Glumows Tagebuch

Hailed as Eisenstein's first movie, DNEVIK GLUMOVA looks a lot like circus clowns let loose on the city, climbing to the top of buildings and generally behaving in a way that should send anyone who suffers from coulrophobia screaming for the exits.

Since it is an Eisenstein piece, the general reaction is that it is a harbinger of future glory and should be loved for that. Looking at it on its own merits, however, one is struck by the oddity of the piece. The Academician editing is staccato and as annoying as the clowns, and the pacing of the cuts is monotonous and as boring.

Academician editing had quicker cuts than was standard for the era and, indeed, for anything short of MTV editing. However, the constant rate of cutting makes all the clips of equal impact and prevent any sort of emotional connection. This may have been Eisenstein's intention, but it is too great a demand on the viewer. Eisenstein would learn to do better, but his failures here make this of no more than historical importance.

Filmic insert to Eisenstein's modernized, free adaptation of Ostrovskiy's 19th-century Russian stage play...

While it is hard to judge anything that is only five minutes long, this is certainly an interesting little piece of film history. Somewhat odd with all the clowns, a bit surreal perhaps... and the juxtaposition of the playful actors with tanks symbolizing war and death... quite strange.

Of course, had the director gone on to only make newsreels, I never would have been exposed to it. But he was Sergei Eisenstein, one of the great silent directors and the master of Soviet cinema. Can we find hints at his genius in this brief sample? Perhaps, perhaps not.

The short film says a lot in 4 minutes.

It is supposed to be a film adapting bits of Alexander Ostrovsky's play "Enough stupidity in every wise man." This debut film of Eisenstein suggests a visual Paris in Russia at a time when his contemporary Grigory Kozintsev was also making ''The New Babylon" (1929) in Paris and formulating "the Manifesto of the Eccentric Theater (FEKS)' with Leonid Trauberg in their silent films "The adventures of Oktyabrina' (1924) with clowns, "Mishki versus Yudenich" (1925), "The Devil's Wheel" (1926) and "The Overcoat" (1926), based on Gogol's play.

"Glumov's Diary" might look like it is all about clowns and circus antics. Yet you have a cross-dressing couple who implies marriage of the same sex!

Then there are also tanks and machine guns that allow clowns to use them as props!

In a film where the master filmmaker himself appears in front of the camera, the tricks of vanishing humans replaced by an ass or an innocent child, anticipates the power of cinema decades before it became common tricks of surrealism. Eisenstein is doffing his cap to the Dadaists of Paris without offending the Leninist mindset at home.

What comes to us as an incomprehensible 5 minute farce was really, according to Wikipedia, an insert for a stage play; it was made to be shown at several points in the performance of "Alexander Ostrovsky's 1868 comedy Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man (Na vsyakovo mudretsa dovolno prostoty) that he realised in 1923 for the Proletkult organisation."

A weird 5-minute short which saw the debut of one of cinema's most important figures (who even appears at the start to salute the audience!) in the development of cinema technique. This is evident even here, as the film starts by introducing various characters (circus clowns, from what I could gather) fixed in a pose to which they all return at some point during the plot less proceedings! Another odd element has each of them enter one particular scene and dissolve into some object or other. For what it is, the bafflingly-titled film is tolerable, even proficient – but, considering the heavily political/social themes Eisenstein would tackle in his influential features soon after, this is at once bland and unmemorable.