Art in Revolution

The years between the 1917 revolution and Lenin's death in 1925 were a period of experimentation and innovation in Russian art. Artists of the left - painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, dramatists, poets, and designers in all the industrial arts - became actively involved in the transformation of society and the creation of a new social order. This film examines how the close integration of art and politics produced revolutionary forms and principles in the whole range of artistic activities. Using contemporary film and photographs, the film gives a detailed account of the developments after the revolution and before the inauguration of Stalin's Five Year Plan. It tells of artists' involvement with propaganda exercises during the civil war, winning the peasants over to the revolution. It shows how street decorations, pageants and theatrical performances pointed the way ahead to the use of Constructivist principles in the theater, where designers produced machine-like sets stripped bare of the conventions of bourgeois illusion. Architects, along with designers of clothing, furniture and household goods, introduced an elegant functionalism into their work, a tradition continued later by the German Bauhaus.

Some of the greatest innovations were made in the cinema in typographical design, where the principles of montage adopted by artists like Dziga Vertoz and Rodchenko produced works of tremendous impact. The film surveys a wide range of experimental work produced by artists and designers during this period, and indicates the extent to which their innovations have influenced the course of twentieth-century art.