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Overview
Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict tells the dramatic story of one of world cinema’s towering geniuses and principal theorists. Ronald Bergan details Eisenstein’s life from his precocious childhood to his explosion onto the avant-garde scene in revolutionary Russia, through his groundbreaking film career, his relationships with authors and artists such as James Joyce and Walt Disney, and his untimely death at age fifty. Eisenstein’s landmark films, including The Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible, are still watched, admired, and taught throughout the world.
Drawing upon material recently released from the Soviet archives after the breakup of the USSR and from Eisenstein’s personal letters, diaries, and sketches, Bergan shines a new light on the influence of Eisenstein’s early life on his work, his homosexuality, and his keen interest in the West. This book is the definitive biography of an influential director who saw film as the synthesis of all the arts and whose work displayed a passionate and profound grasp of art, science, philosophy, and religion.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628726268 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 01/05/2016 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 420 |
| File size: | 33 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Childhood of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein
I had no experience of poverty or deprivation in childhood, nor any of the horrors of struggling for existence. Further on you will encounter descriptions of my childhood – for the time being, take it on faith!
An orchestra was playing at the summer resort of Majorenhof, on the coast just outside Riga. Yulia Ivanovna Eisenstein was seven month's pregnant. The guests at the dacha had had far too much to drink that evening. A fight broke out and someone was killed. Yulia's husband, Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, grabbed his revolver in an attempt to restore order. Yulia Ivanovna was terrified and almost gave birth prematurely. As it was, back in Riga, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein arrived three weeks early, on January 23, 1898, having absorbed, in the womb, a love of gunshots and orchestras.
A couple of years later, the family was again holidaying at Majorenhof. The child Sergei was lying in a small, white bed. A bough of white lilac spilled through the window of the room, its flowers and green foliage cutting across a ray of sunshine above his head. 'My first childhood impression was ... a closeup,' he wrote towards the end of his life.
It is easy to pass by 6 Valdemara Street in Riga without a second glance. Although large, it is an undistinguished, rectangular, off-white, four-storey building, the paint peeling off the facade. It contains the offices of an established printing firm. On the wall beside a rather pretentiously tall doorway, a discreet, unpolished plaque is visible. It reads: 'Sergets Eisenstein, film artist, was born and lived here between 1898–1916.' Virtually no other evidence exists that Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born and brought up in this Baltic seaport, the capital of Latvia. There is an Eisenstein Street, but that is named after Sergei's father, the architect and civil engineer Mikhail Osipovich. It is true to say, that among the general population of Riga, Eisenstein Senior is better known than his film director son.
Now, as at the turn of the century, the house on Valdemara Street (Nicholas Street in Tsarist times) is in an expensive and fashionable part of town. A splendidly spacious and verdant park, a golden church dome and a meandering blue canal can be seen from the windows of the house. Apart from some modern high-rise buildings in the background, this would have been approximately the view that greeted the young Eisenstein through his bedroom window in Flat 7, on the third floor.
The picture of a privileged middle-class child, with his long, fair, shoulder-length hair and his sailor suit, Sergei would go for walks with his beloved nanny, Maria Elksne, in the parks off the pleasant boulevards. In a photograph taken in 1904, the six-year-old Eisenstein is standing in his sailor suit and laced-up boots, holding his large hat in his small right hand. His left hand seems even tinier because it is almost lost in the grip of his father, a portly, officious-looking man, with a trimmed handle-bar moustache. Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein is proudly wearing the uniform of the senior city engineer in the roads department of the Livonian provincial government. (In most of the surviving photographs he is bedecked in some uniform or other.) The little Sergei, plainly ill at ease, stares tentatively out at the camera. He resembles the description he once gave of himself as an adult: 'When I look at myself in complete privacy, the image that most readily springs to mind is that of ... David Copperfield. Delicate, thin, short, defenceless, and very timid.'
Erwin Mednis, a former school classmate, recalled that 'physically he was slightly built and rather frail. There was something rather feminine about his appearance, so that he often looked more like a girl than a boy.'
Much to his father's disgust, Eisenstein's mother kept her son's hair in a kind of medieval bob, rather like that of the effeminate Vladimir's in Ivan the Terrible. Eisenstein saw himself as a 'well-brought up boy from Riga with the Lord Fauntleroy ringlets and lace collar ... Since my earliest years it was the shackles of cuffs and starched collar instead of torn trousers and ink blots ...' Eventually, when his mother left her husband and went to live in St Petersburg, his father had Sergei's head shaved bare.
Eisenstein was certainly a victim of incompatible parents, bullied and ignored by his father, flattered and pampered by his mother. Yulia Ivanovna was a snobbish woman who regarded her husband as vulgar and was determined that Sergei should grow up to be a man of culture. 'She was eccentric. I was eccentric. She was ridiculous. I was ridiculous,' her son remarked. To him, his father represented philistinism and bourgeois values, his mother the arts and refinement. She provided him with a wide culture, while his father incited his rebellion.
Given this situation, it is all too easy for commentators to fall back on psychological commonplaces such as the Oedipus complex when explaining Eisenstein's actions, personality and sexuality – his antipathy towards his father, his ambivalent love for his mother – yet in his oblique writings about his emotional life, the self-perceptive Eisenstein encourages this view.
Mikhail Osipovich was a powerful, stocky man with a Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, who came from a family of German-Jewish origin which had been baptised and assimilated into Russian society. Not much is known about them. Although Mikhail Osipovich's grave in Berlin is marked 'Born St Petersburg', no record of his birth there has been found. It is possible that he was born somewhere close to the city or that he had no wish, for some political or social reason, to divulge his real birthplace. (The name of Eisenstein was quite common in Czechoslovakia and Austria.) Among Sergei Eisenstein's possessions was a souvenir glass on which there is a picture of a church in the town of Eisenstein, somewhere in Europe. Almost nothing is known of his paternal grandparents, though the wife of his cousin once remarked that her husband mentioned that the grandmother was thought to be Swedish.
For Eisenstein, his father exemplified all that was reprehensible in the bourgeois mentality and, it could be argued, that his father's persona informs the bourgeois characters he depicted in his films, such as the fat bosses in The Strike and the heartless doublechinned kulak in The General Line. With this in mind, it is difficult not to see Eisenstein's treatment of Alexander Kerensky in October as not only a political gesture, but a private one. In one visual metaphor, the caricatured Alexander Kerensky is compared, through montage, to a mechanical peacock spreading its metal feathers. The satirical effect is increased in the sequence where the 'dictator' Kerensky is made to ascend the same flight of steps several times with the inter-cutting titles denoting ever higher rank. In the same film, a uniformed general is meticulously presented button by button from his oiled-flat hair to his shiny boots. From Eisenstein's own, albeit subjective, testimony of his father, a grotesque Gogolian picture of a pompous, pedantic, rather preposterous man emerges.
'Father had 40 pairs of patent leather shoes ... His valet Ozols, in his greatcoat, would give him the pair he requested with the aid of the list, taking them from what looked like a multi-tiered rabbit hutch which hung in the corridor ... Papa would only wear shiny, black boots with square toes. He did not acknowledge any other sort. And he had a huge collection of them "for every occasion." He even listed them in a register, with any distinguishing feature indicated: "new", "old"; "a scratch". From time to time he held an inspection and roll-call. Then Ozols would slide up and down, opening wide the gates of this boot garage. Vainglorious, petty, too stout, industrious, unlucky, broken – but still he wore his white gloves (on weekdays!) and his collars were perfectly starched.'
Writing in the last decade of his life, Eisenstein's aversion to his 'tyrannical' father was as strong as ever. However, many of his caustic reflections on a man who had died in 1920, could be seen as a transference of his unexpressed and inexpressible private views on 'Papa' Stalin. During the most repressive period of Stalin's 'paternalistic' rule, it was extremely dangerous to write down one's negative thoughts on the regime, even in one's personal diary, especially for Eisenstein who was always closely watched for any 'deviations'. Yet, in 1928, after the leader's interference with October, Eisenstein did confide to his diary his disgust at 'the barbarism of Stalin'. It was one of the very few pages destroyed by Eisenstein's widow, Pera Attasheva, out of fear for him, and she collected almost everything of his.
Eisenstein's mother, Yulia Ivanovna (née Konyetskaya), who had the simian features, big head and stocky body of her son, resembled Sergei in drag. The resemblance was so striking that the reminiscence of the pain Eisenstein recalled feeling as a child when his mother denied, during an angry exchange, that he was her son, seems hardly credible. If there had been any dispute as to his parentage, it would have been far more likely, given his mother's 'oversexed' nature – she had several affairs before, during and after her marriage – that his father was not his natural one, a far-fetched notion that Eisenstein enjoyed contemplating.
Yulia Ivanovna was independent-minded, and had travelled to Egypt alone, an unusual undertaking for a middle-class woman in the late 19th century. She was the daughter of a self-made merchant, Ivan Ivanovich Konyetsky, who established a flourishing barge-hauling firm in St Petersburg, which carried freight on the Marinsky canal system which linked the Baltic Sea and the River Neva to the River Volga. Her mother, Iraida Matveyevna Konyetskaya, ran the company after her husband died. Eisenstein, always fond of finding analogies in literature, saw his grandmother as the eponymous character in Maxim Gorky's 1910 play Vassa Zheleznova, a woman who rules her bourgeois family and its shipping empire with a rod of iron. Iraida died of a brain haemorrhage while praying vigorously in the Alexander Nevsky church in Riga. Perhaps she was in the throes of religious ecstasy, a state of mind that theoretically fascinated Eisenstein most of his life, linking it as he did with sexual ecstasy.
In addition, in keeping with a certain pattern of correspondences (some accidental, others predetermined) between Eisenstein's life and work, the 'family saint' of the Konyetskies happened to be Alexander Nevsky, the hero of the director's most acceptable film in the Soviet Union. As a child, he would often take walks in the Alexander Nevsky monastery, 'the silver shrine of the saint whom I was destined to glorify in film after his country had made him a national hero.'
If one is searching for further associations, the only mother who has a substantial role in his films is Euphrosinia, the monstrous mother in Ivan the Terrible. She smothers (almost literally at times) her weak, epicene son Vladimir, and is prepared to commit any crime to see him become Tsar, despite his reluctance. The mother of Vassili Bouslay, the axe-wielding blond warrior in Alexander Nevsky, tells him, 'I thought to see you wedded. You have brought disgrace,' when he gives up Olga to his friend Gavrilo.
At his parents' separation, after staying a short period with an aunt, Eisenstein remained with his father and only saw his mother on infrequent visits to St Petersburg, although he lived with her for two years at No. 9 Tauride Street while he was a student at the Engineering School. When he had embarked on his career as a director, after his father had become an exile in Germany, he was in constant touch, allowing her to share in his triumphs, and sending her cards from wherever he was travelling, later getting her to come to Moscow to be near him.
It was Yulia Ivanovna, who had written a number of unfinished and unpublished novels herself, who first indulged her son's love of books. Her great-uncle, General Botovsky, who was the president of the Russian Olympic Games committee, and had been responsible for Russia joining the Olympic movement, wrote stories for magazines. According to Eisenstein, 'He was extremely miserly. He was no less mean in his literary craft. He wasted no time, for example, describing nature. "It was one of those dawns that Turgenev describes so inimitably well ..." This was but one of the literary pearls to roll off the General's pen.'
'Books are attracted to me,' Eisenstein wrote. 'They make a bee-line for me, and stick to me. I have been so fond of them that at last they have begun to reciprocate. In my hands books burst like ripe fruit. Like magic flowers they unfold their petals to show me the vital thought, the suggestive word, the confirming quotation, the decisive illustration.'
Director Mikhail Romm, visiting Eisenstein's apartment in the early 1930s, remarked, 'There were books everywhere. A huge table was covered in books. An entire wall was filled with bookshelves, and Eisenstein used to sit among the books, on the books, under the books.'
His English friend Ivor Montagu had a similar impression when he visited him in 1933. 'The one-big-room flat he inhabited was everywhere knee-deep in books. He could, of course, never find a wanted one and, if something had to be looked up, he had each time to buy another copy.'
By his early teens, Eisenstein had read most of the works of Alexander Dumas, Jean Racine, Pierre Corneille, Emile Zola and Stéphane Mallarmé in French, Edgar Allan Poe in English, and Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Russian, making copious notes as he did so.
It was from books that Eisenstein derived his 'first impressions of sadism ... the first situations to suggest themselves to me came not from live or personal experience but were "reflected" and "refracted."' As if to contradict this, Eisenstein relates his earliest memories of thrashings he had received as a small boy. The first was from Ozols, his father's servant.
'My second thrashing came a little later, but before my schooldays began and with much less ceremony. I remember here being half-naked – only my trousers were down. I remember the "weapon" – a strap folded three times ... Mama was the executioner. And it had absolutely no effect whatsoever, I laughed cheekily the whole time, although my cheekiness alone deserved punishment. I had been thoroughly obnoxious to my French (or English?) governess on a walk in Strelkovy Park. It was worse for Eton schoolboys.'
Eisenstein then goes on to describe, in some detail and with relish, the punishments at Eton. 'In the schoolroom ... stands a small wooden step-ladder with three rungs. The victim kneels on it, bending over obediently. And as he does so, the ancient rule dictates, "there shall be nothing between the birch and the body."'
The sado-masochistic streak in S. M. Eisenstein's character, and a morbid fascination with martyrdom, especially that of St Sebastian, so prevalent in gay iconography, dates back to his childhood reading, later revealing itself in his drawings, films and in his memoirs, particularly in a chapter headed To the Illustrious Memory of the Marquis.
He remembered an article he read as a child in a copy of his father's Petersburg Gazette, which described how a group of drunken butchers took an apprentice into a back room, stripped him, and hung him by his legs from a hook in the ceiling. 'They then began to flay him with a double hook, the sort used for hanging carcasses up. Skin came off in chunks ... I expect it was this image that gave rise to my predilection for St Sebastian ... In my Mexican film, I named the peon who was martyred in the fields of agave, Sebastian; he died in excruciating agony, after suffering all manner of torture, being buried up to his shoulders and trampled beneath the hooves of the haciendado's horses.'
At the age of twelve, while visiting his mother in St Petersburg, he came across a number of books which she had hidden under the seats of chairs and sofas. One of them, which he surreptitiously read and took delight in, was the Marquis de Sade's Histoire de Juliette ou Les Prospérités du Vice (The Story of Juliette or Vice Amply Rewarded), which Eisenstein mistakenly remembered in his memoirs as being called The Stages of Vice. Other representatives of his mother's rather exotic taste were The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau and Venus in Furs by Léopold Sacher-Masoch, the latter being illustrated with 'the first pictures of "unhealthy sensuality" that I found.' He also felt that these books aroused 'an alarming streak of brutality' within him, and influenced 'the ocean of brutalities in which my pictures are steeped.'
The thirteen-year-old schoolboy Eisenstein would stare through the windows of a bookshop in Riga, where the lurid covers of penny dreadfuls were displayed. 'The covers had a terrifying, magnetic force. And I remember being unable to take my eyes off those horrors behind the glass, but standing there for ages.' A cover that made a vivid impression was one which depicted detective Nick Carter, his hands and feet tied up, suspended above a sarcophagus filled with molten metal. 'On one side was a lady, her dress in disarray, wearing a short skirt, her bodice undone. She had one arm stretched out as she took aim. The caption read: "If Nick doesn't tell her what she wants to know, she'll shoot through the rope." The metal bubbled with hospitality, ready for the doomed Nick.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Sergei Eisenstein"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Ronald Bergan.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Preface to the 2016 Edition,
Author's Note,
Acknowledgements,
Prologue: Yo!,
PART I ENTHUSIASM,
1 The Childhood of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein,
2 Revolution!,
3 Agitka!,
4 Ciné-Fist!,
5 Fire!,
6 Forward, Comrades!,
7 Poet and Peasant,
PART II MR EISENSTEIN IN THE LAND OF THE CAPITALISTS,
8 Western Approaches,
9 A Russian in Paris,
10 Hollywood and Bust,
11 Trouble in Paradise,
PART III BACK IN THE USSR,
12 The Rules of the Game,
13 'The Old Man',
14 Crimes and Misdemeanours,
15 Heroes and Villains,
16 The Earthly Tsar,
17 Danse Macabre,
Epilogue: Taking Tea in Eisenstein's Brain,
Filmography,
Bibliography,
Notes,