Eisenstein, Sergey Mikhailovich

Eisenstein, Sergey Mikhailovich (1898-1948), Soviet film director, teacher, and theorist. The only child of a civil engineer and a shipping tycoon's daughter, Eisenstein grew up in Riga, Latvia. He was studying in St Petersburg when revolution broke out in 1917 and he volunteered for the Red Army. Amateur theatricals led to a job with the Moscow Proletkult Theatre in 1920. He also studied theatre with Vsevolod Meyerhold, film with Lev Kuleshov, and wrote about the idea of “montage” in theatre.

Eisenstein's first film, The Strike, won a medal in Paris in 1925 and its rapid editing of sharply contrasting shots established a “montage” style that he would intensify over three further silent films: The Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1928), and The General Line (1929). These brought him to the attention of the world and he was lionized when he travelled through Europe and the United States in 1929-1930. An unsuccessful Hollywood contract was followed by a year shooting in Mexico in 1932, but he was never allowed to edit the epic footage of Que Viva Mexico! that resulted. His first Soviet sound film, Bezhin Meadow (1936-1937), was banned as “formalist”, and later accidentally destroyed, but the rousing tale of a medieval Russian patriot Alexander Nevsky (1938) proved prophetic when Germany invaded Russia in 1941.

Eisenstein made his last great historical drama, the operatic (with music, as for Nevsky, by Sergei Prokofiev) Ivan the Terrible, during the film studio Mosfilm's evacuation to Kazakhstan. Its first part, released in 1945, received the Stalin Prize that year, but the second part was banned and a third part unfilmed.

After a serious heart attack in 1946, Eisenstein continued to plan films, and to draw and write copiously, as he had throughout an often frustrating career, until his death in 1948. Part two of Ivan was not released until 1957, and his theoretical writings began to appear over the following decade. These, along with his many unrealized projects and expressive, often erotic, drawings, have done much to enlarge Eisenstein's reputation as an artist-scholar in the mould of his great hero, Leonardo da Vinci.