Spotlight on Film: All the World's a Stage

Abstract

One phenomenon dominates the history of motion pictures: at one time or another, a single country has emerged as the most creative and vital source of film making on the international scene. It is almost as if a spotlight moved across the stages of the world, pausing now here, now there, to illuminate the work of an entire group of artists. This was perhaps understandable in the Soviet Union during the mid-Nineteen-Twenties, when a new government actively encouraged experimentation in all the arts, and particularly the art of the motion picture.