Eisenstein: The Master's House
A film by Naum Klejman, Marianna Kireyewa
and Alexander Iskin. 1998. VHS video. 102 minutes. Color. Available
from First Run / Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, 21st Floor, Brooklyn
NY 11201. Website: http://www.frif.com.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department
of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A.
E-mail: ballast@netins.net.
Even those unacquainted with film history
may recognize at least one image from the Odessa steps segment of
Battleship Potemkin (1925), a film that brought immediate fame
to Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948). It is a close-up
of a distraught Russian woman, wearing pince-nez glasses, whose face
and glasses have been struck by the sword of a Tsarist soldier. That
frame is montage"), juxtaposing this moment with that, believing that
the audience would synthesize those (at first incompatible) elements
in a new, cohesive event. To its credit, this film biography of Eisenstein
uses related editing techniques to show us the life of "the master"
of montage—a surprising short life (he died of a heart attack
at age 50), in view of how often reproduced, not just as a scene from
the movie, but also because it was "quoted" (just as famously) 25
years later by British painter Francis Bacon in his portraits of pontiffs
in boxes. As a Marxist, Eisenstein believed in the dialectical process
by which the opposition of one force (thesis) by another (antithesis)
is resolved by their emergence in a new, unanticipated unity (synthesis).
He used a comparable process in film editing (called "dialectical
widespread his influence has been. The film's title alludes to Eisenstein's
architectural training (his father was a prominent architect) and
the fact that the film is divided into seven episodes of his life,
poetically referred to as his "houses." Born in Latvia, he grew up
in St. Petersburg and was an architecture student when the Bolshevik
revolution began in 1917. While designing posters and stage sets,
he became a follower of avant-garde theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold,
who taught him how to create forms that were both structured and spontaneous.
His international reknown was established between 1925-28 by four
films (Strike; Battleship Potemkin; October,
an account of the revolution ten years earlier; and Old and New),
after which he spent four largely fruitless years in Hollywood (under
contract to Paramount, while friends with Charlie Chaplin and, of
all people, Walt Disney) and Mexico (where he worked on an ill-fated
project about Mexican socialism, funded by Upton Sinclair). By the
time he returned disillusioned to his homeland, forced collectivisation
had been established, and experimental art and film had been outlawed
in favor of Social Realism. In his final decade, he fought to maintain
his artistic integrity (and, surely, his sanity) while dodging the
growing restrictiveness of the government censors. His last huge film,
never finished, was a reinterpretation of the life of Ivan the Terrible
(who had unified Russia in the 16th century). He suffered
his first heart attack in 1946, the year in which part of that film
was denounced for suggesting parallels between the historic tsar and
Stalin, followed by a second and fatal attack in 1948. Like the unrestrained
dreams of its subject, as well as the ambitious films he produced,
this detailed (and often humorous) biography of Eisenstein is at once
fascinating and exhausting. Narrated in Russian with English subtitles,
it is enriched by the juxtaposition of scenes from historic documentaries,
dozens of photographs and film clips of Eisenstein himself, current
footage, and excerpts from the master's films. Anyone seriously interested
in film history, the Russian Revolution, or the rise of Modernism
will be delighted by it.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol.
19, No. 1, Autumn 2003.)
