Sergej Mihajlovič Eisenstein - genius of world film

Grigorij Vasiljevič Aleksandrov - Eisenstein’s right hand

Sergej Mihajlovič Eisenstein is the great representative of an epoch that, in a few bold strokes, tried to break from the past while shaking and changing the world…

Grigorij Vasiljevič Aleksandrov was never as much a man of sublime visions as Eisenstein. He was capable of creating and “feeling” more populist works that were more acceptable in the Stalinist era, and they had to part their ways.

Speaking of Sergei Eisenstein and Grigorij Aleksandrov in the same context may generate certain critical dilemmas. When we discuss Eisenstein, the leading figure of the “golden age of Soviet film”, we often use the word “genius”, while in describing Aleksandrov we generally stop at the word “director”. However, Fate was such that for a long period the two of them were connected: Aleksandrov was Eisenstein’s right hand man for a time, and, until 1932, he was his assistant, co-directing the films October and Old and New/The General Line. When they parted ways, they made films that were very different in both style and intent. Based on those films nobody would ever guess that they, together with the cinematographer Tisse, were members of a small but inseparable creative team.
Eisenstein was a great representative of the epoch that, in a few bold strokes, tried to break from the past while shaking and changing the world, the epoch that began with the socialist (October) revolution. Eisenstein is one of those artistic giants who truly believed in the socialist transformation of society and the individual consciousness. He is one of the true avant-guardists who thought that one should become free of tradition. For him, film was a great way to achieve this. Eisenstein understood that film was almost without history, that it wasn’t burdened by tradition to the same degree as other art forms and he saw his chance to create a new type of artistic expression in it.
Based on this idea, Eisenstein created his most complex and far-reaching project. While French avant-guardists were discretely flirting with psychoanalysis (or at least evoking it in their works), Eisenstein very openly found his point of reference in dialectic materialism and works by Marx and Lenin. As a talented painter, he discovered his first artistic inspiration in painting while the rational, intellectual side of his character found expression in his talent for languages. Eisenstein was a polymorph who wanted to create an international film language with a firm system of understandable signs. He saw this new language in the visual art of live film pictures and in language structures that he found in Japanese pictorial writing, which he supposedly even learned. However, that was just the starting capital. He took a step further in his thoughts and creations and proved that visual and symbolic values can primarily be expressed through editing; for the majority of Soviet directors of that time (Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin and others), who developed the so-called Soviet school of editing, film is primarily the art of editing. According to Eisenstein, the basis of rhetoric force lies in the editing of attractions or, more specifically, the extraordinary. Eisenstein was a good friend of members of the literary-theoretical group of Russian formalists (especially with Viktor Šklovski), whose main characteristics were the extraordinary use of language -- language as a tool for evoking astonishment, rather than for standard purposes. In film, Eisenstein found the extraordinary in unorthodox editing procedures, attractive connections of frames that he used in order to express the essence of the connection to the scenes to reality. Today, we call this approach associative editing (Eisenstein usually called it intellectual editing), but the main catalyst of the meaning in his films, claimed (and effectively proved) Eisenstein, was the specific rhythm of editing.
Eisenstein’s classic films Strike (1924), The Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1928), Old and New/The General Line (1929) and ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1932, never finished) all use this particular editing style. In those films, he depicted revolutions and the events that happened before and after them. Eisenstein’s projects are always ideological, and therefore the protagonist of these films is not any one individual, but rather the entire society caught up in revolution.
However, not everybody liked Eisenstein’s work. For example, Stalin thought Eisenstein’s films were sterile and formalistic. Nevertheless, the biggest flaw of his films was the fact that they never had an individual hero in them who might serve as a role model for the common Soviet worker. For this reason, the government preferred the director Pudovkin to Eisenstein, and so he became more critical of himself, and started to let go of his own ideas. For a brief moment, it seemed as if he would make a comeback with the film Alesandr Nevsky (1938), but his ultimate end came soon after with another hero, Ivan The Terrible (1944-1946) in which Stalin supposedly recognized himself.
Grigorij Aleksandrov, once a member of the inseparable creative team, but always in Eisenstein’s shadow, was at the peak of his career during the period of Eisenstein’s decay. This fact may spur accusations by some, but we should disregard them. Aleksandrov was never as much a man of sublime visions as Eisenstein. He was capable of creating and “feeling” populist works that were more acceptable in the Stalinist era. It was at this time that these two authors had to part ways. Aleksandrov, then influenced by American musicals, created a Soviet one (The Happy Guys, 1934) which at the time of Stalin’s tyranny seems impossible. However, Aleksandrov soon lost the right to make free choices and became a propagandist: in his great historical project, and in Stalin’s vision, a man must sacrifice himself. The more he has, the more he has to sacrifice.

(Ante Peterlić)