Revolution film

In the narrower sense, revolutionary film is a genre of Soviet film from 1918 to the mid-1930s, in which the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War were thematized. The filmmakers of the revolutionary film saw themselves in their didactic approach as part of this revolution. In a broader sense, the term is also used for period films used in which revolutions serve as Plot Points.

The Soviet revolutionary film

As early as 1919 Lenin ordered the nationalization of the film industry after he recognized the mass effectiveness of the film medium. Under the direct impression of the overthrow of tsarism and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks , feature films were made in the Soviet Union in which the historical significance of the events was emphasized and which served to convince viewers of the ideas of the revolution in an agitational manner. The term revolutionary film was coined in the 1920s. An important representative of the revolutionary film was Sergei Eisenstein , who in his films Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928) combined a didactic, awareness-raising approach with the avant-garde aesthetics of his dynamic image montage. While Eisenstein primarily wanted to depict the power of the collective with this montage of attractions , other filmmakers of the revolutionary film told more epic, full of pathos and focused on individual fates, for example Vsevolod Pudowkin in The Mother (1927), The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Sturm about Asia (1928) or Olexandr Dowschenko in Arsenal (1928). The revolutionary film ended with the final establishment of Stalin's rule ; Instead of the ideological mobilization of the masses, Soviet film now placed more emphasis on films that supported the state and glorified Lenin and Stalin.

Revolution films in the broader sense

While films like Warren Beattys Reds (1981) used the revolution more as a backdrop for the romantic plot, some filmmakers saw themselves as creators of revolutionary cinema , especially in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea told stories of the revolution in 1960 in a partially documentary way of the revolution in Cuba in 1959. Pino Solanas also pursued a concept of a "cinema of the revolution", for example in his film Die Hour der Hochöfen from 1968, which is based on Eisenstein's aesthetic served. With The Lion with the Seven Heads (1970), Glauber Rocha also made a film on the revolution in the Third World .