Sergei Eisenstein: My Art in Life

Eisenstein's life was rich in unexpected turns and temptations. As a Soviet artist he encountered the European bohème and the Hollywood machine, he learned to live under Stalin—in a mix of prohibition, seduction, fear, and conformity. In his art—for Eisenstein the true reality and only necessity—he hits upon the wounds of the century: violence and mass murder; the eroticism of the masses and the urban space this eroticism conquers; the fragmentation of perception and the longing for a lost totality.

In 1909 the Eisensteins were divorced on grounds of the mother’s infidelity. The child remained with the father, the court councilor and civil engineer Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein in Riga.

Eisenstein’s father supervised strictly the education of his only child and monitored his son’s pastimes. “My protest against what was ‘acceptable’ in behavior and art. And my contempt of authority, were certainly linked to him.” His drawings depicted another – playful, anarchical – world. 

On 25 July 1915, Eisenstein enrolled in the Institute of Civil Engineering in St. Petersburg. He followed his father's well path —and moved to St. Petersburg to live with his mother. He wanted to study painting and transfer to the Academy of Fine Arts, but was advised by his teacher that he had no talent.

Eisenstein was introduced to the world of the Commedia dell’ Arte by Carlo Gozzi’s play “Princess Turandot”, directed by Fyodor Komissarzhevsky. He attended the production on 10 October 1914: “It was Komissarzhevsky who made me mad about the theater." This passion inspired Eisenstein’s series of characters from the Commedia dell’Arte and later influenced his own theatrical productions. 

Eisenstein read the detective novels by Arthur Conan Doyle, G. H. Chesterton or S. S. Van Dine as a modern form of the mystery play: the detective’s flash of inspiration enables him to make causal connections of apparently unrelated events and traces. He found that his images were often indebted to the book covers heralding the adventures of Nat Pinkerton and Nick Carters. 

Theater became Eisenstein’s true passion. This sensual, chaotic experience worked against order. On 25 February 1917, two days before Nicholas II abdicated the throne, Eisenstein went to the theater to see Vsevolod Meyerhold's production of “Masquerade”. He compared “Masquerade” (not the collapse of the Russian Empire) to a thunderclap that defined his vague intention to become an artist.

In 1918 Eisenstein was drafted into the Red Army. During his service Eisenstein joined a Rosicrucian Lodge. His new friends helped him to get sent to Moscow to study Japanese at the General Staff Academy and soon introduced him to the theatrical élite of the capital: they were all members of the same clandestine Lodge.

Eisenstein's first professional theater production as costume designer was "The Mexican”, a play about an anarchist rebellion. It was premiered during the bloody repression of the revolt of 27,000 armed sailors in Kronstadt. Eisenstein suggested to the director Valentin Smyshlyaev moving the boxing ring into the audience and letting the actors box for real. The theatrical illusion was replaced by the tension of a match. With this innovation, the director Eisenstein was born.

In 1921 Eisenstein enrolled as a student at the Higher Theatre Directors' Workshop headed by Vsevolod Meyerhold. The avant-garde artist Liubov Popova taught stage design. She abolished the term ‘set’ and replaced it with ‘stage construction’, in which she emphasized the dynamic elements, such as wheels or stairways. She rejected Eisenstein’s student work as too conventional. 

Meyerhold was the new father figure. Soon he rejected his pupil as a traitor who was selling his own ideas in competition: Eisenstein worked as costume designer at Nikolai Foregger’s theatre. Eisenstein compared his apprenticeship by Meyerhold with Hell and their break-up with the expulsion from Paradise. 

The best way Eisenstein found of overcoming the trauma of expulsion was to found his own group, in which he took the place of the beloved tyrant, as director. With a group of young student actors he staged "The Wise Man," based on a play by Alexander Ostrovsky "Even a Wise Man Stumbles" (1868). An influential patron first promotes the young man (Glumov), then drops him.

Eisenstein conceived of theater as a method of attacking the audience’s psyche. The production combined different stimuli: stunts, songs, tricks, film fragments, he called them attractions. The assemblage of attractions allowed to create a combination of stimuli that would train social reflexes such as class solidarity, drawing upon Ivan Pavlov’s research on the conditioned reflex.

In 1923 Eisenstein published in LEF, the journal of the Left Front of the Arts, "The Montage of Attractions", his first theoretical manifesto: “An attraction … is any aggressive moment in theatre, i.e. any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole. These shocks provide the only opportunity of perceiving the ideological aspect of what is being shown, the final ideological conclusion.”.

Eisenstein divided his film about a mutiny on a ship of the Tsarist fleet in 1905 into five acts—just like a classical tragedy. He had not only created a most impressive picture of revolutionary martyrdom. Eisenstein had also shown that political art could be moving and still remain art. The film projected a new understanding of cinema and a different type of hero—the masses. 

The tenth anniversary of the October Revolution needed a major film. The only director who came into question was Eisenstein. Filming at original historical sites with advisors who had stormed the palace ten years earlier, Eisenstein began thinking of a deeply symbolic film that would destroy all symbolism as a form of ridiculous fetishism. 

Stalin commissioned from Eisenstein a film about his ‘General line’: He had to re-shape the world-wide image of backward Russia and to depict the countryside in transformation with revolutionary momentum and American matter-of-factness. Eisenstein asked a Constructivist architect Andrei Burov to build a set of an ultramodern farm in the style of Le Corbusier’s buildings. 

In his afterword for the book "Japanese film" (1929), entitled "Beyond the Shot", Eisenstein compared montage to Japanese hieroglyphs: Two signs put together make a new meaning – just as images in the film montage. He discovered in Kabuki a radical solution to the problems of sound film. "‘I hear with my eyes’ and ‘I see with my ears’ = ‘I perceive’, "as it happened in Kabuki!"

In 1929 Eisenstein conceived of the radical project of a spherical book, look at montage through music, Japanese hieroglyphs, linguistics, reflexology, psychology, and dialectics and make apparent their interconnection: "Such a synchronic manner of circulation and mutual penetration of the essays could be carried out only in the form of a sphere."

In May 1930, Eisenstein signed a contract with Paramount. In Hollywood, he worked on the story of a transparent skyscraper and the dark passions, "The Glass House," wrote the scripts "Sutter’s Gold" about gold diggers and "An American Tragedy" based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel. The bosses at Paramount found Eisenstein’s scripts too pessimistic and unusable during the Depression. The contract was cancelled. 

Eisenstein decided to take a risk—making a film in Mexico. The writer Upton Sinclair emerged as his financier. Mexico was a fashionable subject for left-wing American intellectuals and Eisenstein made a name for himself. Eisenstein was assisted by the Mexican painters: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Siqueiros and Roberto Montenegro.

In Mexico, Eisenstein was confronted with mythological ways of thinking that overwhelmed him—it seemed not to distinguish between life and death, body and spirit, object and subject, male and female. Sensuality and sexuality acquired completely new meanings. He interpreted Mexican architecture as the materialized unconscious that was liberated by drugs and projected onto the outside world. After a long hiatus he again began to draw.

The toreros and the bulls change places, are crucified or are united in a deadly embrace. They do not only invoke death celebrated as an orgy, but also rebirth. Christian heroes are transformed into heathen gods of seasonal recurrence. Mexico became a mystery in Eisenstein’s epic: a cosmogony of life and death. Here he understood art as a transition from biological mortality to social immortality.

From 1930 onwards the Soviet state launched a large scale campaign of political repression. Eisenstein’s close friends were arrested and executed. Terror was omnipresent. Eisenstein produced his cycles of drawings "Délire" and "Nothingness"—tortured, flowing, interconnected, self-perpetuating figures without heads that formed pyramids and circles. 

In late March 1935, when the Peking Opera was playing in Moscow, Eisenstein was able to film the famous female impersonator Mei Lanfang in "Rainbow Crossing," a production in the Opera’s repertoire. For Eisenstein this 41 year old man was the most beautiful and charming woman that he had ever seen. He devoted an essay to the art of Mei Lanfang—"To the Magician of the Pear Garden." 

Eisenstein's apartment struck visitors with extravagance. A brocade chair stood next to a Bauhaus piece; the chandelier was made out of the remnants of four old cameras. A wooden angel from a church served as a tie and suspender rack. Sometimes a Menorah took over that function. His enormous bed was covered by a bright Mexican rug. But most of the space was taken up by books. 

The commissioned film about the Battle of Russians against the Teutonic Knights was not a reenactment of distant history. Fascists in brown uniforms were transformed into Teutons clad in white, the helmets of the Russian Knights resembled Red Army headgear. 

"Alexander Nevsky" was Eisenstein’s first collaboration with Sergei Prokofiev and his first completed sound film. He called a correspondence between sound and image “Vertical Montage”. The movement of the music made the movement within the image perceptible—it highlighted not only the evident physical motion, but also the hidden emotional dynamism. The music enabled the viewer to grasp the visual structure of the image. 

During his stay in Hollywood, Eisenstein visited Disney’s studio. At the entrance, he had his picture taken with Mickey Mouse, and sent it to Pera Atasheva in Moscow signed: “To my best friend in the USSR with my best friend in the USA.” In 1944 he wrote an essay on Disney. Disney’s fleeing lines and expanding shapes represented for Eisenstein the longing for the lost freedom.

Eisenstein’s Father, Mikhail Osipovich, was a German Jew who had converted to Christianity. The mother came from the family of the Russian affluent merchants. Eisenstein never spoke about his Jewish background.  In 1939, after a pact had been signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, he was amused by the fact that he, a half-Jew, had been awarded the contract to direct the allies’ new national epic, Wagner's "Die Walküre." 

On May 12 1928, Eisenstein opened a Directors Lab for at the Film Institute GIK. The first assignment was to read Émile Zola’s novels and to analyze how the French writer represented love, death, and ecstasy. He continued to teach until his death and directed a program for the training of directors that resembled a plan for the formation a Renaissance individual. Applicants for his seminar included Jay Leyda, Herbert Marshall, and Samuel Beckett.

Late in life Eisenstein viewed his research as his only possible means of salvation from the compromises he had consciously made with himself and his creativity. But his grandiose books on mise-en-scène and the psychology of art, on montage, pathos, method and on close up through the history of arts were not published during his life time.

In Eisenstein’s manuscripts all languages―Russian, German, English, French and Spanish―are mixed together and thrown back into a ‘primordial’ non-syntactic state. Verbs are omitted, and sentences are studded with parentheses, dashes, and hyphens, which impart the nuances of writing-gesture and intonation. He writes on the most varied types of paper―on the back of his own manuscripts and other people’s screenplays, on the stationery of the Mosfilm studio or of the film committee, on concert programs or calendar sheets.

In January 1941, Eisenstein received an offer to make a film about the Tsar Ivan the Terrible. No Russian philosopher has been able to ignore this monarch, a sadist and a pervert, a homosexual who married seven times. Now the times dictated a new interpretation of his character. Stalin wanted this mirror for himself, to be able to justify his terror, which had claimed millions as its victims, in the name of a grand raison d’état. 

On 10 February 1948, Eisenstein wrote a letter. As he was writing, he suffered a heart attack. He still managed to scribble: "At this moment I am having a heart attack. Here, the trace in my handwriting." He died towards morning. His brain was given to his friend the neurologists Alexander Luria for research purposes. On Friday, the 13th, Eisenstein was laid out in the House of Film until 13:00, then buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. Eisenstein was very superstitious; the number fits perfectly.