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While Russia was involved in filmmaking as early as most of the other nations in the West, it only came into prominence during the 1920s when it explored editing as the primary mode of cinematic expression. Because of the depletion of resources due to World War I, Russian film schools would take copies of David Wark Griffith's Intolerance and re-cut it as an exercise in creating meaning.
Initially, it was believed that film would be the ideal artform for communist Russia because of its populist potential and facility in propaganda; Lenin, in fact, declared it the most important medium. Dziga Vertov's newsreel series Kino-Pravda lasted from 1922 to 1925 and had a propagandistic bent; Vertov used the series to promote "Socialist realism" but also to experiment with cinema. Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was released to wide acclaim in 1925; the film was heavily fictionalized and also propagandistic, preaching the party line about the virtues of the proletariat. The party leaders soon found it difficult to control directors' expression, partly because definitive understanding of a film's meaning was elusive. Consequently, film in Russia waned in the 1930s.
Stalin's era created only two films of any note: Aleksandr Nevsky and Ivan Groznyi. These films were made during the Patriotic war when censorship was slightly loosened.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Soviet Cinima again flowered, beginning with films such as Ballada o Soldate Ballad of a Soldier that won the 1961 BAFTA Award for Best Picture and Letyat Juravli (The Cranes Fly). After the end of Khrushchev ThawIn Soviet history, Kruschev's Thaw or Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period between the end of 1950s and the beginning of 1960s, when repressions and censorship reached a low point. In Russian, the term is Khrushchovskaya Ottepel or simply Ottepel (« »)., and a new encroachment on free expression, Soviet cinema began to rely heavily on use of subtle hints and themes to say with images what could not be said with words, to circumvent the government censorship.
Vysota (Height) is considered to be defining film of the Thaw era (it also became the foundation of the Bard movementThe term bard came to use in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s (and continues to be used in Russia today) for popular poets and singers who wrote songs outside the Soviet establishment. Bard poetry differs from regular poetry mainly in the fact that it)
The 1980s saw a diversification of subject matter. Touchy issues could now be discused openly. The results were films like Pokayanie (Repentence), which dealt with Stalinist repressions in GeorgiaCOA ( In Detail) (In Detail) State motto: , ! Official language Georgian since 1978 (Georgia was the only Soviet republic to have an official language) Capital Tbilisi Chairman of the Supreme Council Zviad Gamsakhurdia (at independence) Area Total % water, and the allegorical science fictionScience fiction generally speaking, is a form of speculative fiction which deals principally with the impact of imagined science and/or technology upon society or individuals. There are, perhaps, exceptions to (or at least, some very unusual examples of) movie Kin-dza-dza, which satirized the Soviet life in general.