Lenin in 1918

A great film director as well as an instructor to a generation of young filmmakers, Romm made significant contributions to Soviet cinema. Born into a Jewish family deported to Siberia at the turn of the century, Romm moved to Moscow as a teenager to study sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts. After serving in the Red Army during the civil war (1918-1921), he finished his studies and participated in various post-revolutionary artistic endeavors, discovering film in the early 1930s. He wrote an early talkie, called Men and Jobs, and his directorial debut was actually the last Soviet silent— Pyshka. The companion films—commissioned to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the revolution— Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918— were successful artistically as well as politically. After a number of wartime and late Stalinist films, Romm became a professor at VGIK, the state film school in Moscow, in 1957. Beyond shepherding filmmakers during the very active and exciting years of the Soviet thaw, Romm also directed several of his finest films, including the masterful Nine Days in One Year, and the documentary essay, Ordinary Fascism. —Seagull Films