Sergei Eisenstein (review)

I built my career on the premise that Sergei Eisenstein is far from the only Soviet director worthy of note. I have railed against the Eisenstein cult and the mountain of Eisensteiniana. My initial reaction to receiving this book was "Does the world really need one more volume on Eisenstein?" After reading Mike O'Mahony's short creative biography, my answer is an unequivocal "yes."

This new study of Eisenstein is the compleat introduction to the great director and his oeuvre. Like any good creative biography, it seeks to understand the relationship between the artist's life and work and very importantly in this case, the relationship between the artist and the times in which he lived. O'Mahony argues that Eisenstein's films, "despite their seemingly universal appeal, … were very much the product of the time and place in which they were made, namely the Soviet Union under Stalin. This left an indelible mark upon Eisenstein's entire creative output." (11)

Sergei Eisenstein was born in Riga in 1898 and raised there, the cosseted only child of a wealthy engineer, recently converted to Christianity, who was raised to noble rank through his service to the Russian state. The future revolutionary filmmaker grew up in a privileged household, with three servants, a nanny, and governesses to educate him privately. The boy showed his artistic inclinations early but also read widely in European culture; he spoke four languages by the time he was eleven. The cosmopolitan youth was a devotee of the theater, the circus, and the movies.

Amazingly, the director of October evinced little interest in the fall of the Romanov dynasty. Although he was living in Petrograd at the time, with his mother, he spent the evening of the insurrection watching Mikhail Lermontov's Masquerade at the Imperial Aleksandrinsky Theater. Yet the February Revolution did have an impact on him as shortly thereafter he was drafted to serve in the Great War, but as an engineer, following his father's profession. Although Eisenstein remained as disinterested in the political turmoil around him as ever, the October Revolution had an impact on him as well. He was drafted into Trotsky's Red Army, again for his ability as an engineer. He began to be "revolutionized" only in January 1920, when he joined the Corps of Engineers theatrical troupe. The success of his stage designs attracted attention, and he was released from the Corps to engage in political theatrical work full time.

In the fall of 1920, he joined the radical Proletkult Theater as a stage and costume designer and in 1921 enrolled in the State Higher Directors' Workshop, where he was introduced to Vsevolod Meyerhold. Although Eisenstein had broken with Meyerhold within a year, Meyerhold's influence on Eisenstein's work was enormous. It was while working in the Proletkult Theater that Eisenstein first picked up a movie camera to shoot short sequences to be projected on a screen at the back of the stage. His early theatrical work was so avant-garde as to be unsuccessful with audiences, and he quickly found more hospitable environs in the movies, just as the cinema was poised for take-off in 1924.

Here Eisenstein's biography becomes more familiar. In rapid succession he directed Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1926), which catapulted him into the front ranks of Soviet film directors. In his analyses of these films, O'Mahony demonstrates the continued influence of the circus on Eisenstein's work as well as his "extraordinary breadth of cultural knowledge" (73), but also argues that these films reflect the "sheer richness and diversity of early Soviet visual culture" (76). For O'Mahony "the greatest strength of Eisenstein's early cinematic work…lies less in the innovations so often celebrated than in an extraordinary ability to synthesize coherently such disparate ideas and influences." (80)

The international critical success of Potemkin transformed Eisenstein's life, as he was allowed to travel abroad, to Germany, and to receive the foreign cultural elite, especially the Americans, that flocked to his door. On top of...