Proving himself capable of talking tough on culture as well as politics, Putin said that despite state support Russian movies were not sufficiently popular abroad and therefore did not promote the country.

"We possess a most rich cinematographic heritage, our films traditionally receive prestigious awards at international festivals but our product does not so far have a mass foreign audience," he said.

That meant that "the goals of economic, cultural and humanitarian influence are not being reached," he told the first meeting of the recently created Council on Cinematography.

"And that's one of the most important, serious tasks of domestic filmmaking.

"There's always little money but there are even fewer good ideas and talented works," he told the meeting at the country's top film school, the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography.

Before the meeting, Putin was given a tour of the institute's several filmmaking pavilions, where the strongman premier tried his hand at producing sound effects and walked on bags of starch to imitate the crunch of snow under feet.

Putin told directors, including Oscar-winning Nikita Mikhalkov, Vladimir Khotinenko and Karen Shakhnazarov, to learn from how Hollywood managed to take advantage of the financial crisis in the 1930s.

"The Great Depression in the United States has given a very important impulse to the development of the American cinematography and made this industry super-profitable," Putin said.

Despite political constraints, filmmaking thrived in the Soviet Union and a number of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky earned renown in the West for pushing the boundaries of the genre.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union the previously generous levels of funding withered, leading to a general downturn in the industry.

In the last years, a handful of Russian films by directors including Andrei Zvyagintsev and Alexander Sokurov have been critical successes abroad although large-scale foreign box office success has proved elusive.

Konstantin Ernst, head of Channel One, a top state-controlled television channel, said the meeting discussed ways to overhaul state support for the industry, possibly moving away from tenders to direct subsidies.

"The most important thing that we've agreed upon is that the system of state financing of cinematography in 2010 will be done differently," he said.

A special fund will distribute money among the top five or seven producing companies, he said, criticising the previous system of money distribution as "talentless."

Mikhalkov, who is known for his unabashed public admiration of Putin, said the government should withdraw from the industry altogether for it to be successful.

"We should come to a point at which the state should not participate in filmmaking," he said.

The Russian movie industry needs 1 billion dollars over the next three to four years for it to be competitive at home and abroad, he said, adding a viable mechanism to attract that much money needed to be put in place.

Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev said the state support for the industry will grow 55 percent to 4.9 bln rubles (166.7 million dollars) next year.