Sergei Eisenstein

Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict

By Ronald Bergan

Little, Brown and Company, 1997 — 384 pp., $39.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/17909

When the sailors on the battleship Potemkin mutiny and (under the red flag in the last reel) persuade their comrades on the other ships of the tsar's navy not to fire on them, all hearts that beat to the tune of rebellion against tyranny are uplifted. Charlie Chaplin called it "the best film in the world", and millions of viewers have warmed to this classic silent film by Sergei Eisenstein.

Of course, such a stirring account of a successful rebellion was going to hit the alarm buttons of the guardians of minority power and privilege. Battleship Potemkin was banned in the UK until 1954 (in what George Bernard Shaw called "an undisguised stroke of class censorship"), and, when Hollywood tried to tap Eisenstein's genius for the Dream Factory in 1930, his visit to the US was plagued by media and right extremist campaigns against "this red dog and sadist" who was "planning to let loose upon America more of that destruction which has flooded the rivers of Bolshevik Russia with the blood of the murdered", turning the Free World into a "Communist cesspool".

Ronald Bergan's biography of the Soviet film director cuts through the rhetoric that dogged Eisenstein through most of his professional cinematic life: whether the frothing-at-the-mouth ravings of the rabid right or the Stalinist tripe that Eisenstein was forced to write as "mandatory public homage to prevalent orthodoxy", or the cinema critics who dismiss Eisenstein's films as propaganda by a didactic theorist, lacking "humanity".

Born in 1898 in Latvia, the young Eisenstein enthusiastically welcomed the Bolshevik revolution, enlisting in the Red Army as an engineer, building pontoon bridges and staging theatre for the troops during the Civil War.

The political and artistic potential of cinema soon attracted Eisenstein, as it did the Bolsheviks. In 1924, Eisenstein made his first feature film, The Strike, followed by Battleship Potemkin in 1925 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1905 Revolution. In 1927, he made October (Ten Days that Shook the World), to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 1917 revolution.

The artistic flurry whipped up by the revolution caught Eisenstein in its vortex. His style of dynamic montage, constantly changing images and visual metaphor, which focused on the historical rather than the personal, the mass rather than the individual as hero, gave his Russian Revolution trilogy a bold, experimental flavour.

These films brought Eisenstein fame and success, but also problems. In October, the fact that "everyone wanted to play the Bolsheviks and no one wanted to play the Mensheviks" was a (pleasant) annoyance for the director. The Civil War veterans' live cartridges and the civilian actors' inexperience with sharp bayonets gave rise to the joke that Eisenstein's re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace caused more casualties than the original assault in 1917.

Of more importance was the interference in the film by Stalin, who was by then in control of the Bolshevik Party and busy expunging the socialist opposition around Trotsky.

Stalin wanted Trotsky's role in the revolution removed from history and ordered that Trotsky be removed from the film, except for a brief scene showing him opposing Lenin on the uprising. October still magnificently captures the sweep and climax of the revolution, but its political integrity is flawed.

If Eisenstein's experience under Stalin was restricted, so was his sojourn in Hollywood. The Paramount bosses would not accept any of his proposed films, saying his artistry and vision contradicted "the business of this organisation". That business was to produce ideologically safe films which provided returns on the "stockholders' cash".

Back in the USSR in 1932, Eisenstein ran headfirst into the bogey of socialist realism. This was Stalin's attempt to fashion culture to the political needs of his regime. "Formalism" was the enemy, and experimental or modern art (such as montage) was criticised for failing to present plots showing the wisdom of Stalin's policies for building a socialist paradise of merry workers and peasants.

Films became dull, lacking in artistry and overburdened with propaganda. Films with titles like Cement and Energy became the norm, a climate not conducive to Eisenstein or other creative directors.

Eisenstein was officially criticised for "formalism". Under threat of arrest, he wrote, or signed a ghost-written "confession" admitting to "aesthetic and sociopolitical errors". When homosexuality became a criminal offence in 1933, Eisenstein faced another threat. He evaded rumours about his homosexuality by marrying, in law but not spirit, a close female friend and colleague.

With Stalin's bloody purges of socialists and dissenters, with Eisenstein's friends and collaborators from theatre, music and writing "disappearing", with ideological venom about "savage veteran spies, Trotskyite and Bukharinist agents, and hirelings of Japanese and German fascism performing their wrecking deeds in the Soviet cinema", the arts world had to tread carefully.

Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible were his last films. The former is about a 13th century patriotic hero (made under the watchful eye of a Kremlin minder), and the latter about the 16th century tsar who unified Russia. The cruelty of Eisenstein's Tsar Ivan, however, was too close to home for Stalin; Eisenstein, not unwisely, modified the film after a midnight audience with Stalin.

Bergan's biography reveals new clues to Eisenstein's thoughts on all these political pressures. Eisenstein's diary shows what he thought about "the barbarism of Stalin", whilst his public paeans of praise to Stalin were reluctant (even satirical) political dues paid to keep himself alive and shooting film.

Optimism may have triumphed over experience (Eisenstein continually hoped he would have artistic freedom to make each subsequent film), but he was no "Stalinist hack". Imprisonment and death were never more than a signature or policy shift away, yet he continued to strive to make films as close to his conception as possible.

Bergan explores other layers of Eisenstein's films, particularly their homo-eroticism (Eisenstein's private pornographic drawings reveal him as a phallic-obsessive) and their subtext of Oedipal struggle ("there is as much of Freud as of Marx in his films").

Bergan concludes that Eisenstein, who died in 1948, "remained faithful to the communist ideals at the root of the Revolution". The revolutionary spirit of Battleship Potemkin was never quite snuffed out in his films.