Esfir Shub's Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) is culled from pre-Soviet Russian newsreels gathered from Europe and America. Editing, or montage, is the common organizational basis of these films and each of the filmmakers believed the arrangement of shots to be the foundation of film art. The proven ability of movies to achieve this difficult goal inspired Lenin's famous dictum, 'For us, cinema is the most important art,' and their stunning innovations recharged world cinema.

Their problem was to captivate an enormous, culturally diverse, multi-lingual, semi-literate population in ways that would be emotionally compelling, yet ideologically clear. During the 1920s, Soviet documentary and fiction films were financed by the State, and their fledgling directors, some barely out of their teens, converted their lives from theater, engineering, painting and journalism to the practice and theory of a revolutionary cinema devoted to showing the achievements and aspirations of the new Socialist society. Their problem was to captivate an enormous, culturally diverse, multi-lingual, semi-literate pop.

Cyrano de bergerac film 1945