The End of St. Petersburg (1927)

 Vsevolod Pudovkin's "The End of St. Petersburg"

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, Vsevolod Pudovkin was commissioned to make a film to celebrate the event. Another film that was commissioned for the celebration was Sergei Eisenstein's "October (Ten Days That Shook the World)." Eisenstein's film deals more with the revolutionaries responsible for the uprising, like Vladimir Lenin. However, Pudovkin's film does not focus on political figures. Instead, he focuses more on the everyday people who went on strike, unionized, fought in the war, and overthrew the aristocracy. 

The city from the film's title, "St. Petersberg" was the center of power in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution. Pudovkin's film is a dramatization of the downfall of aristocratic power and thereby, the city itself. Pudovkin uses montage to instill an image of the city and what it represents. He cuts between images of the tsar's statue, monuments, and tsarist buildings. Using the rhythms of montage, the images of the city are presented in a poetic fashion. It visually illustrates what the city represents: the power and might of tsarist rule. 

How Pudovkin's film also differs from Eisenstein's film is the use of a protagonist. Where Eisenstein utilized the 'masses' as a central protagonist, Pudovkin goes the more 'Hollywood' route and has the historical events surrounding a central character. The central character here, who is unnamed, acts as the viewer's lens through which the events take place. Eisenstein felt that the best route for cinema was a collectivist route, emulating the communist idealogy. Because of this, his first three films focused on actions performed by collective groups of people. In Pudovkin's films, he chooses a central character with which to engage the viewer. 

Despite Soviet cinema having varying interpretations of what cinema could be, it is undeniable that the creativy implored in these films is unparalelled. After D.W. Griffith differentiated cinema from the theater a decade prior, Soviet filmmakers like Pudovkin and Eisenstein furthered this effort. Their films ushered in avant-garde filmmaking styles as well as demonstrating how editing could enhance a narrative.