Sergei Eisenstein

• 1. Introduction

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  Sergei Eisenstein arrived in Hollywood in May 1930 with a contract worth $100,000 and an invitation from Paramount Pictures to make a film in the United States. He had already directed two of the most celebrated silent films in history. He was one of the most famous filmmakers in the world. And within five months, the studio would declare their contract null and void and hand him a return ticket to Moscow.

  That reversal captures something essential about Eisenstein's life: a man of extraordinary ambition and restless intellect who was perpetually at odds with the institutions that employed him. Born in Riga in the final years of the Russian Empire, he would go on to invent a film language that changed how movies work. His ideas about editing, about the collision of images, about the manipulation of an audience's emotions through carefully sequenced cuts, are still taught in film schools today.

  But his personal story is stranger and more turbulent than any of his films. He fought in the Russian Civil War, studied Japanese kanji, supervised an abortion documentary in Switzerland, feuded with Joseph Stalin, spent time in a mental hospital, and died of a heart attack in Moscow at the age of fifty. Along the way, he left behind an unfinished epic about Mexico, a mountain of theoretical writing, and over 500 erotic drawings that his widow hid from the archive after his death.

• 2. The Mind Behind Montage

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  Eisenstein began his theoretical career in 1923, writing a piece called "The Montage of Attractions" for an art journal called LEF. He was working in theatre at the time, not film, and the essay reflected the experimental spirit of Proletkult, the Soviet institution where he had begun his career. Proletkult aimed to radically modify existing artistic forms and create a new working-class aesthetic.

  At this point Eisenstein had already studied architecture and engineering at the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering, following in the footsteps of his father, the architect Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein. That structural training never really left him. When he turned to film theory, he approached editing the way an engineer approaches a bridge: as a system of forces and tensions.

  The central argument he developed was about collision. Where his contemporary Lev Kuleshov believed that film editing worked through the "linkage" of related images, Eisenstein insisted that the real power lay in the clash between shots. Put two independent images next to each other and the viewer's mind generates a third idea that exists in neither image alone. This was the "intellectual" dimension of what he called his methods of montage, a list that also included metric, rhythmic, tonal, and overtonal approaches.

  His two main books, Film Form and The Film Sense, laid out these arguments in detail. His study of Japanese kanji, which he pursued in the early 1920s and in which he learned some 300 characters, reinforced his thinking: a pictorial symbol could carry meaning that no single image alone possessed. He saw in Japanese ideograms a visual logic that resembled what he was trying to do with film cuts. His classroom at the State Institute of Cinematography used exercises drawn from Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot and the Haitian struggle for independence as depicted in Anatolii Vinogradov's The Black Consul.

• 3. Silent Giants

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  Strike, released in 1925, was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film. Battleship Potemkin followed the same year and was critically acclaimed worldwide. Both films exemplified his belief that narratives need not follow individual characters. Broad social forces and class conflict were the real subjects. The roles were filled with untrained people drawn from the appropriate classes; he avoided casting professional actors entirely.

  Battleship Potemkin earned particular distinction long after its release. In its decennial poll, the magazine Sight and Sound named it the 54th-greatest film of all time. October: Ten Days That Shook the World came in 1928, commissioned as part of a grand tenth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution of 1917.

  The international praise these films attracted gave Eisenstein leverage within the Soviet system, but it also made him a target. His focus on structural matters, such as camera angles, crowd movements, and the mechanics of montage, brought him into conflict with the Soviet film community, alongside like-minded directors including Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko. The increasingly rigid doctrines of socialist realism demanded a very different kind of filmmaking: one centered on individual heroes and positive narratives. Eisenstein's ironic sensibility kept getting in the way. He was forced to write public articles of self-criticism and to commit publicly to reforming his approach.

  The films he had already made, however, were traveling the world without him, shaping a generation of filmmakers who would not fully articulate his influence until decades later.

• 4. The Mexican Odyssey

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  On the 24th of November 1930, Eisenstein signed a contract with Upton Sinclair's Mexican Film Trust to make a film in Mexico. The contract called for a non-political picture, a shooting schedule of three to four months, and an initial budget of not less than $25,000 from Mary Sinclair. Crucially, it stipulated that all negative film, positive prints, and the story itself would be the property of Mrs. Sinclair.

  Eisenstein had long been fascinated by Mexico. He mixed socially with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera while there, and the encounter moved him to describe his films as "moving frescoes." His left-wing supporters in the United States eagerly followed his progress from afar.

  The three-to-four month schedule collapsed. Eisenstein had not determined a direction for the film even when he departed for Mexico on the 4th of December 1930, accompanied by his collaborators Grigori Aleksandrov and cinematographer Eduard Tisse, and by Mary Sinclair's brother Hunter Kimbrough, a banker with no prior filmmaking experience. Joseph Stalin sent a telegram to Sinclair expressing concern that Eisenstein had become a deserter. The footage shot ranged, by various estimates, from 170,000 to over 250,000 lineal feet of film. The Soldadera section of the project was never filmed at all, though Eisenstein had secured from the Mexican Army 500 soldiers, 10,000 guns, and 50 cannons for it.

  Sinclair shut down production. When Kimbrough reached the American border, customs officials found sketches by Eisenstein in his luggage: caricatures of Jesus and other erotic material that Eisenstein had added without Kimbrough's knowledge. The three Soviets were allowed a 30-day pass to travel from Texas to New York and then return to Moscow. In mid-1932, the footage was handed to Sol Lesser, who produced two short feature films and a short subject from it. Eisenstein never saw any of them. He publicly maintained he had lost all interest in the project.

• 5. Stalin, Nevsky, and Survival

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  Returning to the Soviet Union as a perceived failure, Eisenstein spent time in a mental hospital in Kislovodsk in July 1933, suffering from depression. His formalist film theory was under attack as an "ideological failure." He was assigned a teaching position at the State Institute of Cinematography and put in charge of writing the curriculum.

  A project called Bezhin Meadow, assigned in 1935, went badly wrong in familiar ways. Eisenstein filmed two versions of the scenario, one for adults and one for children, without authorization. He shot prodigiously and missed deadlines. Boris Shumyatsky, the de facto head of the Soviet film industry, cancelled further production. What rescued Eisenstein was a calculation made at the highest level: Stalin concluded that the Bezhin Meadow disaster reflected poorly on the executives who had been supervising Eisenstein rather than on Eisenstein himself. Shumyatsky was denounced, arrested, tried, convicted as a traitor, and shot in early 1938.

  Eisenstein was given one more chance. He chose, from two options offered to him, a biopic of Alexander Nevsky and his victory at the Battle of the Ice. He was assigned a co-scenarist, Pyotr Pavlenko, an assistant director named Dmitri Vasilyev, and professional actors. Sergei Prokofiev composed the score. The film served as an allegorical warning against the massing forces of Nazi Germany, with Nevsky's resistance to Germanic invaders drawn in pointed terms. It was completed and distributed entirely within 1938, making it Eisenstein's first completed film in nearly a decade and his first sound film. It earned him the Order of Lenin and a Stalin Prize.

• 6. Ivan and the Final Years

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  The evacuation of Moscow's film community during the German advance in 1941 brought Eisenstein to Alma-Ata, where he first began thinking about a film on Tsar Ivan IV. He corresponded with Prokofiev from there, and Prokofiev joined him in 1942. Their collaboration was mutual: Prokofiev composed the score for Ivan the Terrible while Eisenstein designed sets for an operatic version of War and Peace that Prokofiev was developing.

  Ivan the Terrible, Part I, presenting Ivan IV as a national hero, won Stalin's approval and a second Stalin Prize. Part II was criticized by Soviet authorities and was withheld from release until 1958. The footage from Part III was confiscated by Soviet authorities while the film was still incomplete; most of it was destroyed, though several filmed scenes survived.

  Eisenstein suffered a heart attack on the 2nd of February 1946, shortly after the Stalin Prize was awarded to Part I. He spent much of the following year recovering. A second heart attack killed him on the 11th of February 1948. He was fifty years old. His body lay in state in the Hall of the Cinema Workers and was cremated on the 13th of February; his ashes were buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

  After his death, his widow Pera Atasheva gave most of his sketchbooks to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, but she withheld over 500 erotic drawings, passing them instead to Andrei Moskvin for safekeeping. After Perestroika, Moskvin's heirs sold them abroad. The drawings have since been exhibited internationally and were the subject of an essay by Joan Neuberger titled "Strange Circus: Eisenstein's Sex Drawings."