Sergei Eisenstein is generally considered to be one of the most important figures?perhaps the most important figure?in the history of cinema. But he was not only the leading director and theorist of Soviet cinema in his own lifetime, he was also a theatre and opera director, scriptwriter, graphic artist, teacher, and critic. His contemporaries called him quite simply "the Master."
Vsevolod Illarionovitch Pudovkin's major contribution to the cinema is as a theorist. He was fascinated by the efforts of his teacher, the filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, in exploring the effects of montage. As Pudovkin eventually did in his own work, Kuleshov often created highly emotional moments by rapidly intercutting shots of diverse content. Of course, the results could be manipulated. In The End of St. Petersburg, for instance, Pudovkin mixed together shots of stock market speculation with those depicting war casualties.
Roberto Rossellini has been so closely identified with the rise of the postwar Italian style of filmmaking known as neorealism that it would be a simple matter to neatly pigeonhole him as merely a practitioner of that technique and nothing more. So influential has that movement been that the achievement embodied in just three of his films?Roma, citt? aperta; Pais?; and Germania, anno zero?would be enough to secure the director a major place in film history.
At present, with regard to the Hollywood cinema of the last fifteen years, two directors appear to stand head-and-shoulders above the rest, and it is possible to make large claims for their work on both formal and thematic grounds: Scorsese and Cimino. The work of each is strongly rooted in the American and Hollywood past, yet is at the same time audacious and innovative.
Like the other two distinguished pioneers of the early Swedish cinema, Sj?str?m and Sj?berg, Mauritz Stiller had an essentially theatrical background. But it must be remembered that he was reared in Finland of Russian-Jewish stock, did not emigrate to Sweden until he was twenty-seven, and remained there only fifteen years before going to Hollywood.
As a screenwriter, Preston Sturges stands out for his narrative inventiveness. All of the amazing coincidences and obvious repetitions in such comedies as Easy Living and The Good Fairy show Sturges's mastery of the standard narrative form, as well as his ability to exaggerate it and shape it to his own needs. Moreover, in The Power and the Glory (an early model for Citizen Kane), Sturges pioneered the use of voice-over narration to advance a story.
Though Kira Muratova?s career as a film director was seriously hindered by the censors of the Brezhnev-to-Gorbachev-era Soviet Union, she still managed to emerge as one of the leading figures in contemporary Russian cinema. She was born in 1934 in Soroca, Romania (which is now part of Moldova), with her family background being partly Western. Raised by a Russian grandmother while her parents were in prison for their Communist activities, Muratova moved to the Soviet Union in 1954, attended Moscow State University for one year, then studied under the director Sergei Gerasimov at the Soviet s
Though little known in the West today, Olga Preobrazhenskaya was one of the pioneers of the Russian and early Soviet cinema. Beginning as a Moscow Art Theatre- and Stanislavskytrained actress for the stage, Preobrazhenskaya made a smashing screen debut in 1913?s The Keys to Happiness?an adaptation of a popular novel by Anastasiya Verbitskaya, which was directed by Yakov Protazanov and Vladimir Gardin. Preobrazhenskaya played a young Russian woman who has a liaison with an older, Jewish businessman (at the time, she was in her early thirties, considered ?too old? for starring roles
One cannot consider the career of Soviet actress-filmmaker Yulia Solntseva without acknowledging the influence of her husband, Alexander Dovzhenko, who with Eisenstein and Pudovkin is one of the virtuosos of the Russian cinema. After establishing herself on screen in the 1920s, Solntseva married Dovzhenko and, from then on, was inexorably linked to her husband. In this regard, Solntseva?s work behind the camera is not that of an independent creative artist.
Solntseva had more of a self-contained identity during her relatively brief time before the camera than she did upon becoming Dov
