In perspective: Sergei Eisenstein, film director 1898-1948, page 4
After Hollywood
When Eisenstein went to Hollywood in 1928 he was feted by movie moguls and powerbrokers like Douglas Fairbanks, Chaplin and Paramount's Jesse Lasky, all hailing him as the genius who would teach the philistines who populated this commercial hell how to make film. Eistenstein churned out scripts by the cartload, but Paramount failed to green light any of them for actual production. Eventually Eisenstein accepted the financial backing of novelist Upton Sinclair and commenced filming Que Viva Mexico! but Sinclair pulled the plug following one too many interventions by Stalin. Eisenstein's near complete work was sold to studios for use as stock footage.
He returned to the Soviet Union in 1932, finding a vastly different climate to the one he had left. Proletkult had petered out. Few of his friends remained active. Many of them had been purged. The 1932 edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia accused him, regarding October and The General Line, of giving 'no deep analysis of the decisive stages of the Socialist Revolution' and stated that he 'made a diversion to formal experiments. Eisenstein is a representative of the ideology of the revolutionary section of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia which is following in the path of the proletariat.'
Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein (1938)
So, years after making October, Eisenstein was denounced as a Formalist. The Formalism movement used the method of defamiliarisation - making objects strange in order to make them seem more real. Eisenstein's technique expressed their idea that mere reproduction is never valid unless it is a deviation from the norm, a risky thing to do under Stalin. Subsequently he directed Old And New, which advanced the arguments of Stalin's collectivisation policy. Toeing Stalin's nationalistic line with Alexander Nevsky (1938) at a time when the Soviet state was gearing up for war with Germany, Eisenstein portrayed medieval Russian knights as heroic defenders of the motherland. Ivan The Terrible I (1944) depicts a tough but misunderstood tyrant battling single handed against the evil Boyar conspiracy, the enemy within. Eisenstein's brilliant earlier technique has congealed: the storytelling is stolid and turgid; the performances verge on self parody. The 1,376 editing cuts of The Battleship Potemkin, double that of the average film, give way to long, repetitive shots of actors mugging to camera. In 1946, with Eisenstein recovering from a near fatal heart attack, his work print of Ivan the Terrible II was screened and critically mauled. Finally released in 1958, during Khrushchev's 'thaw' and ten years after Eisenstein's death, its antiquated style rendered it an ill received dinosaur.
Ivan The Terrible, Sergei Eisenstein (1944)
Eisenstein directing Ivan The Terrible
Sadly, Eisenstein's normally robust spirit appeared finally to collapse shortly before he died in 1948, weakened by poor health and the stultifying political climate in which he was trying to work. Bergan quotes a magazine article published in 1947 in which he wrote:
In the light of the resolutions of the Central Committee, all workers in art must...fully subordinate our creative work to the interests of the education of the Soviet people. From this aim we must not take one step aside nor deviate a single iota. We must master the Lenin-Stalin method of perceiving reality and history... This is a guarantee that our cinematography will be able to surmount all the ideological and artistic failures...and will again begin to create pictures of high quality, worthy of the Stalinist epoch.50
What, then, remains of Eisenstein's legacy? Without the Russian Revolution we might never have heard of him at all. He was at his most inventive and innovative during the initial throes of the revolution, in unprecedented conditions of mass creative liberation. In the early days state finance allowed him to pursue his ideas to their limits, whereas even Griffith encountered great difficulty in securing backing for his films in the US. Griffith and his successors eventually defined the art of film for the mass market, if not for the masses; but whilst little of Eisenstein's work transcended brilliant experimentation, it was nevertheless Eisenstein who embodied the promise of the fulfilment of human potential under socialism.
Notes and Links
1 As there is no definite article in the Russian language, Strike and Battleship Potemkin are sometimes translated with definite articles attached. I have used the Tartan Video titles as stated on the box throughout this piece.
2 S Eisenstein, 'Word and Image', The Film Sense (Faber, 1943), p35.
3 K Marx, Werke und Schriften (quoted in The Film Sense, op cit, p35). Bis Anfang 1844, nebst Briefen und Dokumenten (Berlin, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, section 1, vol 1, semi-volume 1). Bemerkungen über die neueste preussische Zensurinstruktion, von ein Rheinlander.
4 Eisenstein quoted in R Bergan, Eisenstein: A Life In Conflict, (Little, Brown & Company, 1997), p28.
5 Ibid, p28.
6 S Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein (BFI Publishing, 1995), p45.
7 P Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Secker & Warburg, 1969), p19.
8 Eisenstein Archives at TsGALI (State Archives of Literature and Arts), Moscow. Quoted in R Bergan, op cit, p27.
9 P Wollen, op cit, p21.
10 Ibid, p21.
11 Ibid, p21.
12 Ibid, p28. 13 Ibid, p27.
14 T Cliff, Trotsky 1923-1927: Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy (Bookmarks, 1991), p98.
15 Ibid, p99.
16 Ibid, p113.
17 Quoted ibid, p115.
18 Ibid, p115.
19 Quoted ibid, p115.
20 I Konigsberg, The Complete Film Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 1988), p213.
21 K Reisz and G Millar, The Technique of Film Editing (Focal Press, 1953), p19.
22 S Eisenstein, 'Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today', Film Form (Dennis Dobson, 1951), p195.
23 Ibid, p234.
24 Ibid, p234.
25 Ibid, p196.
26 K Reisz and G Millar, op cit, pp27-28.
27 V I Pudovkin, Film Technique (Newnes, 1929), p140.
28 Ibid, pp138-139.
29 S Eisenstein, Film Form (Dobson, 1951), p63
30 S Eisenstein, The Film Sense (Faber & Faber, 1943), p17.
31 Goethe in Conversations with Eckermann (5 June 1825) translated by John Oxenford, quoted in S Eisenstein, Film Form, op cit, p45.
32 S Eisenstein, Film Form, op cit, p38.
33 Ibid, p46.
34 Ibid, p39.
35 Ibid, p15.
36 Ibid, p16.
37 Memo from David O Selznick (Viking Press, 1972) quoted in R Bergan, op cit, p118.
38 Ibid, p117.
39 J D Andrew, The Major Film Theories (Oxford, 1976), p73.
40 More on the subject of the physiology of perception can be read in 'The Language of Film: Signs and Syntax' in James Monaco's How To Read A Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media (Oxford University Press, 1981).
41 J D Andrew, op cit, p81.
42 R Bergan, op cit, p131.
43 K Reisz and G Millar, op cit, p36
44 J Reed, Ten Days That Shook The World: The Illustrated Edition (Sutton Publishing, 1997), p78.
45 R Bergan, op cit, p21.
46 S Eisenstein, 'A Dialectic Approach to Film Form', Film Form, op cit, p59.
47 Ibid, p58.
48 Ibid, p58.
49 Ibid, p56.
Links:
Odessa Steps sequence
http://waynesweb.ualr.edu/Expressionism/Eisenstein.htm
Short Odessa Steps sequence
http://www.carleton.edu/curricular/MEDA/classes/media110/Severson/potemkin.htm
Great Eisenstein pics at this site
http://www.carleton.edu/curricular/MEDA/classes/media110/Severson/eisenste.htm
Eisenstein profile and comprehensive cinema site:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/eisenstein.html
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/index.html
Download Battleship Potemkin
Back to Writing
Back to Home
Essay on George Orwell
© 1998 Anna Chen