SITE SEARCH
ON
THE WSWS
Editorial Board
Home
New Today
News
& Analysis
Workers
Struggles
Arts
Review
History
Science
Polemics
Correspondence
Archive
About
WSWS
Books Online
About
the ICFI
OTHER
LANGUAGES
German
French
Spanish
Serbo-Croatian
Indonesian
Russian
Sinhala-
LEAFLETS
Download
our statements
HIGHLIGHTS
After the Slaughter: Political Lessons of the Balkan War
Why is NATO at war with Yugoslavia? World power, oil and gold
|
|
WSWS : Arts
Review
Eisenstein
By Marty Jonas
11 February 1998
Fifty years ago, on February 11, 1948, the Soviet film director
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein died of a heart attack at the age
of fifty. Eisenstein was probably the greatest director ever to
work in the film medium. He was an innovator, a teacher, a theoretician,
and, above all, a practical worker in films. In his career can
be seen the tremendous flowering of the arts--especially the cinema--in
the first years of the workers state and its subsequent
degeneration under the Stalinist bureaucracy after 1925. The spirited
and industrious Eisenstein, in a career spanning 25 years, was
able to complete only six films--and most of these with approved
major revisions and under the eyes of the Stalinist censors. After
1925, his life became primarily a series of unrealized projects.
Sergei Eisenstein was born on January 23, 1898, to assimilated
and baptized Jewish parents in Riga, Tsarist Russia. His father
was a conservative, an architect and civil engineer for the city
of Riga. His parents separated in 1905, and Eisenstein spent his
childhood in both Riga and St. Petersburg. He received a good
education and learned to speak French, German, and English fluently.
Under pressure from his father, Eisenstein trained as a civil
engineer, but all of his spare moments were spent attending the
theater or thinking about it.
The Bolshevik Revolution changed everything for him. At the
same time as Eisensteins father entered the White Guards,
Eisenstein entered the Red Army. Posted at the front as a civil
engineer, he used every opportunity to attach himself to the theater
and agitational work being done by the Red Army. The Civil War
was the school for many of the great figures of Soviet film. Eisenstein,
Tisse, Dziga Vertov, and Pudovkin all were with the Agit trains
or shot newsreels at the front. Both the Agit trains, which traveled
to critical areas to agitate and educate among troops, workers,
and peasants; and the newsreels, filmed by Bolsheviks with a camera
in one hand and a gun in the other, elevated art to a new level--that
of a weapon. It was the cinema that was to prove the most powerful
of all and to merit Lenins comment to Lunacharsky in 1922,
that "of all the arts for us the cinema was the most important."(1)
Revolutionary Art
By the end of the Civil War, Eisenstein had completely shed
his career as a civil engineer and was seeking a theater group
to join. The Bolshevik Revolution had ushered in a veritable golden
age of the arts. Within the criterion of support to the Revolution,
myriad schools of aesthetics sprang up, each enthusiastically
seeking a way to express the power of the revolution through art
and each having its own theater group, magazine, writers
circle, etc. As Soviet film director Igor Yutkevich recalled in
1966:
"They were astonishing and wonderful days--the beginnings
of a revolutionary art. When we talk about the years when we started
artistic work, people are always surprised by the birth-dates
of almost all the directors and the major artists of those times.
We were incredibly young! We were sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds
when we entered upon our artistic lives. The explanation is quite
simple: the Revolution had made way for the young. It has to be
remembered that an entire generation had disappeared. Our elders
had been dispersed throughout the country, or had perished in
the Civil War, or had left Russia. Hence the Republic lacked a
clear organization, lacked people; and our way in was easy--the
country wanted us to work, the country needed people in every
department of culture.
"This was a period of tumultuous expansion for Soviet
art. It is difficult now to imagine how it was ... in Leningrad,
for instance, in 1919 or 1920 ... There had never been so many
theaters (and incidentally, at that time theaters were free);
never had so many books--particularly volumes of poetry--appeared.
Never had there been so much experiment in the theater and in
painting."(2)
In the midst of this vast laboratory of the arts, Eisenstein
applied to the theater group and school led by the great and controversial
director, Vsevelod Meyerhold, and was accepted. Meyerhold had
broken from the traditional "naturalist" theater and
stressed spectacle and "biomechanics" (precise stage
movement and acrobatics) in his classes. Although Eisenstein had
applied for training as a designer, Meyerhold made him and every
other student participate in every aspect of production, including
acting. Though not primarily a film director, Meyerhold taught
or influenced the majority of film directors who emerged from
this period. He was to die before Stalins firing squad in
1939.
Eisenstein may have officially been the designer on many of
the subsequent productions up through his affiliation with the
Proletkult Theater, but was actually fulfilling the role of director
more and more. Increasingly, he brought into each production his
impatience with the restrictions of the theater. For the production
of Jack Londons The Mexican, on which he was designer,
he staged the climactic scene, an actual boxing match, in front
of the curtain. Ordinarily, such a scene would have taken place
off-stage and been merely referred to in the play. For the production
of Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man, which he directed,
he introduced circus acts (including a tightrope walker) and a
short film to depict the main characters diary. For the
production of Gas Masks, which he directed, he moved the
play entirely out of the theater and staged it in a gas factory.
The play, which depicted life in a gas factory, ended each performance
as the new shift came to work.
Dialectics of Montage
It was clear to Eisenstein that he was moving closer and closer
to film. Each experiment negated the one before. As Eisenstein
was aware, it was the Russian Revolution that pushed him further
each time. What dominated him as well as most artists and writers
in the young workers state was the search for the most powerful
means to reflect the Revolution in the mirror of art. Gas Masks
was the crossover point for Eisenstein. More than any previous
production, this was cinema without film. All of the theatrical
forms and conventions--both new and old--had become an artistic
burden and had to be thrown off, negated and subsumed in a higher
form.
In 1924, Proletkult Theater offered him the job of directing
the first of eight episodes of the film series Towards the
Dictatorship. As it turned out, only Eisensteins episode,
Strike, was made, but it changed the direction of Soviet
cinema. Strike is about the development and destruction
of a strike in Tsarist Russia. It shows the tremendous strength
and energy of the working class as well as the use of agents provocateurs
and armed troops by the ruling class. It ends with a powerful
superimposition of a bull being slaughtered over a scene of massacred
workers.
Eisenstein brought everything he had learned up to then into
the making of Strike. For the first time he introduced
the concept of "montage," that is, the juxtaposing of
two film images to produce a new idea. In his theater work, he
had devised the "montage of attractions," which was
the throwing at an audience of shocking, spectacular scenes, totally
unexpected in a theater. In Strike, he went much further.
It was a complete denial of the documentary method with which
any other director might have made the film. It was extremely
well received, though some critics objected to its "eccentricity."
In this first film, Eisenstein also pioneered in the portrayal
of the working class as collective hero. The immediate precedent
for this was the regularly held mass spectacle The Storming of
the Winter Palace, which was staged at the Winter Palace and involved
thousands of non-professional actors--many of whom had been actual
participants in the event. The filming of Strike involved
Eisenstein further in theoretical work. More than any other Soviet
director, he was concerned with questions of philosophical method.
Throughout his life, he felt that cinema--the highest of arts--must
negate and subsume all other arts. Unlike many of the "leftists"
in the arts in this early period, he felt that bourgeois culture
could not be discarded, but must be learned from and taken into
the creation of socialist art. Incredibly erudite, he never failed
to bring the greatest of bourgeois and earlier culture into his
film work and his teaching. The original germ for his concept
of film montage, he often stated, was the development of Japanese
ideograms.
From his earliest days in the theater, Eisenstein had sought
the cinematic equivalent of the dialectical method. He relates
that this became a conscious philosophical struggle when one of
his students brought to his attention that his classes were paralleling
those across the hall, on philosophy.
"I unexpectedly discovered the relation between the things
I came across in my analytical work and what was going on around
me ... [This stimulus] was enough to put on my desk the works
of materialist dialecticians instead of those of aesthetics."(3)
Montage became for Eisenstein a method of penetrating reality.
Montage is the unity and conflict of opposites in art. It was
an attack by Eisenstein on the traditional method of constructing
a film--the linkage of sequences in a smooth, undisturbing manner.
In reference to his fellow director Pudovkin, with whom he had
great differences, he wrote:
"In front of me lies a crumpled yellow sheet of paper.
On it is a mysterious note: Linkage-P and Collision-E.
This is a substantial trace of a heated bout on the subject
of montage between P (Pudovkin) and E (myself)."(4)
Eisenstein compared montage to the explosions in an internal
combustion engine that drove a car forward. Nowhere can this be
seen better than in his next film Battleship Potemkin (or,
as it is better known, Potemkin).
Inspiration
Potemkin was made in 1925 to celebrate the anniversary
of the 1905 Revolution. The mutiny it depicts was originally to
have been only one of many sequences in the revolutionary panorama.
But as the work on the scenario proceeded, the mutiny, the enthusiastic
reaction to it by the workers of Odessa, and the brutal repression
by the Cossacks came to represent the essence of 1905. As a tribute
to Eisensteins genius, it is a film that remains as powerful
today as the day it was made. It still regularly appears at the
top of critics lists of greatest films ever made. In 1933,
in Indonesia, the mutinous crew of the Dutch battleship De Zeven
Provincien claimed at their trial to have been inspired by Potemkin.
Potemkin is a conscious, scientifically calculated effort
not only to capture on film the movement and spirit of the masses
and the brutal reaction of the Tsarist government, but to evoke
very powerful emotions in the viewer as well. Eisenstein was always
concerned with bringing together the objective and the subjective
through art; with his training as both engineer and artist, he
was concerned with doing this by bringing together science and
art. Throughout his films, every detail is planned carefully after
the initial intuition. Potemkin also demonstrates that
montage is not one-sidedly an editing technique, as is commonly
assumed. Throughout the film we find counterpoint within shots,
counterpoint between entire sequences, counterpoint of moods,
tempos, tones, textures, faces, crowds. Every conflict expresses
the basic one: the class conflict in Odessa and throughout Russia
in revolutionary 1905.
The Odessa steps sequence in Potemkin is probably the
most famous sequence ever put on film. It shows the Cossack onslaught
on the citizens of Odessa who have gathered on the steps overlooking
the harbor to greet the revolutionary Potemkin sailors. The sequence
exemplifies everything Eisenstein said about montage as a series
of explosions. Crowds surge; shots of marching white boots; sabers
flash; enormous close-ups of faces fill the screen for fractions
of seconds; as crowds surge up the stairs away from the Cossacks,
a baby carriage travels down the long steps. The rhythm of the
sequence is inexorable. Even after repeated viewings one cannot
help being gripped emotionally.
Potemkin was the last film over which Eisenstein was
to have complete control. He was next called upon by Sovkino,
the Soviet film agency, to make a film for the tenth anniversary
of the October Revolution. The film, October (also called
Ten Days that Shook the World), included important experiments
with what Eisenstein called "intellectual montage,"
or the use of metaphorical devices to elaborate filmically certain
ideas. But much more important was that this film, a history of
the 1917 revolution, was being made during the height of the fight
against the bureaucracy by the Left Opposition. Eisenstein was
instructed--in the last stages of editing the film--to summarily
slice out of October many of the leading participants in
the revolution, notably Leon Trotsky. This Stalinist falsification
resulted in an estimated one-third of the film being cut. Eisensteins
long-time collaborator Alexandrov reports that late one night,
during the last stages of editing the film, Stalin unexpectedly
came by the studios and was shown certain sequences, including
a speech by Lenin. Stalin ordered that sequence, Amounting to
about 3,000 feet, to be cut, saying, "Lenins liberalism
is no longer valid today."(5)
Eisenstein was then engaged to direct Old and New (The General
Line), a film about the bringing of modern agricultural techniques
to the Soviet farmer. It is notable for Eisensteins use
of abstract color in the bull-mating sequence and the attempt
to suggest sound in a silent film. The film was completed in 1929,
but not before Eisenstein was ordered by Stalin to reshoot a more
sentimental ending.
In August 1929, Eisenstein and his collaborators Alexandrov
and Tisse set off for a trip to Europe and North America. After
lecturing and attending film congresses throughout Europe, they
arrived in the United States in 1930 to work and to study modern
film techniques. They were already armed with a contract signed
with Jesse Lasky, the head of Paramount, when they arrived in
Hollywood. It was a disastrous experience. Numerous projects were
suggested by Eisenstein, but they all came to nothing. Two scenarios
were completed, Sutters Gold, on the 1948 gold rush,
and An American Tragedy, based on Theodore Dreisers
great novel indicting capitalist society, but both were rejected.
Dreiser campaigned actively at the studio for Eisensteins
scenario, but the heads of Paramount turned deaf ears. Eisensteins
treatment by the Hollywood moguls can best be summed up in a remark
attributed to Samuel Goldwyn:
"Ive seen your film Potemkin and admire it very
much. What I would like is for you to do something of the same
kind, but a little cheaper, for Ronald Coleman."(6)
Hollywood Disaster
Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Tisse left Hollywood in December.
In November they had signed a contract with Upton Sinclair, muckraking
novelist and "socialist" reformer, who, together with
various liberal backers, wanted to underwrite the production of
a film about Mexico. Thus began one of the greatest tragedies
in motion picture history.
Upon arriving in Mexico, Eisenstein rose to his usual enthusiasm.
He was immediately engrossed in the history of Mexico, its scenery,
its people, its revolutionary tradition. He was determined to
make a film that would show every aspect of Mexico. Que Viva
Mexico was envisioned by Eisenstein to have six episodes and
span a large portion of Mexicos history. It would do for
the Mexican people what the body of his work had done for the
Soviet people. By the end of 1931, almost 200,000 feet of film
had been sent to Hollywood for processing, due to lack of facilities
in Mexico.
Throughout his stay in Mexico, Eisenstein had been having increasing
difficulties with Sinclair. Never one to put economy ahead of
artistic necessity, Eisenstein had been pursuing his usual perfectionist
course and had been steadily overrunning Sinclairs budget
(a small one to begin with). Sinclair was frothing about it and
went so far as to communicate his slanders to Stalin. By January
1932, the differences had reached a peak and Sinclair ordered
Eisenstein to stop shooting. Eisenstein planned to return to Hollywood
to edit the footage of Que Viva Mexico there, but was refused
a visa into the United States. In March, he and his companions
were finally allowed into the country, but were refused permission
to pass through Hollywood. In April, after a farewell banquet
in New York, Eisenstein finally was able to see the footage of
his Mexican film. Before leaving for Moscow, he reached an agreement
with Sinclair that would allow him to edit the film in the Soviet
Union. Alexandrov was left behind to see that Sinclair sent on
the footage. However, after Alexandrov left for Moscow, Sinclair
ordered the footage halted in Hamburg, Germany, and sent back
to the United States. The philistine Sinclair thereupon signed
a contract with Sol Lesser, producer of Tarzan epics, to have
a film made out of Eisensteins uncut footage. Through all
this, the Soviet film agency made no effort to have the product
of one of its greatest artists returned to the Soviet Union. Lesser
made the feature Thunder Out of Mexico, which premiered
in March 1933, and two shorts, Death Day and Eisenstein
in Mexico. These films are totally alien to Eisensteins
conception. They retain none of the panoramic scope of the Mexican
history and culture that was present in his original plan. They
are edited in conventional story form and are memorable only for
the stunning camera work. But, of course, Eisensteins films
are much more than beautifully composed frames.
Later, Eisensteins biographer and friend Marie Seton
made her own version, Que Viva Mexico, an honest but inadequate
attempt to reconstruct the film from the directors scenario.
But there was no substitute for Eisensteins own post-production
work, which was where his films really took form. Other footage
was sold by Sinclair to firms such as Bell & Howell and Encyclopedia
Britannica Films. To this day, Eisensteins footage still
emerges in various travelogues and educational films.
Return to Moscow
Eisenstein never recovered from his Mexican experience. It
obsessed him and sometimes, in moments of stress, he would speak
of getting his Mexican footage and editing it. The worst blow
was finally seeing the butchered film in 1947, a year before his
death and at the height of his censure by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
After returning to the Soviet Union in 1933 he retreated to the
Caucasus in extreme depression. He led a reclusive life, devoting
himself to his theoretical work, and eventually decided to return
to Moscow to teach at the Film Institute. Along with his teaching,
he also continued projects that had long held his attention. Among
these was a never-to-be-made film on the life of Toussaint lOuverture,
the Haitian revolutionary, with the role conceived for Paul Robeson,
the Black American actor, who was in Moscow at the time. He also
worked on plans for his long-cherished idea to make Marxs
Capital into a film. He envisioned it as a film about dialectical
materialism. The bureaucracy scoffed at the idea and the film
was never made.
However, Eisenstein had returned to a Moscow that had changed
since his trip to America. The Left Opposition had been exiled,
imprisoned, or killed. Any opposition to the bureaucracy in the
party had been stifled. The bureaucracy had declared war upon
dialectical materialism, and this could be seen not only in the
realm of politics but also in the sciences and arts. Stalins
Comintern had betrayed the German working class, and the debacle
of the "third period" was now being transformed into
the "policy" of the popular front. In order to carry
through the alliance with the bourgeoisie internationally, the
Moscow Trials and GPU assassinations were necessary. Eisenstein
returned to an atmosphere of preparation for purges. Thought was
calcified. Artists were attacked for "formalism"; "socialist
realism" was the bureaucracys aesthetic. This was the
opposite of the artistic golden age after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Art was now to be the clarion and apologist for the bureaucracy.
Eisenstein immediately came under attack for his "formalism"
in Potemkin and October. The offensive came from
old friends, filmmakers he had generously helped in their early
careers. For the six days of the All Union Conference of Cinematographic
Workers, Eisenstein was roundly attacked by his colleagues. Only
one filmmaker, the pioneer director Kuleshov, came to his defense.
At the awards ceremony held at the Bolshoi Theater to commemorate
the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet cinema, at which Eisenstein
presided, he was passed over for the major decorations and given
the most minor prize.
The pressure of the bureaucracy on every revolutionary, intellectual,
and artist was tremendous. Under this pressure, Eisenstein, who
had long carried on a fight against the conventions of plot and
story and for the collective as opposed to the individual hero,
was to write in 1934:
"Stretching out its hand to the new quality of literature--the
dramatics of subject--the cinema cannot forget the tremendous
experience of its earlier periods. But the way is not back to
them, but forward to the synthesis of all the best that has been
done by our silent cinematography, towards a synthesis of these
with the demands of today, along the lines of story and Marxist-Leninist
ideological analysis. The phase of monumental synthesis in the
images of the people of the epoch of socialism--the phase of socialist
realism."(7)
And, in 1935, in a further concession to the new "aesthetics":
"From the former all-pervading mass imagery of movement
and experience of the masses, there begin at this stage to stand
out individual heroic characters. Their appearance is accompanied
by a structural change in those works where they appear. The former
epical quality and its characteristic giant scale begin to contract
into constructions closer to dramaturgy in the narrow sense of
the word, to a dramaturgy, in fact, of more traditional stamp...
"It is not accidental that precisely at this period, for
the first time in our cinematography, there begin to appear the
first finished images of personalities, not just of any personalities,
but of the finest personalities: the leading figures of leading
Communists and Bolsheviks."(8)
Eisenstein made every attempt to conform outwardly, but his
early history and past practice could not be easily shaken off.
Denounced by Bureaucracy
In the middle of 1935, he began work on his first film in over
three years, Bezhin Meadow. It was commissioned by the
Communist Youth League to commemorate the contribution of the
Young Pioneers to collective farm work. Its story was of the martyrdom
of a young peasant, a member of the Young Pioneers, in a successful
fight against sabotage by the villages kulaks, led by his
own father. By the end of the year, however, Eisenstein was stricken
by smallpox. This was followed, in 1936, by an attack of influenza.
He was unable to return to the film, which was 60 percent shot,
but continued work on the scenario with the great Soviet writer,
Isaac Babel.
The bureaucracy failed to be impressed. The new head of Soviet
film production, Boris Shumyatsky, published a vicious denunciation,
"The Errors of Bezhin Meadow," and ordered production
stopped.
In his statement, published in Pravda in March 1937, Shumyatsky,
who had criticized Soviet films for lacking romantic interest
and who was himself to be removed only eight months later, accused
Eisenstein of "making Bezhin Meadow only because it
offered him an opportunity to indulge in formalistic exercises.
Instead of creating a strong, clear, direct work, Eisenstein detached
his work from reality, from the colors and heroism of reality.
He consciously reduced the works ideological content."(9)
Eisenstein replied soon after with a published self-denunciation
in which he pledged to "rid myself of the last anarchistic
traits of individualism in my outlook and creative method."(10) Nevertheless, the filming
of Bezhin Meadow was not resumed and the footage completely
disappeared.
The Moscow Trials were beginning. Along with the murders of
the allies of Lenin and Trotsky went the destruction of an entire
generation of artists and writers who reached their creative peaks
during the first period of the revolution. Meyerhold, Babel, and
Tretyakov, old colleagues of Eisenstein, perished at the hands
of Stalins police. Of all the arts, only the major figures
in film survived the Stalinist terror. This was not, as one biographer
of Eisenstein has conjectured, because Stalin had a special weakness
for films.(11) More than
in any other part of the cultural sphere in the Soviet Union,
filmmakers were well-known international figures, most notably
Eisenstein. Eisenstein had been to every major city in the world,
where he had been wined and dined by intellectuals and artists.
He was an intimate friend of Chaplin and Robeson, among many.
To have come down on an Eisenstein or a Pudovkin would have alienated
those liberals throughout the world without whose support the
Stalinist purges would not have been possible. So Eisenstein and
his colleagues were pushed down a very narrow creative path.
In 1937, with Germany threatening hostilities against the Soviet
Union, Eisenstein was given a very important task. He was to make
a film that would arouse the patriotic spirit of every Russian
against the German danger as well as serve a warning to the Germans
that war against the Soviet Union would be fatal. To do this he
would reach back to the thirteenth century for the saga of Prince
Alexander Nevsky, who raised up an army from the Russian peasantry
to beat back the barbaric Teutonic knights. The film Alexander
Nevsky was completed in 1938 and earned Eisenstein the Order
of Lenin as well as the title of Doctor of the Science of Art
Studies. It is a very impressive film, his first in sound, with
a marvelous score by Sergei Prokofiev that became famous in its
own right. The costumes and settings are magnificent. The Teutonic
knights are outfitted in nightmarish helmets. the climactic scene
is the famous "Battle on the Ice," where the enemy sinks
through the cracking ice of Lake Pleschayev and, from the weight
of their armor, beneath the water.
Tremendous theoretical work went into the preparation and execution
of Alexander Nevsky, as is evident from Eisensteins
writings at this time. These writings stress the unity and conflict
of the two opposites, sound and picture. The structure of each
frame and sequence is broken down and examined in terms of the
conflict within them. But such an impressive film and body of
theory could not hide the fact that Eisenstein had made a film
that ten years before he might have walked out on. For all its
cinematic strengths, Alexander Nevsky is a patriotic pageant
that speaks of the "Russian people" rather than "classes."
To make this chauvinistic epic it was necessary for Eisenstein
to jettison "Collision" and go over completely to "Linkage."
Montage is thrown out and we are left with a superb Hollywood-type
rendering of a national hero, complete with (the first time for
Eisenstein) a cast of big-name Russian stars.
Alexander Nevsky was an immediate success and, except
for the years when it was shelved during the Stalin-Hitler pact,
was a constant prop of chauvinist propaganda throughout the war.
Eisenstein then set to work on various projects, but shooting
was stopped with the opening of World War II. In 1941, after being
evacuated from Moscow to Alma Ata with other filmmakers in the
face of Hitlers advancing armies, he started work on the
scenario of Ivan the Terrible.
Indictment of Stalinism
The new film was projected as a three-part historical spectacle
about the Russian tsar who unified the country into one nation
in the 16th century. To do this, Ivan the Terrible resorted to
the most ruthless measures to destroy the rule of the boyar nobility
over their fiefdoms, thus earning himself his name. The film was
to be another epic about a great national hero, placing him in
the most favorable light. Again with the talents of the composer
Prokofiev and the actor Nikolai Cherkassov (who had played Nevsky),
Eisenstein commenced shooting in 1942. Every facility was placed
at his disposal. In 1945, Ivan the Terrible, Part One had
its first showing. In 1946, it won the Stalin Prize, first class,
for Eisenstein, Cherkassov, Prokofiev, and others who worked on
the film. Part One goes further than Alexander Nevsky in
its confident use of spectacle. In its form and mood it is like
opera. The costumes, settings, photography, and use of music outdistance
anything done in film before then. Ivan is a tragic figure in
Part One, torn between his humanity and the ruthless things
he is forced to do.
In 1946, Ivan the Terrible, Part Two was completed.
It had the same cast and production crew as Part One and
continued the story of Ivans fight for Russian nationhood.
In Part Two, however, the character of Ivan has undergone
a major change. In his struggle against the boyars, Ivans
measures clearly get out of hand. He becomes paranoid, and in
carrying out his dark deeds against the boyars relies increasingly
on his hand-picked band of fanatic young security guards, the
oprichniki. The film is an obvious indictment of Stalin and the
GPU.
In February 1946, Eisenstein was stricken with a heart attack
at a dinner celebrating the completion of the editing of Part
Two. On September 4, the Central Committee of the Communist
Party passed a resolution on cinema and theater that condemned
Ivan the Terrible, Part Two. It said, in part:
"In the second part of the film Ivan the Terrible,
the director Eisenstein displayed his ignorance of historic fact
by showing Ivan the Terribles progressive army of oprichniks
as a band of degenerates in the style of the American Ku-Klux-Klan;
and Ivan the Terrible, a man of great will power and strong character,
as a weak and feeble being, a sort of Hamlet."(12)
Eisenstein defended the film in a cultural journal in October,
but the film was banned. It did not premiere in the Soviet Union
until 1958 (five years after Stalins death), in the United
States until 1959.
Nikolai Cherkassov, who played Ivan, wrote in his 1953 memoirs
of the "unforgettable meeting" that he and Eisenstein
had with Stalin in the Kremlin on February 24, 1947, to discuss
Part Two:
"In reply to our questions, Comrade J. V. Stalin made
a whole series of extraordinarily valuable and interesting remarks
about the era of Ivan the Terrible and the principles of the artistic
representation of historical figures. "These figures,"
he emphasized, "must be shown with truth and forcefulness,
and it is essential to preserve the style of the historical period."
A number of problems concerning the Soviet cinema were discussed
during the conversation, and we were able once again to appreciate
the vigilant attention with which Josef Vissarionovich had considered
the problems of the cinematic art.
"We mentioned the question of the time it would take to
complete our film. J. V. said that in this field excessive haste
was useless, and the essential thing was to make a film in the
style of the period, one which conformed to historic truth. Only
flawless films, he said, should be released. Our spectators had
grown up, they had become more demanding and we should only show
them works of art of the highest quality."(13)
So, with Stalins approval, the film would be revised.
This, of course, meant reshooting and reediting a good deal of
Part Two. It was a matter of virtually remaking the film,
and Eisensteins health prohibited such an undertaking. The
total ban on Ivan the Terrible, Part Two remained. Nevertheless,
Eisenstein worked on the scenario for Part Three (little
of which was shot) and immersed himself in new projects and theoretical
work. At the time of his death in 1948, he was at work on two
books of film theory. An unfinished manuscript on color cinematography
was on the desk at which he died.
Eisenstein was in continuous conflict with the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Probably as a matter of physical survival as well as the ability
to still work in films, he took on the coloration of the prevailing
aesthetics and yielded on many points. It would seem that he had
made his peace with the bureaucracy. But there is much we do not
know, since the voluminous Eisenstein archives are kept under
guard in Moscow; biographers and historians have continually been
refused access to them. These journals, letters, and other personal
papers might throw light on his relationship with Stalin and on
the course that led him to his courageous offensive against the
bureaucracy in Ivan the Terrible, Part Two.
The trend among his biographers has been to picture Eisenstein
as a tragic figure torn by an enormous internal conflict: the
artist vs. the Marxist. But, as the history of the arts in the
early days of the Russian Revolution demonstrated, this was not
a conflict. The conquest of power led by the Bolshevik Party unleashed
a cultural renaissance, the high point of which was the works
of Sergei Eisenstein.
Notes
1. Martin Mailer, "Success and Failure
of the Soviet Cinema," Marxist, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1967,
p. 4. [back]
2. Luda and Jean Schnitzer and Marcel Martin,
editors, Cinema in Revolution, Hill and Wang, 1973, p.
13. [back]
3. Yon Barna, Eisenstein, Little, Brown,
1973, p. 62. [back]
4. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, Meridian
Books, 1957, p. 37. [back]
5. Barna. p. 123. [back]
6. Leon Moussinac, Sergei Eisenstein,
Crown Publishers, 1970, p. 167. [back]
7. Eisenstein, p. 17. [back]
8. Ibid., pp. 123-124. [back]
9. Moussinac, p. 158. [back]
10. Ibid., p, 164. [back]
11. Barna, p. 199. [back]
12. Sergei Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible,
Classic Film Scripts, Simon and Schuster, p. 12. [back]
13. Ibid., p. 21. [back]
Top of page
Readers:
The WSWS invites your comments. Please send
e-mail.
Copyright 1998-99
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved |