Avant-garde cinema of the early, culturally experimental, days of the Soviet Union has long been admired by film-lovers around the world. But most of the attention has been given to the directors (and, to a lesser degree, score composers) of these ground-breaking films--interpreting them almost squarely in the "auteur" tradition. This book aims to bring to light other aspects of the works, focusing more on the collaborative nature inherent both in the genre and the ideology underlying it, and concentrating specifically on the camera operators, who were, after all, responsible for the large part of the aesthetics of the finished product. Basic theory of camera operation in the 1920s in general is discussed first, with an emphasis on specific practices used in the USSR. Several chapters concentrating on specific operators and their working relationship (almost symbiotic) with their directors follow: Tisse and Eizenshtein; Golovnia and Pudovkin; Demuts'kyi and Dovzhenko; and Moskvin and the wonderful and wildly experimental collective, the factory of the Eccentric Actor. The concluding chapter looks at the end of the Golden Age of the Soviet Cinema with its intimations of oppression and the horror that soon followed. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)