Early Soviet Cinema and American Poetry

Early Soviet film developed documentary modes of presentation--particularly that of the worker testimonial--that came to appeal strongly to U.S. poets. Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams, when they were beginning their epics, "A" and Paterson in the 1930s and 1940s, were especially attentive to the films of Eisenstein and Vertov. The quick, choppy cuts in Soviet film were known generally as "Russian montage," and derived from material shortages of film stock in the U.S.S.R. Vertov's approach to documentary materials showed Objectivist poets how to extend the naïve referentiality of Imagism into an account of historical events; Soviet film helped establish history as a fitting subject matter for modernist poetry. Particularly the long montage poems of Zukofsky and Williams owe a debt to Soviet filmmakers, and the forms these poems share indirectly express the utopian spirit of the early Soviet experiment.