Daydreams

It is a common tendency among casual cinephiles to reduce the history of Russian cinema to the radical innovations of the 1920s—most notably the revolutionary montage techniques of Sergei Eisenstein and the bold experiments of early Soviet filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov and Vsevolod Pudovkin. While these figures undoubtedly reshaped global cinema, this narrow view overlooks the rich and sophisticated cinematic trad…