A romantic revolutionary in motion pictures

Herrmann, Waxman, Rozsa, Steiner, Korngold... among the presiding musical gods of the early cinema, a new name is increasingly to be found: Dmitri Shostakovich. He may have been dead these last 25 years, but CDs of his film music now appear regularly, and tomorrow the Barbican cinema will set the seal on this with a celebratory season. To the wild orchestral declamation, and the driven intricacy of the chamber music, we must now add a new dimension.

It is often forgotten how interwoven his concert music was with what he wrote for film: the two activities fed each other throughout his life, though he was always ambivalent about what he called his "bride-price": "Most musicians working in the cinema consider it a mire which will swallow them up," he wrote towards the end of his life. "But just like writing for the ballet, film scores kept my musical reflexes alert and my craftsmanship lithe and adroit. When I've finished a film, I'm keen to start work on a symphony or a string quartet."

He entered films the hard way. As a broke and sickly 18-year-old, with his father dead and his mother unable to finance his studies at the Leningrad conservatoire, he took a job as house pianist at the Bright Reel cinema and then moved to the Splendid Palace cinema, where the wages were higher, but the repetitiveness of the work drove him mad. One evening, while accompanying a film called Swamp and Water Birds of Sweden, he let his pianistic bird-imagery run riot, until the audience began to jeer. When told that the jeers were for him - and not, as he had assumed, for the terrible film - his reaction was proud defiance.

With his youthful renown as both performer and composer, he was soon roped into the film-making process. The first scores applied to silent films were dire stitchings-together by second-rate conductors, and in 1928 the Sovkino directors Grigoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg hired Shostakovich to write a score for their silent film The New Babylon, a "revolutionary romantic" treatment of the failed Paris Commune of 1871. The Sovkino artistic panel praised the score for not being beyond the grasp of the average viewer: Shostakovich's avant-garde music would not, it seemed, preclude his also being the people's composer.

Or would it? As Laurel Fay notes in her excellent new book Shostakovich: A Life, liberal errors in the printed parts, coupled with insufficient rehearsal, plus deliberate sabotage from envious conductors, turned the Leningrad premieres into a flop, and after a couple of days, the score was supplanted in most cinemas by routine pap. Part of the trouble lay in the fact that the film and its score had to be rewritten at the last moment after cuts by the censors; part lay in the practice, then common among projectionists, of speeding films up to get two showings into one evening. As Trauberg bitterly recalled: "On screen, a frenzied dance seethed, while in the orchestra there was a funeral march."

As Stalin's grip tightened, so film-making grew more politicised, and Shostakovich's work with it. He wrote the score for The Counterplan - a film justifying the Soviet way of dealing with "disrupters" at a Leningrad factory - and was asked to provide a theme song with broad appeal. He succeeded beyond the producers' wildest dreams: his tune was an instant hit, and went on to resurface in two different forms in America, as well as reappearing in three of his later works.

But Shostakovich's life was a long political calvary. He started out with impeccable Soviet intentions, lining up with the government to denounce "light music" - including gypsy music and jazz. He even denounced his own deviant film and theatre music, but privately went on writing it until, with the premiere of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, he was himself denounced as a "bourgeois formalist".

Scholars will never agree on the truth behind his apparent political playing-along in later life: Fay accuses him of cowardice, while others insist that it was all an elaborately subversive ploy. On 21 May, the Barbican will screen Music from the Flames, in which, in his only filmed interview with a non-Soviet audience, Shostakovich discusses his political life.

But the flames in question were those of Dresden, which he visited to score a film about Second World War devastation called Five Days - Five Nights. Shostakovich started his gravely portentous score, with its explicit references to Beethoven's Choral Symphony, while still on the spot, but when he got home he couldn't continue, and found himself impelled instead to start his Eighth Quartet, which is as majestic and mysterious as late Beethoven, and rumour has it that he intended to kill himself afterwards, but a friend removed the pills with which he meant to do the deed.

The Barbican season may not be offering The New Babylon or The Counterplan, but it will offer Katerina Izmailova - the 1966 film version of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - plus the extraordinary Rothschild's Violin, in which Shostakovich's battle on behalf of a Jewish student's opera is dramatised. And it will offer Kozintsev's version of Hamlet, with its magnificent Shostakovich score. As Kozintsev said with grateful hindsight: "In Russian we have a wonderful word - virulent. No good exists in Russian art without a virulent hatred of all that degrades man. In Shostakovich's music, I hear a virulent hatred of cruelty, of the cult of power, of the persecution of truth."

Barbican (020-7382 7000). 'Katerina Izmailova' 13 May; 'Rothschild's Violin' 14 May; 'Hamlet' 20 May