Sergei Eisenstein

With Japanese kabuki actor Sadanji Ichikawa II, Moscow, 1928

Eisenstein moved to Moscow in 1920, and began his career in theatre working for Proletkult,[18] an experimental Soviet artistic institution which aspired to radically modify existing artistic forms and create a revolutionary working-class aesthetic. His productions there were entitled Gas Masks, Listen Moscow, and Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man.[19] He worked as a designer for Vsevolod Meyerhold.[20] Eisenstein began his career as a theorist in 1923,[21] by writing "The Montage of Attractions" for art journal LEF.[22] His first film, Glumov's Diary (for the theatre production Wise Man), was also made in that same year with Dziga Vertov hired initially as an instructor.[23][24]

Strike (1925) was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film. Battleship Potemkin (also 1925) was critically acclaimed worldwide. Mostly owing to this international renown, he was then able to direct October: Ten Days That Shook the World, as part of a grand tenth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution of 1917, and then The General Line (also known as Old and New). While critics outside Soviet Russia praised these works, Eisenstein's focus in the films on structural issues such as camera angles, crowd movements, and montage brought him and like-minded others such as Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko under fire from the Soviet film community. This forced him to issue public articles of self-criticism and commitments to reform his cinematic visions to conform to the increasingly specific doctrines of socialist realism.

In the autumn of 1928, with October still under fire in many Soviet quarters, Eisenstein left the Soviet Union for a tour of Europe, accompanied by his perennial film collaborator Grigori Aleksandrov and cinematographer Eduard Tisse. Officially, the trip was supposed to allow the three to learn about sound motion pictures and to present themselves as Soviet artists in person to the capitalist West. For Eisenstein, however, it was an opportunity to see landscapes and cultures outside the Soviet Union. He spent the next two years touring and lecturing in Berlin, Zürich, London, and Paris.[25] In 1929, in Switzerland, Eisenstein supervised an educational documentary about abortion directed by Tisse, entitled Frauennot – Frauenglück.[26]

Aleksandrov, Eisenstein and Tisse with Walt Disney in June 1930

In late April 1930, film producer Jesse L. Lasky, on behalf of Paramount Pictures, offered Eisenstein the opportunity to make a film in the United States.[27] He accepted a short-term contract for $100,000 ($1,500,000 in 2017 dollars) and arrived in Hollywood in May 1930, along with Aleksandrov and Tisse. They wrote a script based on Theodore Dreiser but the Americans just wanted to see them as defectors and people who could criticize the Bolshevik system.[28]

Eisenstein proposed a biography of arms dealer Basil Zaharoff and a film version of Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw, and more fully developed plans for a film of Sutter's Gold by Blaise Cendrars,[29] but on all accounts failed to impress the studio's producers.[30] Paramount proposed a film version of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.[31] This excited Eisenstein, who had read and liked the work, and had met Dreiser at one time in Moscow. Eisenstein completed a script by the start of October 1930,[32] but Paramount disliked it and, additionally, found themselves intimidated by Major Frank Pease,[33] president of the Hollywood Technical Director's Institute. Pease, an anti-communist, mounted a public campaign against Eisenstein. On October 23, 1930, by "mutual consent", Paramount and Eisenstein declared their contract null and void, and the Eisenstein party were treated to return tickets to Moscow at Paramount's expense.[34]

Eisenstein was faced with returning home a failure. The Soviet film industry was solving the sound-film issue without him; in addition, his films, techniques and theories, such as his formalist film theory, were becoming increasingly attacked as "ideological failures". Many of his theoretical articles from this period, such as Eisenstein on Disney, have surfaced decades later.

Eisenstein and his entourage spent considerable time with Charlie Chaplin,[35] who recommended that Eisenstein meet with a sympathetic benefactor in the person of American socialist author Upton Sinclair.[36] Sinclair's works had been accepted by and were widely read in the USSR, and were known to Eisenstein. The two admired each other, and between the end of October 1930 and Thanksgiving of that year, Sinclair had secured an extension of Eisenstein's absences from the USSR, and permission for him to travel to Mexico. The trip to Mexico was for Eisenstein to make a film produced by Sinclair and his wife Mary, and three other investors organized as the "Mexican Film Trust".[37]

On 24 November 1930, Eisenstein signed a contract with the Trust "upon the basis of his desire to be free to direct the making of a picture according to his own ideas of what a Mexican picture should be, and in full faith in Eisenstein's artistic integrity."[38] The contract stipulated that the film would be "non-political", that immediately available funding came from Mary Sinclair in an amount of "not less than Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars",[39] that the shooting schedule amounted to "a period of from three to four months",[39] and most importantly that: "Eisenstein furthermore agrees that all pictures made or directed by him in Mexico, all negative film and positive prints, and all story and ideas embodied in said Mexican picture, will be the property of Mrs. Sinclair..."[39] A codicil to the contract allowed that the "Soviet Government may have the [finished] film free for showing inside the U.S.S.R."[40] Reportedly, it was verbally clarified that the expectation was for a finished film of about an hour's duration.

By 4 December, Eisenstein was traveling to Mexico by train, accompanied by Aleksandrov and Tisse. Later he produced a brief synopsis of the six-part film; this would come, in one form or another, to be the final plan he would settle on for his project. The title for the project, ¡Que viva México!, was decided on some time later still. Whilst in Mexico, he mixed socially with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; Eisenstein admired these artists and Mexican culture in general, and they inspired him to call his films "moving frescoes".[41] The left-wing U.S. film community eagerly followed his progress within Mexico, as is chronicled within Chris Robe's book Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture.[42]

After a prolonged absence, Joseph Stalin sent a telegram expressing the concern that Eisenstein had become a deserter.[43] Under pressure, Eisenstein blamed Mary Sinclair's younger brother, Hunter Kimbrough, who had been sent along to act as a line producer, for the film's problems.[44] Eisenstein hoped to pressure the Sinclairs to insinuate themselves between him and Stalin, so Eisenstein could finish the film in his own way. The furious Sinclairs shut down production and ordered Kimbrough to return to the United States with the remaining film footage and the three Soviets to see what they could do with the film already shot; estimates of the extent of this range from 170,000 lineal feet with Soldadera unfilmed,[45] to an excess of 250,000 lineal feet.[46]

For the unfinished filming of the "novel" of Soldadera, without incurring any cost, Eisenstein had secured 500 soldiers, 10,000 guns, and 50 cannons from the Mexican Army,[44] but this was lost due to Sinclair's cancelling of production. When Eisenstein arrived at the American border, a customs search of his trunk revealed sketches and drawings of Jesus caricatures amongst other lewd pornographic material.[47][48] His re-entry visa had expired,[49] and Sinclair's contacts in Washington were unable to secure him an additional extension. Eisenstein, Aleksandrov, and Tisse were allowed, after a month's stay at the U.S.-Mexico border outside Laredo, Texas, a 30-day "pass" to get from Texas to New York,[49] and thence depart for Moscow, while Kimbrough returned to Los Angeles with the remaining film.

Eisenstein toured the American South on his way to New York. In mid-1932, the Sinclairs were able to secure the services of Sol Lesser, who had just opened his distribution office in New York, Principal Distributing Corporation. Lesser agreed to supervise post-production work on the miles of negative—at the Sinclairs' expense—and distribute any resulting product. Two short feature films and a short subject—Thunder Over Mexico based on the "Maguey" footage,[50] Eisenstein in Mexico, and Death Day respectively—were completed and released in the United States between the autumn of 1933 and early 1934. Eisenstein never saw any of the Sinclair-Lesser films, nor a later effort by his first biographer, Marie Seton, called Time in the Sun,[51] released in 1940. He would publicly maintain that he had lost all interest in the project. In 1978, Gregori Aleksandrov released – with the same name in contravention to the copyright – his own version, which was awarded the Honorable Golden Prize at the 11th Moscow International Film Festival in 1979. Later, in 1998, Oleg Kovalov edited a free version of the film, calling it "Mexican Fantasy".

Eisenstein 1939

Eisenstein's foray into the West made the staunchly Stalinist film industry look upon him with a suspicion that would never completely disappear. He apparently spent some time in a mental hospital in Kislovodsk in July 1933,[52] ostensibly a result of depression born of his final acceptance that he would never be allowed to edit the Mexican footage.[53] He was subsequently assigned a teaching position at the State Institute of Cinematography where he had taught earlier, and in 1933 and 1934 was in charge of writing the curriculum.[54]

In 1935, Eisenstein was assigned another project, Bezhin Meadow, but it appears the film was afflicted with many of the same problems as ¡Que viva México!. Eisenstein unilaterally decided to film two versions of the scenario, one for adult viewers and one for children; failed to define a clear shooting schedule; and shot film prodigiously, resulting in cost overruns and missed deadlines. Boris Shumyatsky, the de facto head of the Soviet film industry, called a halt to the filming and cancelled further production. What appeared to save Eisenstein's career at this point was that Stalin ended up taking the position that the Bezhin Meadow catastrophe, along with several other problems facing the industry at that point, had less to do with Eisenstein's approach to filmmaking as with the executives who were supposed to have been supervising him. Ultimately this came down on the shoulders of Shumyatsky,[55] who in early 1938 was denounced, arrested, tried and convicted as a traitor, and shot.

Eisenstein was able to ingratiate himself with Stalin for 'one more chance', and he chose, from two offerings, the assignment of a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, with music composed by Sergei Prokofiev.[56] This time, he was assigned a co-scenarist, Pyotr Pavlenko,[57] to bring in a completed script; professional actors to play the roles; and an assistant director, Dmitri Vasilyev, to expedite shooting.[57]

The result was a film critically well-received by both the Soviets and in the West, which won him the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize.[58] It was an allegory and stern warning against the massing forces of Nazi Germany, well played and well made. The script had Nevsky utter a number of traditional Russian proverbs, verbally rooting his fight against the Germanic invaders in Russian traditions.[59] This was started, completed, and placed in distribution all within the year 1938, and represented Eisenstein's first film in nearly a decade and his first sound film.

Within months of its release, Stalin entered into a pact with Hitler, and Alexander Nevsky was promptly pulled from distribution. Eisenstein returned to teaching, and was assigned to direct Richard Wagner's Die Walküre at the Bolshoi Theatre.[58] After the outbreak of war with Germany in 1941, Alexander Nevsky was re-released with a wide distribution and earned international success. With the war approaching Moscow, Eisenstein was one of many filmmakers evacuated to Alma-Ata, where he first considered the idea of making a film about Tsar Ivan IV. Eisenstein corresponded with Prokofiev from Alma-Ata, and was joined by him there in 1942. Prokofiev composed the score for Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible and Eisenstein reciprocated by designing sets for an operatic rendition of War and Peace that Prokofiev was developing.[60]

Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible, Part I, presenting Ivan IV of Russia as a national hero, won Stalin's approval (and a Stalin Prize),[61] but the sequel, Ivan The Terrible, Part II, was criticized by various authorities and went unreleased until 1958. All footage from Ivan The Terrible, Part III was confiscated whilst the film was still incomplete, and most of it was destroyed, though several filmed scenes exist.[62][63]