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Sergei Eisenstein (Birthname: Sergei Mikhailovich Eizenshtein) (January 23, 1898 – February 11, 1948) was a revolutionary Soviet film director and film theorist noted in particular for his silent films Strike, Battleship Potemkin and Oktober. His work vastly influenced early filmmakers owing to his innovative use of and writings about montage.EARLY YEARS
Eisenstein was born in Riga, Latvia. Latvia was a place of many cultures and ethnicities at the time, and this is duely exhibited by Eisenstein's own heritage. His father, Mikhail Eisenstein, was an architect of Baltic German, Jewish, and Swedish descent while his mother, Julia, was an ethnic Russian and a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. During the rise of Nazism, Eisenstein was often thought to be a German Jew,[citation needed] primarily because of his surname, though he was only of one-eighth Jewish descent, and religiously, his various ethnic ancestors assimilated into Russian society and the Russian Orthodox religion.Eisenstein was a pioneer in the use of montage, a specific use of film editing. He believed that editing could be used for more than just expounding a scene or moment, through a "linkage" of related scenes. Eisenstein felt the "collision" of shots could be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience and create film metaphors. He developed what he called "methods of montage":
1. Metric
2. Rhythmic
3. Tonal
4. Overtonal
5. Intellectual montage
His many articles and books — including Film Form and The Film Sense — explain these methods in detail. Along with Lev Kuleshov, he was one of the earliest theorists of the young film medium. His impact on film makers in the 1920s was enormous and his theories continue to be taught in film schools to this day.In his initial films, Eisenstein did not use professional actors. His narratives eschewed individual characters and addressed broad social issues, especially class conflict. He used stock characters, and the roles were filled with untrained people from the appropriate class backgrounds.Eisenstein's vision of Communism brought him into conflict with officials in the ruling regime of Joseph Stalin. Like a great many Bolshevik artists, Eisenstein envisioned the new society as one which would subsidize the artist totally, freeing them from the confines of bosses and budgets, thus leaving them absolutely free to create. Yet, budgets and producers were as much a part of the Soviet film industry as the rest of the world. The fledgling, war- and revolution-wracked, and isolated new nation simply hadn't the resources to even nationalize its film industry at first. Later, when it did, limited resources - both monetary and equipment - necessitated production controls every bit as extensive as in the capitalist world.Eisenstein's popularity and influence in his own land waxed and waned with the success of his films and the passage of time. The Battleship Potemkin (1925) was acclaimed critically worldwide and popular in the Soviet Union. But it was mostly his international critical renown which enabled Eisenstein to direct The General Line (aka Old and New), and then October (aka Ten Days That Shook The World) as part of a grand 10th anniversary celebration of the October Revolution of 1917. The critics of the outside world praised them, but at home, Eisenstein's focus in these films on structural issues such as camera angles, crowd movements and montage, brought him - along with likeminded others, such as Pudovkin and Dovzhenko - under fire within the Soviet film community forcing him to issue public articles of self-criticism and commitments to reform his cinematic visions to conform to socialist realism's increasingly specific doctrines.
EUROPE AND HOLLYWOODIn 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 Eisenstein and company to learn about sound motion pictures and to present the famous Soviet artists, in person, to the capitalist West. For Eisenstein, however, it was also an opportunity to see landscapes and cultures outside those found within the Soviet Union. He spent the next two years touring and lecturing in Berlin, Zurich, London and Paris where, in late April, 1930, he was approached by Jesse L. Lasky on behalf of Paramount Pictures to make a film in the United States. He accepted a short-term contract for $100,000 and arrived in Hollywood in May 1930.Unfortunately, this arrangement failed. Eisenstein's idiosyncratic and artistic approach to cinema was incompatible with the more formulaic and commercial approach of American studios. Eisenstein proposed a biography of munitions tycoon Sir Basil Zharov 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 Jack London, but on all accounts failed to impress the studio's producers. Paramount finally settled on a movie version on 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 completely and, additionally, found themselves intimidated by the American fascist agitator Major Pease, who had mounted a public campaign against Eisenstein. Seventeen days later, by "mutual agreement", 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 thus faced with returning home an image of failure. The Soviet film industry was solving the sound-film issue without him and his films, techniques and theories were becoming increasingly attacked as 'ideological failures' and prime examples of formalism at its worst by the Stalinists, as the Soviet film industry came increasingly under their sway. Many of his theoretical articles from this period, such as "Eisenstein on Disney" have surfaced decades later as seminal scholarly texts used as curriculum in film schools around the world.
QUE VIVA MEXICO!A last-minute reprieve came from Charlie Chaplin, who arranged for Eisenstein to meet with a sympathetic benefactor in the person of American socialist author Upton Sinclair. Sinclair's works had been accepted by and were widely read in the USSR, and were known to Eisenstein. Conversely, Sinclair was a fan of Eisenstein's film work and looked forward to the opportunity to assist the artist. 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 to make a film to be produced by Sinclair and his wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair, and three other investors organized as the Mexican Film Trust.On 24 November, Eisenstein signed a contract with the Trust "upon the basis of Eisenstein's 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".[citation needed] The contract also stipulated that the film would be "non-political", that immediately available funding came from Mrs. 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..."[citation needed] A codicil to the contract, dated 1 December, allowed that the "Soviet Government may have the [finished] film free for showing inside the U.S.S.R."[citation needed] Reportedly, it was verbally clarified that the expectation was for a finished film of about an hour's duration.If Eisenstein's experience in Hollywood had seemed a failure, his journey to Mexico was destined to be an utter fiasco. Mexico was a right-wing dictatorship with no diplomatic ties to the Soviet Union, and had insisted on censorship rights over all footage shot as a condition of admitting the Soviet filmmakers to Mexico. The process devised was to have every reel of negative sent back to Los Angeles for development, a print struck and returned to the Mexican authorities for review and comment, which they were not inclined to do in any hurry.Eisenstein had no story or subject in mind for a film about Mexico, however, even when he left Los Angeles and embarked on a full-scale photographic expedition, filming anything and everything of personal interest without clear idea what he would be doing with it in fulfillment of his contract. He planned, however, to create something without use of a script, to utilize local "types" rather than professional actors for any human role, and to shoot the film silent.Eisenstein should have, by contract, returned with the finished film by the end of April 1931. Instead, by the 15th of that month, he could only offer up a sketchily written, abstraction-based, somewhat poetic impression of what the finished film might be. It was six months later before he produced a brief synopsis of the six-part film which would come, in one form or another, to be the final plan Eisenstein would settle on for his project. The title for the project, Que Viva Mexico!, was decided on some time later still.While in Mexico, Eisenstein had gotten wind that the Soviet film industry was pressing Stalin to have Eisenstein declared a deserter, due to his prolonged absence from the Soviet Union, and that Stalin was not resisting that pressure.On 5 February 1932, Sinclair received a telegram from Soyuzkino, to forward to Eisenstein, ordering the latter immediately back to the U.S.S.R, leaving Aleksandrov and Tisse to finish the film without him. On the same day, Sinclair learned that 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 Eisenstein could finish the film in his own way. The furious Sinclair shut down production and ordered Kimbrough to return to the U.S. with the remaining film footage and the three Soviets to see what they could do with the film already shot.
DEPARTURE FROM MEXICOTo cap things off, when Eisenstein arrived at the American border, a customs search of his trunk revealed several reels of negatives. Kimbrough was barely able to prevent their arrest and confiscation of the entire cargo. Simultaneously, it was determined that Eisenstein's re-entry visa had expired, and Sinclair's contacts in Washington were unable to secure him an additional extension. Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Tisse were, after a month's stay at the U.S.-Mexico border outside Laredo, Texas, allowed 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.Eisenstein planned to edit the film in Moscow, and Sinclair was inclined to allow this. However, Eisenstein took the entire 30 days to tour the American South, and repeated his blaming of Kimbrough to the Soviet film people in New York. Additionally, once Eisenstein had left the USA, the Soviets agreed to allow him to cut the film in Moscow but expected the Mexican Film Trust to pay for the duplicate negatives and shipping of the material, then began insisting on the original negative being sent. Mary Sinclair, on behalf of herself and the other trust members, balked at that juncture. The Trust was virtually broke, and all faith by the investors toward Eisenstein was also broken. Eisenstein was officially "off the project"; someone else, in the USA, would be found to edit the film.It took another year to find someone to deal with the vast amount of Eisenstein's Mexican footage. Other than two general descriptions of each part of the film, Eisenstein had provided Sinclair with no descriptive material to work from. Indeed, he had never developed the film's structure on paper anywhere beyond this most general of stages. The major studios were not interested in either trying to figure out a continuity for the mass of film or to market a silent picture. Another, American-made "photographic expedition" to Mexico had already been shown in New York. Finally, in mid-1932, the Sinclairs were able to secure the services of