Sergei Eisenstein Films | Sergei Eisenstein Filmography | Sergei Eisenstein Biography | Sergei Eisenstein Career | Sergei Eisenstein Awards

Sergei Eisenstein is generally considered to be one of the most important figures?perhaps the most important figure?in the history of cinema. But he was not only the leading director and theorist of Soviet cinema in his own lifetime, he was also a theatre and opera director, scriptwriter, graphic artist, teacher, and critic. His contemporaries called him quite simply "the Master."

Eisenstein's reputation as a filmmaker rests on only seven completed feature films, but among them The Battleship Potemkin has consistently been regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. The pivotal scene in the film?the massacre on the Odessa Steps?has become the most famous sequence in film history and a paradigm of the montage techniques that were central to Eisenstein's theories of filmmaking.

Like many early Soviet filmmakers, Eisenstein came to cinema by a circuitous route. Born in Riga, then a largely German-speaking provincial city of the Russian Empire, he saw his first film on a visit to Paris with his parents when he was only eight: Les 400 farces du diable by M?li?s. He was educated at a technical grammar school so that he would follow his father's career as an engineer. Despite, or perhaps because of, his artistic bent, he was consistently given low marks at school for his drawing. Conversely, he consistently did his best in the subject of religious knowledge. In 1909 his parents separated and his mother went to live in St. Petersburg. On various visits to her, Eisenstein was entranced by his first taste of the circus and intrigued by his clandestine reading of her copies of Venus in Furs by Sacher-Masoch and Mirabeau's The Torture Garden. Reflections of this can be detected in his later work.

In 1915 Eisenstein entered the Institute for Civil Engineering in Petrograd, where he saw his first Meyerhold productions in the theatre. After the Revolution he abandoned his courses and joined the Red Army. He was assigned to a theatrical troupe, where he worked as a director, designer, and actor. In 1920 he was demobilised to Moscow and rapidly became head of design at the First Proletkult Workers Theatre. His first sets were for a production of The Mexican, written by Jack London, Lenin's favorite writer. In 1921 he joined Meyerhold's theatre workshop (he was later to describe Meyerhold as his "spiritual father") and worked on designs for Puss in Boots.

Eisenstein's first stage production, a version of Ostrovsky's Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man in 1923, included his first venture into cinema, Glumov's Diary. This was inspired by the use of a short film in the Kozintsev and Trauberg production of Gogol's The Wedding, which he had seen the year before. His production of Tretyakov's Gas Masks in 1924 staged in the Moscow gasworks was an attempt to bridge the gap between stage ?realism? and the reality of everyday life. It failed and, as Eisenstein himself put it, he "fell into cinema."

Eisenstein had already worked with Esfir Shub re-editing Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse for Soviet audiences in 1923, but he made his first full-length film?The Strike, set in 1905?in 1925. In this film he applied to cinema the theory of the ?montage of attractions? that he had first developed in Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man. Eisenstein was not the first to develop the notion of montage as the essence of cinema specificity: that honour belonged to Lev Kuleshov in 1917. Unlike Kuleshov, however, Eisenstein thought that montage depended on a conflict between different elements from which a new synthesis would arise. This notion developed partly from his study of Japanese ideograms and partly from his own partial understanding of the Marxist dialectic. It followed from the primacy accorded to montage in this theory that the actor's role was diminished while the director's was enhanced. Eisenstein's view of the primacy of the director was to cause him serious problems on both sides of the Atlantic.

In his silent films Eisenstein used amateur actors who were the right physical types for the part, a practice he called "typage": hence an unknown worker, Nikandrov, played the role of Lenin in October, released in 1927. Most of the parts in his second full-length film, The Battleship Potemkin, released in 1926, were played by amateurs. Even the local actors who appeared in the Odessa Steps sequence were chosen not for their professional training, but because they looked right for the parts. It was Potemkin that secured Eisenstein's reputation both at home and abroad, especially in Germany, where it was a spectacular commercial success and attracted far greater audiences than in the USSR itself. Potemkin put Soviet cinema on the world map.

After Potemkin Eisenstein started work on a film about collectivisation, The General Line, but broke off to make October for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. It was with this film that his serious problems with the authorities began. Critics were divided about the film. Some enthused about the birth of a new ?intellectual cinema,? based on ?intellectual montage,? which, like Brecht's ?alienation effect,? stimulated audiences to think rather than to react solely with their emotions. Other critics were troubled by what they saw as an overabundance of abstract symbolism that was, in the (officially inspired) catch-phrase of the times, "unintelligible to the millions."

When Eisenstein returned to The General Line and completed it in 1929, the Party's general line on agriculture had changed and Trotsky had fallen from grace: the film therefore had to be re-edited to reflect these developments, and it was finally released under the title of The Old and the New. The political problems Eisenstein encountered with this project were to recur in all his subsequent film work in the Soviet Union.

In 1929 Eisenstein went abroad with his assistants Alexandrov and Tisse, ostensibly to study the new medium of sound film. In his ?Statement on Sound,? published in the summer of 1928, he had warned against the dangers of purely illustrative sound, as in the ?talkies,? and argued for the application of the techniques of the montage of attractions to produce what he called ?orchestral counterpoint.? It was to be another ten years before he had the chance to put these ideas into effect.

Eisenstein first visited Western Europe and then travelled to Hollywood to work for Paramount. From the outset he was subjected to a hostile press campaign characterizing him as a ?red dog? and a Bolshevik. After rejecting several of his film projects, Paramount cancelled his contract. He went on to start filming Que Viva Mexico! with funds provided by the Socialist millionaire novelist Upton Sinclair. Eisenstein spent most of 1931 working on the film, but Sinclair was not satisfied either with the pace of progress or the escalating cost. Material for three-quarters of the Mexican film had, however, been shot when the project collapsed in acrimonious exchanges. Eisenstein returned to the Soviet Union in May 1932. He had accepted assurances from Sinclair that the raw footage would be shipped to Moscow so that he could edit it, but this assurance was never honoured.

The Soviet Union that Eisenstein returned to was significantly different from the country he had left three years earlier. The political and economic changes associated with the first Five-Year Plan had led to concomitant changes in Soviet cinema, which was now run by an Old Bolshevik, Boris Shumyatsky, who was determined to create a ?cinema for the millions.? After several abortive projects, including Moscow, a history of the capital, The Black Consul, which would have starred Paul Robeson, and a film version of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Eisenstein began making his first sound feature, Bezhin Meadow, in 1935. The film focused on the generational conflict engendered by the collectivization program, but it too was dogged with problems and was eventually stopped on the orders of Shumyatsky in March 1937. Eisenstein was forced to confess his alleged errors in public. This submission, together with the dismissal of Shumyatsky in January 1938, enabled him to start filming again.

The result was Eisenstein's most popular film, Alexander Nevsky, made in record time and released in 1938, but it was also the film that he regarded as his least successful. Nevertheless, it contains the best, and most famous, illustration of his technique of ?orchestral counterpoint? in the sequence of the Battle on the Ice. On the other hand, Nevsky to some extent gave Eisenstein the reputation of ?court filmmaker,? particularly after he was awarded the Order of Lenin. It was because of this that, after the signature of the Nazi-Soviet Pact?and the subsequent withdrawal of Nevsky from distribution?Eisenstein was asked to direct a new production of Wagner's Die Walk?re at the Bolshoi Theatre.

When not filming, Eisenstein taught at the State Institute of Cinema, where he had been head of the directing department since his return to the Soviet Union and where he was made professor in January 1937, shortly before the final crisis with Bezhin Meadow. He also devoted an increasing amount of time and energy to his theoretical writings, but his magnum opus on Direction, like his other works on Mise-en-Sc?ne and the theory of montage, remained unfinished at his death.

Eisenstein's last film, arguably his masterpiece of masterpieces, was also unfinished: filming of the first part of Ivan the Terrible was begun in 1943 in Alma-Ata, where the Moscow studios had been evacuated because of the war, and released in 1945. The film was an instant success and earned Eisenstein and his associates the Stalin Prize. While celebrating this award in February 1946, Eisenstein suffered a heart attack, a development that encouraged his premonitions of an early death at the age of fifty. He threw himself into a flurry of frenzied activity, completing his memoirs and Part 2 of Ivan and starting on Part 3. In Part 2, however, the historical parallels between Ivan and Stalin became too obvious and, although completed, the film was not shown until 1958.

Eisenstein died of a second, massive heart attack in February 1948, just past his fiftieth birthday. He died very much under a cloud in his own country, but has since been universally acknowledged as one of cinema's greatest creative geniuses and a towering figure in the culture of the twentieth century. Some of his most important theoretical texts are only now being properly assembled and published, both in the Soviet Union and abroad.?RICHARD TAYLOR