Eisenstein's Soviet masters punished him for the very montage the world admired
Battleship Potemkin made Sergei Eisenstein famous far beyond Moscow in 1925. His obsession with editing, camera angles and crowds thrilled foreign critics, yet at home it drew attacks from fellow Soviet filmmakers and forced him to publish confessions of his errors and promise to fall in line with socialist realism.
Eisenstein was born in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, on 22 January 1898. His father, an architect from a Jewish family who had joined the Orthodox Church, and his mother, a merchant's daughter, eventually divorced; she took Sergei to Saint Petersburg in 1905 before settling in France. He trained in architecture and engineering in Petrograd, as his father had, but in 1918 he quit to fight for the Red Army while his father backed the Whites and later went to Germany.
Army service brought an unexpected education. Stationed in Minsk in 1920 after success with revolutionary propaganda, he encountered Kabuki theatre and learned roughly 300 Japanese kanji, which he later credited with shaping his visual thinking. That same year he moved to Moscow to work in experimental theatre at Proletkult and as a designer for Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 1923 he published The Montage of Attractions, his first theoretical essay, and shot a short film, Glumov's Diary, for a stage production.
Strike, his first feature, and Battleship Potemkin both appeared in 1925, and the second earned worldwide praise; Sight and Sound's poll later ranked it the 54th greatest film. That fame won him October, commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the 1917 revolution. Critics at home, though, attacked his formal experiments, along with those of Pudovkin and Dovzhenko, and his irony made matters worse.
In autumn 1928 he left on a European tour with his collaborator Grigori Aleksandrov and cameraman Eduard Tisse, officially to study sound film. He spent two years lecturing in Berlin, Zurich, London and Paris. His later historical epics, Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible, completed his reputation as a pioneer of montage in theory and practice. He died on 11 February 1948.
Source: Sergei Eisenstein
