Review: Sergei Eisenstein Autobiography (1996)

Arthouse Bolshevik celebrated in medium he pioneered

It's one of the coincidences of history that cinema and one of its greatest pioneers were born simultaneously, writes Mark Cantrell

Sergei Eisenstein circa 1935. Public domain image

SERGEI Eisenstein is long dead now, but the art form he helped to shape continues - and this Autobiography was made in 1996 to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of both.

The DVD is the first autobiography on film for Sir Gay (as he was known in his cartoonist days). It includes clips from his movies, as well as those of his contemporaries. Rare archive footage of the man himself is included, along with his personal reminiscences to provide a fascinating insight into the man behind the moving image.

Eisenstein, of course, stands as one of the most outstanding filmmakers of the last century. Not only was he a revolutionary in the political sense, he was a revolutionary in his approach to the movie art and his films express both these aspects beautifully.

Were it not for the cataclysmic events of 1917, Eisenstein would be destined to follow in his father's footsteps as an engineer. Instead, the possibilities in his life exploded in this social upheaval, and after a time working in the fledgling Soviet theatre he turned his attention to the new art of film.

Many of his theories for film were developed from his stage experiences. In a sense, the man had thought the moving image virtually all his life. So steeped in film culture was he that he wrote towards the end of his life: "My first childhood impression was… a close up."

His movies of this period, such as October and Battleship Potemkin, were not just stories but propaganda. They were part of the revolutionary battlefront, espousing the Bolshevik cause. Yet it would be wrong to see Eisenstein as a died-in-the-wool Bolshevik.

He was greatly affected by the events of his time, and he supported the aims of the revolution because, as he saw, it was opening up vast opportunities for creative expression and the development of new and experimental forms of art. He took up the cudgel of experimental art with a vengeance and was bitterly opposed to the Proletkult movement that wished to impose a pure 'proletarian' art.

In a time of fierce arguments over every aspect of life, there were those who suggested that art should be subordinated to politics. They were opposed by those who said art should be left free and unfettered, untouched by the reality around it. Art was the 'higher' cause, yet Eisenstein bridged the two sides and synthesised both in his films and his artistic insights.

Such arguments still hold resonance today, not just in political terms, but in the arguments of commercial constraints too. The aftermath of such debates, and Eisenstein's contribution to the '20th Century artform' have left behind a resonance of contemporary relevance, despite today's demanding technological prowess.

His artistic and revolutionary fervour were distilled into his films; each of which was planned in meticulous detail - all drawing from his background in engineering. In a sense, movies such as October were works of celluloid engineering as much as art.

The films still hold their own today. These silent classics worked the medium of film hard. In the days before colour and especially sound, filmmakers needed to work the image hard. The camera technique, angles, lighting all had to make up for the missing dimensions of colour and sound. In a real sense, movie-making was much closer to the art of suggestion that was stage than would ever be true today.

The technique of 'montage' pre-saged post-modernism and its use of contradictory and disconnected images to create visual metaphors to inspire meaning. Only later did post-modernism come to mean fragmentation and the inherent meaningless of the world. Eisenstein would have none of this.

As Ronald Bergen wrote in his biography of Eisenstein, 'A Life in Conflict': "[His] theory of montage is one of collision, conflict and contrast, with the emphasis on a dynamic juxtaposition of individual shots that forces the audience to consciously come to conclusions about the interplay of images while they are also emotionally and psychologically affected."

Considering Eisenstein's importance to world cinema, it's remarkable that his work has not been pulled together into a singular collection. Perhaps someone is working to correct this oversight, if so the resulting Eisenstein Collection would be a must-have for any film buff's library. As it is, this Autobiography adds essential detail to the man behind the movie classics.

MC

First published on the Internet Review of Film in 2001.