Sergei Eisenstein (1898 - 1948) was a Soviet film director, screenwriter and film theorist whose work fundamentally influenced the development of cinematic editing. [1] His films Battleship Potemkin, October and Alexander Nevsky, together with his extensive writings on montage, made him one of the most studied figures in film history. He worked for most of his career under the constraints of Soviet cultural policy, and several of his projects were suppressed or left unfinished. [2]
Early life and education
Eisenstein was born on 10 January 1898 in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, the son of an architect and civil engineer. [1] He was educated in the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering, following his father's profession, but his studies were interrupted by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the civil war, during which he served in the Red Army and worked on agitational theatre and poster design.
In the early 1920s he moved to Moscow and joined the Proletkult theatre, working as a set designer and then a director under the influence of Vsevolod Meyerhold's experimental staging. It was in this period that he formulated his idea of a "montage of attractions," in which a performance is assembled from calculated shocks designed to act directly on the audience. [2]
Silent films
Eisenstein turned to cinema with Strike (1925), a depiction of a factory walkout and its violent suppression. The same year he directed Battleship Potemkin, commissioned to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution and built around the mutiny aboard a tsarist warship. Its Odessa Steps sequence, in which troops advance on a fleeing crowd, became one of the most analysed and imitated passages in film. [3]
October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928) applied what Eisenstein called intellectual montage to the events of 1917, cutting between images to produce abstract argument rather than narrative continuity. Old and New, on agricultural collectivisation, followed in 1929. In these years he also worked extensively as a theorist and teacher, later holding a professorship at the state film school VGIK.
Travels and later films
Between 1929 and 1932 Eisenstein travelled in Europe, the United States and Mexico. A contract with Paramount produced no completed film, and his ambitious Mexican project Que viva Mexico! collapsed when its American backers withdrew, leaving the footage out of his control. [1]
Returning to the Soviet Union, he faced an increasingly restrictive artistic climate. His film Bezhin Meadow was halted and destroyed in 1937. He recovered official favour with Alexander Nevsky (1938), a patriotic historical epic scored by Sergei Prokofiev whose Battle on the Ice sequence is a landmark of image and music working in concert. [2] Ivan the Terrible followed: its first part, released in 1944, was awarded a Stalin Prize, but the second part was banned and remained unseen until 1958, and the third was never completed. Eisenstein died of a heart attack in Moscow on 11 February 1948.
Legacy
Eisenstein's theoretical writings, collected in volumes such as Film Form and The Film Sense, are foundational texts of film studies, and his practical demonstration that meaning can be produced by the collision of shots rather than by their content alone reshaped editing worldwide. [3] His major films are routinely placed among the most influential ever made.
