Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1898-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy

Raack !Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1889-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy R. C. Raack, Professor Emeritus California State University- Hayward Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1898-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy "Cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. The task is to take it into our hands." Joseph Stalin, 1924 Stalin Eisenstein With these words, Stalin entered on a task that he would, within a few years, wholly accomplish. He sought to capture the new forces of technology, the moving picture among them, to help him realize the domestic and yet grander dreams ofhis Party, and of his recently deceased spiritual mentor, V. I. Lenin.1 Stalin, with a few years, took the Soviet cinema, its makers, and Lenin's Bolshevik party wholly into his hands. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was the Russian cinematographer who, perhaps as much as any other practitioner of the arts, suffered tragically the depredations Stalin effected on his work and in his personal life. Not a few of his contemporary artists and literateurs, just as famous as he, were executed or died in the Gulag. Eisenstein had, in his youth, subscribed to the program of the Bolsheviks, producing heavily political films like Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Ten Days that Shook the World (1928) to propagandize the cause. These films came well before the dreary conformity soon imposed by Stalin, through his cultural tsars, was set firmly in place as a kind of opaque ceiling above individual creative imagination. In his later career (he died in 1948, aged 50), Eisenstein was to be effectively entrapped in the Kremlin boss's ukases that narrowly prescribed the propaganda directions of Soviet cinema. Stalin constantly meddled in every aspect of Soviet creative life, cinema being perhaps his favorite amateur playground . His continuing program of arrests, imprisoments, and executions of citizens of all walks of life brought terror to the entire society,—including the creative elite. When he demanded films celebrating national heroes, Eisenstein, after being publicly mauled in 1936 and 1937 for countless infractions of the rules of Soviet artistic expression, was offered what was in effect the redeeming task of revivifying in film an antique Russian hero, Alexander Nevsky (1938). This opportunity to exculpate himself by plunging into another politically risky production followed the shredding ofhis almost completed film Bezhin Meadow. That he had to endure while pathetically apologizing for his alleged misdemeanors . A few years later, when Stalin saw himself victorious in war after takingover large neighboring territories, Eisenstein was called in to reproduce in film the story of another Russian conqueror, Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny, part 1 [1945, commissioned in early 1941]). It is likely that Eisenstein was, in some ways, more vulnerable to being caught up in the dictator's whims than most members of the elite.2 The executioner's blade cut close to Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, but, though it took some out of the ranks of the Soviet artistic elite personally 48 I Film & History Eisenstein Anniversary Essays | Film & Politics close to him, he was spared—not, perhaps, unaccountably , given his international reputation and the effectiveness of his films at conveying the Soviet message abroad. Now, one hundred years after the birth of the great cinematographer, some heretofore far less known aspects of his artistic biography as it intertwined contemporary Soviet cultural history, and even diplomatic history, should be told. What should amaze those only familiar with Eisenstein's major film work is the level of professional engagement of this artist in every imaginative, and even scholarly, task of production, whatever he did. In his short life of political restriction and drastically limited opportunities he was only able to complete few productions (six major films, one in two parts—albeit all grand international successes). Some ofhis oeuvre was in fact cancelled while in production or, like Bezhin Meadow, the worst case, actually physically destroyed. One vitally important cinema work, Que viva Mexico^ was wholly emasculated in Hollywood as a result ofa tragicomedy of ill will, lack of communication, lack ofbudgeting experience and fiscal discipline on Eisenstein's part.3 Most writers have in the past highly sung Eisenstein's glory as a filmmaker, overlooking the close political...