Like many other figures once closely associated with the Soviet state, the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein has become the subject of renewed interest. A decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, and with fresh material on his life and art now available, a more complex picture of Eisenstein is emerging. This collection-featuring the work of major film theorists and Russian scholars-offers the first post-Soviet reconsideration of Eisenstein's contribution to world cinema.
The contributors address themes previously avoided by Soviet critics, such as sexuality, religion, gender, and politics, in The Battleship Potemkin, October, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible. These films and others are also reassessed in light of a more thorough knowledge of Eisenstein’s life and of the complicated historical, cultural, and political contexts in which he worked. Of particular concern here is Eisenstein’s struggle with Soviet censorship, which resulted in a tenuous balance between the pressures of the state and his goals as an artist. Essays explore the manner in which Eisenstein’s later theoretical writings reveal continuity with the more well known earlier work, issues of historical revisionism, and the relationship between autobiography and the films. Eisenstein’s undeniable influence on his contemporaries and subsequent generations, as well as his reception by the film community and the public, are illuminated.
Rather than fostering the popular image of Eisenstein as the “inventor” of film montage, the director of Potemkin, and the enthusiastic early supporter of the Bolsheviks, Eisenstein at 100 presents a much richer and more profound picture of Eisenstein the man, the director, and the film theorist.
During the 1920s and ’30s, Mexico attracted an international roster of artists and intellectuals—including Orson Welles, Katherine Anne Porter, and Leon Trotsky—who were drawn to the heady tumult engendered by battling cultural ideologies in an emerging center for the avant-garde. Against the backdrop of this cosmopolitan milieu, In Excess reconstructs the years that the renowned Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein spent in the country to work on his controversial film ¡Que Viva Mexico!
Illuminating the inextricability of Eisenstein’s oeuvre from the global cultures of modernity and film, Masha Salazkina situates this unfinished project within the twin contexts of postrevolutionary Mexico and the ideas of such contemporaneous thinkers as Walter Benjamin. In doing so, Salazkina explains how Eisenstein’s engagement with Mexican mythology, politics, and art deeply influenced his ideas, particularly about sexuality. She also uncovers the role Eisenstein’s bisexuality played in his creative thinking and identifies his use of the baroque as an important turn toward excess and hybrid forms. Beautifully illustrated with rare photographs, In Excess provides the most complete genealogy available of major shifts in this modern master’s theories and aesthetics.
A major new study of Sergei Eisenstein delivers fresh, in-depth analyses of the iconic filmmaker’s body of work
What can we still learn from Sergei Eisenstein? Long valorized as the essential filmmaker of the Russian Revolution and celebrated for his indispensable contributions to cinematic technique, Eisenstein’s relevance to contemporary culture is far from exhausted. In Movement, Action, Image, Montage, Luka Arsenjuk considers the auteur as a filmmaker and a theorist, drawing on philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles Deleuze—as well as Eisenstein’s own untranslated texts—to reframe the way we think about the great director and his legacy.
Focusing on Eisenstein’s unique treatment of the foundational concepts of cinema—movement, action, image, and montage—Arsenjuk invests each aspect of the auteur’s art with new significance for the twenty-first century. Eisenstein’s work and thought, he argues, belong as much to the future as the past, and both can offer novel contributions to long-standing cinematic questions and debates.
Movement, Action, Image, Montage brings new elements of Eisenstein’s output into academic consideration, by means ranging from sustained and comprehensive theorization of Eisenstein’s practice as a graphic artist to purposeful engagement with his recently published, unfinished book Method, still unavailable in English translation. This tour de force offers new and significant insights on Eisenstein’s oeuvre—the films, the art, and the theory—and is a landmark work on an essential filmmaker.
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