Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (11 February 1948) was a Soviet film director, screenwriter, film editor and film theorist. Considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, he was a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1945/1958). In its decennial poll, the magazine Sight and Sound named his Battleship Potemkin the 54th-greatest film of all time.
Early life
Sergei Eisenstein was born on in Riga, in the Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire (present-day Latvia), to a middle-class family. His family moved frequently in his early years, as Eisenstein continued to do throughout his life. His father, the architect Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, was born in Belaya Tserkov in the Kiev Governorate, into a Jewish family.Роман Соколов, Анна Сухорукова «Новые данные о предках Сергея Михайловича Эйзенштейна» : «Киноведческие записки» 102/103, 2013; стр. 314—323.
Sergei Eisenstein's father had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church before the marriage in 1897, while his mother, Julia Ivanovna Konetskaya, came from a Russian Orthodox family. . She was the daughter of a prosperous merchant.. Julia left Riga in the year of the 1905 Russian Revolution, taking Sergei with her to Saint Petersburg.. Her son would return at times to see his father, who joined them around 1910.. Divorce followed, and Julia left the family to live in France.. Eisenstein was raised as an Orthodox Christian but later became an atheist. Among the films that influenced Eisenstein as a child was The Consequences of Feminism (1906) by the first female filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché.
Education At the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering, Eisenstein studied architecture and engineering, the profession of his father.. In 1918, he left school and joined the Red Army to participate in the Russian Civil War, although his father Mikhail supported the opposite side.. This brought his father to Germany after the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik forces, and Sergei to Petrograd, Vologda, and Dvinsk.. In 1920, Sergei was transferred to a command position in Minsk, after success in providing propaganda for the October Revolution. At this time, he was exposed to Kabuki theatre and studied Japanese, learning some 300 kanji characters, which he cited as an influence on his pictorial development. .
Career From theatre to cinema
Eisenstein moved to Moscow in 1920 and began his career in theatre working for Proletkult,. an experimental Soviet artistic institution which aspired to radically modify existing artistic forms and create a revolutionary working-class aesthetic. His productions there were entitled Gas Masks, Listen Moscow, and Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man.. He worked as a designer for Vsevolod Meyerhold.. Eisenstein began his career as a theorist in 1923. by writing "The Montage of Attractions" for art journal LEF. His first film, Glumov's Diary (for the theatre production Wise Man), was also made in that same year with Dziga Vertov hired initially as an instructor. ..
Strike (Stachka, 1925) was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film. Battleship Potemkin (also 1925) was critically acclaimed worldwide. Mostly owing to this international renown, he was then able to direct October: Ten Days That Shook the World, as part of a grand tenth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution of 1917. While critics outside Soviet Russia praised his work, Eisenstein's focus in the films on structural issues such as camera angles, crowd movements, and montage brought him and like-minded others such as Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko under fire from the Soviet film community. Eisenstein, however, once again could not refrain his ironic humour. This forced him to issue public articles of self-criticism and commitments to reform his cinematic visions to conform to the increasingly specific doctrines of socialist realism.
Travels to western Europe In the autumn of 1928, with October still under fire in many Soviet quarters, Eisenstein left the Soviet Union for a tour of Europe, accompanied by his perennial film collaborator Grigori Aleksandrov and cinematographer Eduard Tisse. Officially, the trip was supposed to allow the three to learn about sound motion pictures and to present themselves as Soviet artists in person to the capitalist West. For Eisenstein, however, it was an opportunity to see landscapes and cultures outside the Soviet Union. He spent the next two years touring and lecturing in Berlin, Zürich, London, and Paris.. In 1929, in Switzerland, Eisenstein supervised an educational documentary about abortion directed by Tisse, entitled Frauennot – Frauenglück..
American projects
In late April 1930, film producer Jesse L. Lasky, on behalf of Paramount Pictures, offered Eisenstein the opportunity to make a film in the United States.. He accepted a short-term contract for $100,000 ($1,500,000 in 2017 dollars) and arrived in Hollywood in May 1930, along with Aleksandrov and Tisse. Eisenstein proposed a biography of arms dealer Basil Zaharoff and a film version of Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw, and more fully developed plans for a film of Sutter's Gold by Blaise Cendrars,. but on all accounts failed to impress the studio's producers.. Paramount proposed a film version of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.. This excited Eisenstein, who had read and liked the work, and had met Dreiser at one time in Moscow. Eisenstein completed a script by the start of October 1930,. but Paramount disliked it and, additionally, they found themselves attacked by Major Pease,. president of the Hollywood Technical Director's Institute. Pease, a strident anti-communist, mounted a public campaign against Eisenstein. On 23 October 1930, by "mutual consent", Paramount and Eisenstein declared their contract null and void, and the Eisenstein party were treated to return tickets to Moscow at Paramount's expense..
Eisenstein was faced with being seen a failure in the USSR. The Soviet film industry was solving the sound-film issue without him; in addition, his films, techniques and theories, such as his formalist film theory, were becoming increasingly attacked as "ideological failures". Many of his theoretical articles from this period, such as Eisenstein on Disney, have surfaced decades later.
Eisenstein and his entourage spent considerable time with Charlie Chaplin,. who recommended that Eisenstein meet with a sympathetic benefactor, the American socialist author Upton Sinclair.. Sinclair's works had been accepted by and were widely read in the USSR and were known to Eisenstein. The two admired each other, and between the end of October 1930 and Thanksgiving of that year, Sinclair had secured an extension of Eisenstein's absences from the USSR and permission for him to travel to Mexico. Eisenstein had long been fascinated by Mexico and had wanted to make a film about the country. As a result of their discussions with Eisenstein and his colleagues, Sinclair, his wife Mary, and three other investors organized as the "Mexican Film Trust" to contract the three Russians to make a film about Mexico of Eisenstein's design..
Mexican odyssey
On 24 November 1930, Eisenstein signed a contract with the Trust "upon the basis of his desire to be free to direct the making of a picture according to his own ideas of what a Mexican picture should be, and in full faith in Eisenstein's artistic integrity".. The contract stipulated that the film would be "non-political", that immediately available funding came from Mary Sinclair in an amount of "not less than Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars",. that the shooting schedule amounted to "a period of from three to four months", and most importantly that: "Eisenstein furthermore agrees that all pictures made or directed by him in Mexico, all negative film and positive prints, and all story and ideas embodied in said Mexican picture, will be the property of Mrs. Sinclair..." A codicil to the contract allowed that the "Soviet Government may have the [finished] film free for showing inside the U.S.S.R.". Reportedly, it was verbally clarified that the expectation was for a finished film of about an hour's duration.
By 4 December, Eisenstein was traveling to Mexico by train, accompanied by Aleksandrov and Tisse, and also by Mrs. Sinclair's brother, Hunter Kimbrough, a banker with no prior experience in motion picture work, who was to serve as production supervisor. At their departure Eisenstein had not yet determined a direction or subject for his film, and only several months later produced a brief outline of a six-part film; this, he promised, would be developed, in one form or another, into a final plan he would settle on for his project. The title for the project, , was decided on some time later still. While in Mexico, he mixed socially with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; Eisenstein admired these artists and Mexican culture in general, and they inspired him to call his films "moving frescoes".. The left-wing U.S. film community eagerly followed his progress within Mexico, as is chronicled within Chris Robe's book Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture.Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture
Filming was not accomplished in the 3–4 months agreed to in Eisenstein's contract, however, and the Trust was running out of money; and his prolonged absence from the USSR led Joseph Stalin to send a telegram to Sinclair expressing the concern that Eisenstein had become a deserter.. Under pressure, Eisenstein blamed Mary Sinclair's younger brother, Hunter Kimbrough, who had been sent along to act as a line producer, for the film's problems.. Eisenstein hoped to pressure the Sinclairs to insinuate themselves between him and Stalin so that Eisenstein could finish the film in his own way. Unable to raise further funds, and under pressure from both the Soviet government and the majority of the Trust, Sinclair shut down production and ordered Kimbrough to return to the United States with the remaining film footage and the three Soviets to see what they could do with the film already shot; estimates of the extent of this range from 170,000 lineal feet with Soldadera unfilmed,. to an excess of 250,000 lineal feet.. For the unfinished filming of the "novel" of Soldadera, without incurring any cost, Eisenstein had secured 500 soldiers, 10,000 guns, and 50 cannons from the Mexican Army.
When Kimbrough arrived at the American border, a customs search of his trunk revealed sketches and drawings by Eisenstein of Jesus caricatures amongst other lewd pornographic material, which Eisenstein had added to his luggage without Kimbrough's knowledge... His re-entry visa had expired,. and Sinclair's contacts in Washington were unable to secure him an additional extension. Eisenstein, Aleksandrov, and Tisse were allowed, after a month's stay at the U.S.-Mexico border outside Laredo, Texas, a 30-day "pass" to get from Texas to New York and thence depart for Moscow, while Kimbrough returned to Los Angeles with the remaining film.