Made in 1933, Deserter was particularly timely in telling of a striking Hamburg dockworker who is offered the life of a workers' hero in the Soviet Union, but who is overcome by guilt as his German comrades come under increasing attack. Hitler's coup caused the cancellation of a planned German version of the film, and all further shooting had to be done in the Soviet Union. For V. I. Pudovkin, the cinema was a medium of poetry and ideas; in his silent films he attempted to liberate the image and the narrative from the constraints of linear continuity, and with Deserter, he applied his theories to sound with landmark results. Eschewing the current practice of treating sound as "pure accompaniment, advancing in inevitable and monotonous parallelism with the image," he created a poetry of sounds linked in constructivist interrelation to the image. He wrote, "I recorded pieces of various music and sound of different volumes, transitions from bands to crowd noises, from 'hurrahs' to the whirling propellers of aeroplanes, slogans from the radio and snatches of our songs. Just like long shots and close-ups in silent film. Then followed the task of editing...to create...rhythmic composition" (in Film Technique, quoted in Richard Roud's Cinema: A Critical Dictionary).