Sergei Eisenstein

Latvian film and theater director

• Born: January 23, 1898
• Birthplace: Riga, Latvia
• Died: February 11, 1948
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Universally regarded as one of the greatest directors in the history of the cinema, and an influential theorist and teacher as well, Eisenstein pioneered a method of film editing known as montage. As the result of political censorship, he completed few films in his lifetime, three of which Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible are considered classics.

Early Life

Sergei Eisenstein (syehr-GYAY IZ-ehn-stin) was the son of a wealthy shipbuilder of Jewish descent. In 1910, Eisenstein and his family moved to St. Petersburg. Several facets of Eisenstein’s childhood were to play an important role in his subsequent creative work. His nurse introduced him to fables and legends, some of which received artistic expression in films such as Staroye I Novoye (1929; The General Line), a fable, and Alexander Nevsky , a legend. As a child, Eisenstein developed a penchant for sketching, a talent that was to stand him in good stead years later when he planned scenes for films. Eisenstein’s childhood reading of novels by Alexandre Dumas, père, and Victor Hugo prepared his sympathies for the Russian Revolution and for the victims of social injustice, both of which he used as subjects of his films years later. The origin of Eisenstein’s preoccupation with revolution can also be traced to the terrifying and shocking events that he witnessed as a child in Riga during the political turmoil of 1905-1906. The source of Eisenstein’s fascination with dramatic spectacle can be found in his infatuation with the circus and in his fondness for staging war games with his friends.

After being enrolled at the Institute of Civil Engineering in 1916, Eisenstein helped manage an experimental theater and a circus in Moscow at the same time that he was studying engineering. He had just decided on a career in the plastic arts when the Russian Revolution erupted. In 1917, he interrupted his education and enlisted in the Red Army. Although he started by building trenches and dugouts, he eventually was given a chance to indulge his artistic sensibilities when he was assigned the task of organizing theatrical performances for the Red Army and painting and designing the scenery. These tasks revived his interest in the Japanese theater, and he was inspired to begin a study of the Japanese language.

Having found his true vocation, Eisenstein enrolled in the Academy of the General Staff in Moscow after being discharged from the army at the age of twenty-two. While he was at the academy, he specialized in the “Japanese section” and formulated his theory of film editing from his studies of the pictographic or ideographic element in the Japanese writing system, imported by the Japanese from China. He envisioned a type of editing that would bring together independent images to create a new meaning or image not implicit in any of its individual components, just as the Chinese character meaning “east,” for example, is said to be formed by combining the character meaning “sun” with the character meaning “tree.” (In fact, like many Westerners, Eisenstein misunderstood Chinese hence Japanese writing, greatly exaggerating its ideographic element while underestimating its phonetic element, but in his case the misunderstanding was fruitful.)

Early in the 1920’s, Eisenstein became associated with the Proletkult Theater in Moscow, which was devoted to the promotion of proletarian art. As art director of the Proletkult, he sought to infuse the theater with his own evolving concepts of what he called “Soviet realism.” Eisenstein left the Proletkult briefly to work with the director of the newly formed Meyerhold Theater, then returned to produce a comedy by the nineteenth century dramatist Alexander Ostrovsky, Na vsyakogo mudretsa dovolno prostoty (1868; Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man, 1923). His last production before going into films, S. M. Tretyakov’s Protivogazy (1924; gas masks), was so realistic that it was staged in a factory instead of a theater. This effort to carry dramatic realism to the utmost convinced Eisenstein that the theater could not adequately portray life, and he turned his efforts fully to the cinema.

Life’s Work

In 1924, Eisenstein published his first article on his revolutionary theories of film editing, which he put into practice six months later in his first full-length film, Stachka (1924; Strike , 1925). In this film, which recounts the repression of a strike by the soldiers of the czar, Eisenstein attempted to place the audience in the psychological situation that would produce the emotions and the political convictions that he wanted to communicate. His symbolic juxtaposition of unequal images (for example, matching the murder of workers with the slaughter of cattle) was shocking, but obvious and artificial.

Impressed by Eisenstein’s accomplishments in Strike, the Russian government commissioned him to make a film, Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925; Potemkin ) commemorating the abortive revolution of 1905. In this dramatized documentary of a famous mutiny of sailors aboard a battleship, Eisenstein showcased his greatest editorial discovery, which was the discrepancy between screen time and real time. The cinematic expansion of time, which was repeated at crucial moments in the film, reached its fullest expression in the scene depicting the massacre on the Odessa steps. Even though the film was an obvious piece of propaganda, it is so well crafted that it ranks among the masterpieces of the cinema.

In his next three films, Eisenstein experimented with many of the editing techniques that he had introduced in Potemkin. In a film that was commissioned in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Oktyabr’ (1927; October: Or, Ten Days That Shook the World ), Eisenstein employed a series of elaborate symbols to epitomize events. Eisenstein’s problems with censorship began with this film, the release of which was delayed a year because one of the main protagonists, Leon Trotsky, had fallen out of favor and had to be removed. In his next film, The General Line , Eisenstein used people whom he had found in night-lodging houses and on the road instead of professional actors. From this lyric depiction of the rural countryside, Eisenstein moved on to film Romance Sentimentale (1930), a film based on a visit that he had made to Paris.

In 1930, Eisenstein received an invitation to work for Paramount Studios in Hollywood, California. His difficulties began when screenplays that he had written for Sutter’s Gold and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) were rejected because of his refusal to revise them. During his entire stay in Hollywood, he was subjected to intense scrutiny by a congressional committee investigating communism in the United States. At the end of a few months, without having been assigned a single feature, Eisenstein left Hollywood for Mexico, where he had arranged to direct Que viva Mexico! with money collected by the American novelist Upton Sinclair. The film was to demonstrate how the feudal system in Mexico survived up to modern times. However, because of disputes between Eisenstein and his benefactor, the film was never completed. After fourteen months of filming, Eisenstein was forced to abandon the task of editing the 200,000 feet of film when his government ordered him back to the Soviet Union. Sinclair arranged for the film’s release by an independent producer as Thunder Over Mexico (1933), but most critics agreed that a potentially great film had been mutilated.

After he returned to Russia in 1933, Eisenstein returned to teaching and to his experiments with film. By this time, though, government interference had escalated. A film on the Soviets’ peasant policy, Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow), was scrapped by the party on the charge that it was too formalistic. Bureaucrats also halted production of a comedy, a film on the Spanish Civil War, a chronicle of the organization of the Red Army in 1917, and a biography of the Swedish match king, Ivar Kreuger.

Eisenstein was partially restored to favor in 1938 by the Central Administration of the Photo-Cinema Industry after he had apologized for his errors. In December of that year, his new sound film, Alexander Nevsky, was released. Made in accordance with Stalin’s policy of glorifying Russian heroes, Alexander Nevsky blends images with a brilliant musical score by Sergey Prokofiev to transfigure medieval history. Although the film earned for Eisenstein one of the highest honors in the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin, as well as the Stalin Prize, the film received mixed reviews in the United States.

During World War II, Eisenstein’s cinematic vision reached its final evolutionary stage. Evidence that his ideas were still evolving in the 1940’s was provided by his decision to break with his early belief that the theater was obsolete and to direct Richard Wagner’s opera, Die Walküre (1856), which was to commemorate the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He traced the development of his theories in his book The Film Sense (1942).

In 1943, Eisenstein embarked on a project of the same style as Alexander Nevsky but more ambitious in scope. Part one of Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible ) a film about one of Stalin’s heroes, the sixteenth century czar Ivan IV, was completed in 1944 after several delays, during which Party heads debated whether Ivan IV was a hero or a villain. Between 1943 and 1946, Eisenstein taught, lectured, and directed plays at the same time that he was working on the second part of Ivan the Terrible. He had no sooner finished the second part of his film in late 1946 than it was banned in Moscow, because the party ideologists objected to the film’s portrayal of the czar as “weak and spineless.” It was not released until 1958.

On September 30, 1947, Eisenstein made the first notes for a new film planned as an epic poem in color about Moscow. His vision of the projected film, entitled Moscow 800, corresponded with his expansive vision of the cinematography of the future in that it was to synthesize color and sound as well as literary, musical, and plastic images. He planned to use color in a symbolic way; black, for example, represented the dark moments of struggle in the city’s eight-hundred-year history.

As intriguing as this project was, Eisenstein was forced to abandon it when he was given permission to resume work on Ivan the Terrible. Work on the third part of Ivan the Terrible was interrupted when he became bedridden for several months from an attack of angina pectoris. As he was about to return to work, he died on February 11, 1948, in Moscow.

Significance

Eisenstein will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the cinema’s greatest film technicians. In films such as Strike and Potemkin, his montage technique grouped objects together in such a way that they suggested new meanings to the viewer. In Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein also became the first to put into practice the theory of combining visual images with music and sound. Even though he never made a film in color, he envisioned a day when film would become a vast color symphony, incorporating the sum total of the director’s emotional and artistic experiences.

On the whole, Eisenstein’s career was one of repeated victories offset by perennial struggles. In his grim determination to pursue his muse even in the wake of censorship, he recalls such other stubborn artists as Modest Mussorgsky, Rembrandt, and James Joyce. To a large extent, the cold, objective tone to which many critics have objected in his films can be traced to government interference.

Although many experts argue that Eisenstein’s cinematographic views are outmoded by today’s standards, his work has had an undeniable influence on contemporary directors all over the world. Elia Kazan publicly expressed his admiration for Eisenstein, and Alain Resnais has expressed a desire to make a film in the style of Alexander Nevsky or Ivan the Terrible. Other filmmakers have paid tribute to Eisenstein by imitating scenes from his most famous films. Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), for example, has a montage sequence that recalls similar scenes in Strike, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963) includes a lengthy scene that seems to have been taken from Potemkin. Potemkin also seems to have provided the inspiration for Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), which includes a scene that is clearly reminiscent of the scene on the Odessa steps. Even advertisers have used excerpts from Potemkin in television commercials to sell their clients’ products. Of course, the perennial revivals of Eisenstein’s films, including the silent ones, also testify to the continuing relevance of his art.

Ultimately, though, Eisenstein’s most enduring legacy may be said to lie in the large number of unrealized ideas in a career that included few completed films. Stifled by interfering bureaucrats, a lingering illness, and an early death, Eisenstein nevertheless clung to his vision of film as a synthesis of all the arts and sciences and, therefore, opened new horizons for later generations of filmmakers.

Bibliography

Barna, Yon. Eisenstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Undeniably the best biography of Eisenstein available in English. Notable because of the attention it devotes to the large number of unrealized ideas in Eisenstein’s career. This book is a valuable resource because it demonstrates how the circumstances of Eisenstein’s life and the social events of the day combined to form a dual influence on his works.

Bulgakowa, Oksana. Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography. Translated by Anne Dwyer. San Francisco, Calif.: Potemkin, 2001. A biography based on previously unused materials, including Eisenstein’s diaries and correspondence.

Geduld, Harry M., and Ronald Gottesman, eds. Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: The Making and Unmaking of “Que Viva Mexico!” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Based on previously unpublished documents from the Sinclair archives, this book goes far in clearing up the mystery surrounding Eisenstein’s great unfinished Mexican film.

Knight, Arthur. The Liveliest Art. New York: Macmillan, 1957. The chapter on Eisenstein places his technical achievements in the context of film history. Knight’s frame-by-frame analysis of Potemkin is especially insightful.

La Valley, Al, and Barry P. Scherr, eds. Eisenstein at One Hundred: A Reconsideration. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Collection of nineteen essays that analyze Eisenstein’s early silent films of the 1920’s, as well as his later films. Also explores the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and British directors on his work.

Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. New York: Macmillan, 1960. Written by a former student and collaborator of Eisenstein, this book includes in-depth analyses and personal recollections about the director. An invaluable source.

Montagu, Ivor. With Eisenstein in Hollywood. Berlin: Seven Seas, 1968. A collection of memoirs written by a man who collaborated with Eisenstein on the film scenarios written in Hollywood. Includes their scenarios of Sutter’s Gold and An American Tragedy.

Moussinac, Leon. Sergei Eisenstein. Translated by D. Sandy Petrey. New York: Crown, 1970. Written by a friend of Eisenstein, this book includes personal anecdotes about Eisenstein at the same time that it examines his films and the cinematographic philosophy that guided the films. Includes photographs, sketches, and excerpts from some of Eisenstein’s screenplays.