- Born
- Died
- Birth nameSergei Mikhailovich Eizenshtein
- Height1.70 m
- The son of an affluent architect, Eisenstein attended the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd as a young man. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, he worked as an engineer for the Red Army. In the following years, Eisenstein joined up with the Moscow Proletkult Theater as a set designer and then director. The Proletkult's director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, became a big influence on Eisenstein, introducing him to the concept of biomechanics, or conditioned spontaneity. Eisenstein furthered Meyerhold's theory with his own "montage of attractions"--a sequence of pictures whose total emotion effect is greater than the sum of its parts. He later theorized that this style of editing worked in a similar fashion to Marx's dialectic. Though Eisenstein wanted to make films for the common man, his intense use of symbolism and metaphor in what he called "intellectual montage" sometimes lost his audience. Though he made only seven films in his career, he and his theoretical writings demonstrated how film could move beyond its nineteenth-century predecessor--Victorian theatre-- to create abstract concepts with concrete images.- IMDb mini biography by: Michael Kaminsky <kaminsky@ucsee.eecs.berkeley.edu>
- SpousePera Atasheva(October 27, 1934 - February 11, 1948) (his death)
- [Montage] Considered the father of the cinematic montage, he often used heavily edited sequences for emotional impact and historical propaganda (his most famous being the Odessa Steps sequence in Le cuirassé Potemkine (1925) [Battleship Potemkin]).
- Collectivization: Often used a collective instead of the main character
- Often uses non-professional actors
- Close-ups of faces
- Uncompromising violence
- Spoke fluent Japanese, and used the haiku as a model for his theories on montage.
- He was one of the founders of the world's oldest film school, VGIK in Moscow (opened 1 September 1919), and along with Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Mikhail Romm, Eduard Tisse and Anatoli Golovnya, worked out the basic methods of professional training, which produced such well-known giants as Sergei Parajanov, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and the more obscure masters Mikhail Vartanov and Artavazd Peleshian.
- Visited Germany and met with Fritz Lang during the filming of Metropolis (1927), on the Le jardin du plaisir (1925) set. (1926).
- He once praised Walt Disney's Blanche-Neige et les Sept Nains (1937) as the single greatest film ever made.
- Arrived in the United States in 1929, accompanied by Grigoriy Aleksandrov and Eduard Tisse. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had praised Eisenstein during a 1926 trip to Moscow, and after visiting Hollywood, he was given a contract by Paramount "to direct several films at the convenience of the contractee." His proposed projects, film adaptations of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds", Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" and "Gold" (a.k.a. "Sutter's Gold"), were rejected as being too socially conscious and not commercial enough to justify their length and expense. Paramount canceled the contract, and then on November 18, 1930, the State Department announced it was deporting Eisenstein and his companions because they were Communists.
- The hieroglyphic language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any political or tactical slogan, without recourse to the help of a rather suspect dramatic or psychological past.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content