Sergei Eisenstein Soviet Director (1898–1948)

Early life

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, on 10 January 1898 by the Old Style calendar (22 January in the modern calendar). His father, Mikhail Eisenstein, was an architect; his mother, Julia Konetskaya, came from a merchant family. The household moved frequently. In 1905 his mother took him to Saint Petersburg, and his father joined them there around 1910. The parents later divorced, and his mother moved to France.

Eisenstein followed his father into architecture and engineering, studying at the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering. In 1918 he left his studies and joined the Red Army during the Civil War, serving in Petrograd, Vologda, Dvinsk and later Minsk. While in the army he came across Kabuki theatre and taught himself some three hundred Japanese characters, which he later credited with shaping his visual thinking.

Career

In 1920 Eisenstein settled in Moscow and began working in the theatre with Proletkult, an experimental workers' arts organization, and also designed for the director Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 1923 he published his essay on the "montage of attractions" in the journal LEF and made his first film, the short Glumov's Diary, as part of a stage production.

His first feature, Strike, appeared in 1925, followed in the same year by Battleship Potemkin, which won international acclaim. Its reputation allowed him to direct October: Ten Days That Shook the World for the tenth anniversary of the revolution. The Soviet film community nevertheless criticized his emphasis on camera angles, crowd movement and editing, and he was pressed to publish self-criticism and to adjust his work to the doctrine of socialist realism. The General Line followed in 1929.

In late 1928 he left for a trip through Europe with the director Grigori Aleksandrov and the cinematographer Eduard Tisse, lecturing in Berlin, Zurich, London and Paris. In 1930 Paramount Pictures invited him to Hollywood, but its projects, including an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, came to nothing, and the contract ended by mutual consent in October of that year. With help from the author Upton Sinclair he then travelled to Mexico to make a film of his own design, later titled ¡Que viva México! Shooting ran far beyond the planned months, funds ran out and the Soviet leadership grew impatient. Sinclair stopped the production, and Eisenstein never edited the footage. Other people assembled films from it, among them Thunder Over Mexico and Death Day in the early 1930s.

Back in the Soviet Union he taught at the State Institute of Cinematography. A new project, Bezhin Meadow, was halted in the mid-1930s before completion. He recovered with Alexander Nevsky (1938), a historical film with music by Sergei Prokofiev and his first with sound. During the war he was evacuated to Alma-Ata, where he developed a film about Tsar Ivan IV. Ivan the Terrible, Part I appeared in 1944. Part II was criticized by the authorities and was not released until 1958. Footage from a planned third part was confiscated, and most of it was destroyed.

Alongside filmmaking he was one of the first major film theorists. He wrote on montage, arguing that the collision of shots could create meaning and emotion, and set out several methods of montage, among them metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal and intellectual. His books include Film Form and The Film Sense. He taught directing at the state film school and wrote the curriculum for its directors' course. He also kept sketchbooks of drawings throughout his life.

Recognition

Alexander Nevsky brought him the Order of Lenin in 1939 and a Stalin Prize in 1941; a second Stalin Prize followed in 1946 for the first part of Ivan the Terrible. He was named an Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1935 and also received the Order of the Badge of Honour and two wartime and anniversary medals. Battleship Potemkin was placed 54th in the decennial poll of the magazine Sight and Sound. A Google Doodle marked his 120th birthday in 2018.

Personal life

Eisenstein married the filmmaker and screenwriter Pera Atasheva, who outlived him and died in 1965. He had no children on record. He died on 11 February 1948, and his ashes were buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.