Russian cinema studied against the background of the artistic and political revolutions which helped shape it. The course spans the period 1917-present, from the Russian pioneers of film montage (Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, Alexander Dovzhenko) to the varied cinematic approaches of recent directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, and Nikita Mikhalkov. Films by all of the above directors and others are viewed, analyzed, and discussed both with respect to their intrinsic aesthetic structure and with respect to the cultural trends and socio-political events of the period and country.