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Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict
The first full-scale biography of the brilliant filmmaker and cinema theorist. 36 photos.
385 pages, Hardcover
First published February 4, 1999
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About the author
Ronald Bergan
43 books4 followersRonald Bergan is a regular contributor to The Guardian and the author of several critically acclaimed books on film, including biographies of directors Francis Ford Coppola, Jean Renoir, Sergei Eisenstein, and the Coen brothers.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 19, 2022
Sergei Eisenstein wanted to create art in cinema for a new revolutionary era but ran into the demands of Hollywood executives and Soviet ideologues who wanted movies to be understandable to the average filmgoer. Battleship Potemkin was a work of art but did not appeal to the people who wanted entertainment and the Soviet government that wanted propaganda. When Eisenstein left Hollywood, he had to deal with the Soviet film censors who wanted to present the party line of the greatness of Stalin and communism. Sergei Eisenstein had to temper his artistic vision with the demands of Soviet ideology and succeeded with Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. Eisenstein's genius lies in how he able to create art in such a stifling system under Stalin.
November 23, 2022
By his street cred ye shall know him. One time at UCLA a group of political friends and I sponsored a showing Sergei Eisenstein’s film OCTOBER, AKA TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD; a seminal work heavily doctored by Stalin before its official release. When the figure of the counterrevolutionary appeared on screen, wearing a goatee, mustache and pince-nez glasses we all knew it was supposed to be Lev Davidovich Trotsky, and started jeering. That is the power of Eisenstein. Here's another treat: Josef Goebbels once sighed as to why Nazi filmmakers could not make political films as good as the Russians, and invited Nazi Germany's top directors to secretly view the films of Eisenstein. Who else in the arts of the twentieth century connected Josef Stalin to John Steinbeck and Hollywood? Who else could claim, through his montage technique, to have fathered MTV and cat food commercials? The "Steps" sequence from POTEMKIN has been copied by everyone from Woody Allen (BANANAS) to Brian DePalma (THE UNTOUCHABLES). Eisenstein was a philosopher of aesthetics as well. His NON-INDIFFERENT NATURE is a difficult but bountiful read. This birth to early death biography covers all sources of the man's genius, from literature to his sexuality. And, yes, I have seen his never-finished QUE VIVA MEXICO!, terminated after Stalin called him home from Hollywood.
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June 4, 2023Our parents or childhood caregivers imprint on us in ways subtle, overt and even latent. There is little question that my artistic proclivity toward austerity and orderliness, both practically and formally, was engendered by my father's scientific temperament and my mother's penchant for neatness. And this was likely the impetus for the near-instant appeal of Soviet filmmaker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein and the intensely rational, systematic approach to his art in my early filmmaking self-education. It also just so happens that we're both the sons of civil engineers.
Eisenstein rose to prominence in art-subsidizing, post-Revolutionary Russia as a consummate maker of silent films with a uniquely personal approach to editing referred to as "intellectual montage." The gifted polymath championed a dialectical form of filmmaking wherein a dramatic clash or juxtaposition of images is used to produce a new idea (e.g., editing shots of a woman writing with shots of a churning sea to suggest a surge of personal industry). However, the latter stretch of his career in Soviet Russia was tragically stymied by Stalinist censorship and repression; a criminal perversion of the Revolution's valiant ideals.
Overall, this book richly rewarded my career-long interest in an artist and teacher who wanted to create "an unheard-of form of cinema... a synthesis of science, art and militant class consciousness." For a medium so young in his time, this remarkable man nursed an unparalleled belief, even by contemporary standards, in the power and potential of motion pictures to advance the noblest causes of humanity. Soviet, yes; visionary, even more so.
A shout-out to my good friend Rubén Rosario for recommending this enthralling read!
Eisenstein rose to prominence in art-subsidizing, post-Revolutionary Russia as a consummate maker of silent films with a uniquely personal approach to editing referred to as "intellectual montage." The gifted polymath championed a dialectical form of filmmaking wherein a dramatic clash or juxtaposition of images is used to produce a new idea (e.g., editing shots of a woman writing with shots of a churning sea to suggest a surge of personal industry). However, the latter stretch of his career in Soviet Russia was tragically stymied by Stalinist censorship and repression; a criminal perversion of the Revolution's valiant ideals.
Overall, this book richly rewarded my career-long interest in an artist and teacher who wanted to create "an unheard-of form of cinema... a synthesis of science, art and militant class consciousness." For a medium so young in his time, this remarkable man nursed an unparalleled belief, even by contemporary standards, in the power and potential of motion pictures to advance the noblest causes of humanity. Soviet, yes; visionary, even more so.
A shout-out to my good friend Rubén Rosario for recommending this enthralling read!
May 12, 2019
Review of Eisenstein biography
So many things are wrong with this biography, that i would not recommend it to anyone. I suggest looking for a different Eisenstein biography, this is one of the most interesting personalities of the 20th century and this biography just doesn’t fo him justice.
For example the writer doesn’t even mention that the film Bezhin Meadow was based on a falsified myth about Pavlik Morozov. He keeps referring to Molotov as wenceslav, which is a polish first name meanwhile Molotov was ethnically Russian, was not born anywhere near Poland and his name was the Russian version of that name Vyatcheslav. I mean when you write a biography you need to at least get the names right, no? There’s so little about stalin’s purges, he says that Eisenstein wanted to make a film about Giordano bruno but doesn’t delve into the why or why the project didn’t work out, when its obvious to anyone that the inquisition was a metaphor for Stalin’s own regime, etc.
So many things are wrong with this biography, that i would not recommend it to anyone. I suggest looking for a different Eisenstein biography, this is one of the most interesting personalities of the 20th century and this biography just doesn’t fo him justice.
For example the writer doesn’t even mention that the film Bezhin Meadow was based on a falsified myth about Pavlik Morozov. He keeps referring to Molotov as wenceslav, which is a polish first name meanwhile Molotov was ethnically Russian, was not born anywhere near Poland and his name was the Russian version of that name Vyatcheslav. I mean when you write a biography you need to at least get the names right, no? There’s so little about stalin’s purges, he says that Eisenstein wanted to make a film about Giordano bruno but doesn’t delve into the why or why the project didn’t work out, when its obvious to anyone that the inquisition was a metaphor for Stalin’s own regime, etc.
September 5, 2012
This is a well-written and readable biography of the great Soviet director, which traces his rise and fall in a similar fashion to that of his US homologue, Orson Welles. Both made their greatest film early on (Potemkin for Kane) and then struggled against their respective systems to repeat the success (in fact, Eisenstein struggled against both Stalinism and the subtler forms of oppression favoured by the Hollywood system, when trying to get several films made in the US, including the legendary lost film Que Viva Mexico!). Whether a true believer or not, Eisenstein felt compelled to make such blatantly propagandistic films as Alexander Nevsky, which was then censored by Stalin so as not to imperil the cynical Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Later on, he made the very good Ivan the Terrible, as a final parting shot against Stalin. A fairly sad story in the end.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews