this first generation of Soviet film-makers also fell under the spell of ‘American-ness’ (amerikanshchina). As I shall discuss in this chapter, the dialogue that ensued between Soviet perceptions of American demotic modernism and nascent revolutionary politics are at the heart of the outpouring of breathtaking talent which characterised Soviet cinema in its first decade. What is particularly interesting in the Soviet–Hollywood ‘dialogue’ is how it highlights the tensions involved in attempting to separate the issues of content and context from film form. The figure most affected by the tensions within this dialogue was Sergeii M. Eisenstein who will take a central role in this study.