Background
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born on January 23, 1898 in Riga, Latvia. He was the son of a civil engineer and architect.
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born on January 23, 1898 in Riga, Latvia. He was the son of a civil engineer and architect.
Eisenstein studied architecture and engineering at the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd (St. Petersburg).
During the Russian Revolution Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein constructed trenches and also acted in plays for the Bolshevik army and during the civil war he worked as a set designer in an army propaganda unit.
Shortly after the civil war, he managed a carnival and a small workers' theater in Moscow.
His most celebrated avant-garde productions included a dramatization of Jack London's story, Mexicalia, of A. N. Ostrovsky's Much Simplicity in Every Wise Man, and an experimental play, Anti-Jesus.
In 1924 with members of the Proletkult he directed his first film, Strike, the story of a strike by Russian factory workers.
His next film, Potemkin (1925), dramatized the corruption of the tsarist regime and the successful mutiny aboard the Potemkin. With this film the director was able to exploit effectively his sadistic fantasies, culminating in the apocalyptic violence of the Odessa steps scene.
It found favor with Stalin, and that year Eisenstein was granted permission for an extended tour abroad.
After a brief teaching assignment at the Sorbonne in Paris, the director went to Hollywood in 1930, intending to undertake an American production. Here he wrote several scenarios for Hollywood, all of which were rejected.
Under contract to Paramount studio he composed a script, Sutter's Gold, subsequently rejected by the studio as morally indecent.
Next he began intensive work on a film adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.
Eisenstein then attempted to write and direct a film on location in Mexico.
He was intoxicated by the warm sensuality and primitive spontaneity of Mexican life.
Que Viva Mexico took shape, sections of the complex scenario being composed for each day's shooting.
Eisenstein was unwilling to conclude the picture after its allotted budget had been expended.
Later Career Upon returning to the Soviet Union in 1932, Eisenstein was confronted with a restrictive philistinism even more oppressive than the lack of understanding he had encountered in the United States.
His nearly completed film Bezhin Meadow, based on Ivan Turgenev's tale of peasant life, was condemned and suppressed for its religious mysticism and "formalistic excesses. "
Also disparaged was Eisenstein's theory of montage. After having to abandon several films and scenarios, he made his first sound film, Alexander Nevsky (1938), the story of the defeat in the 13th century of the Teutonic knights by the Russians. Although the film was praised at first for its patriotism and its anti-German virulence, the treaty signed by the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany in 1939 necessitated its immediate withdrawal from circulation.
In 1940 Eisenstein wrote his finest study of film esthetics, Film Form, which contains a brilliant analysis of parallels between cinematic and novelistic techniques.
The same year Eisenstein began composing the scenario for Ivan the Terrible, a massive historical epic with contemporary overtones; although subtler and richer in psychological nuances than his previous work, this biographical parable of Russia's first dictator-despot possesses a claustrophobic opacity that is at times physically intolerable.
Under careful scrutiny and mounting criticism from a Soviet government increasingly wary of artistic independence, he directed his last films, Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944) and Ivan the Terrible, Part II, the latter withheld from exhibition until 1958.
While attending a party celebrating the premiere of Ivan the Terrible (Part I) the director collapsed from a heart attack.
During his early convalescence Eisenstein was informed that the already filmed Part II of Ivan the Terrible would not be shown in the U. S. S. R. Ravaged by physical deterioration and the emotional torments of a lifetime, Eisenstein spent his remaining months preparing a second theoretical study, Film Sense, and teaching classes in cinema technique at the Soviet Cinema Institute.
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was married to Pera Atasheva.