Russian cinema has an important and highly esteemed background. Sergei Eisenstein was a filmmaker during the 1910s who developed the concept of montage editing, which he used in his seminal "Battleship Potemkin." Stalin supported the work of Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov and others, and made "social realism" the official cinema of the state. Later, in the mid- to late-20th century, Andrei Tarkovsky would become a great Russian innovator of the cinema. The 1960s and 1970s were periods of great growth, no doubt due to the proliferation of underground movies.
Under the control of Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian culture was transformed in the mid-1980s through "Glasnost," a political movement that gave Russians more freedom, including greater freedom of speech. Glasnost affected underground Russian movies by making them more culturally acceptable, and it made popular movies more like underground movies by allowing more pessimistic and gritty stories as well as more nudity, offensive language and crime and violence. While the new Russian cinema was nowhere near as extreme as that of the U.S., the changes brought on by this policy caused many Russian movies to be R-rated for the first time.
One of the best places to view Russian cinema and to understand the spectrum of all that Russian cinema has to offer is at the KinoArt Festival in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Films include adaptations of famous Russian novels such as "Anna Karenina" and "Taras Bulba," the latter of which was considered to be "one of the 10 greatest books of all time" by Ernest Hemingway (see "A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway). There are fiction films, many of which have never been seen; there are also historical documentaries as well as short films. To get a real sense of underground Russian cinema today and a wide sweep of more popular fare, a festival of Russian cinema such as the KinoArt Festival is worth attending.