Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein: The Man Who Made Editing an Argument

A pram bounces down a flight of stone steps while soldiers advance in rank behind it. The sequence lasts a few minutes, occupies a fraction of a 1925 silent film, and is, in the British Film Institute's estimation, "one of the most widely recognised and painstakingly analysed sequences of all time." Its director had trained as a civil engineer, spent his twenties reading Japanese, and believed he had discovered how cinema thinks.

From Riga to the Red Army

Sergei Eisenstein was born on 22 January 1898 in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, into money — the son, by one account, of a wealthy shipbuilder of Jewish descent. He was a child in that city during the upheavals of 1905 and 1906, and the sight of crowds and soldiers in the streets stayed with him.

In 1916 he enrolled at the Institute of Civil Engineering while simultaneously helping to run an experimental theatre and a circus in Moscow — a double life that is the whole man in miniature, half technician and half showman. In 1917 he abandoned the degree and joined the Red Army, where he built fortifications before being put to work organising theatrical performances for the troops.

The Theatre and the Theory

Discharged at twenty-two, he did something no other filmmaker of his generation did: he went looking for a theory before he had a practice. He studied Japanese writing systems, in which characters are combined so that the compound carries a meaning neither element holds alone, and concluded that film could be made to work the same way. Editing, he argued, was not a means of joining shots smoothly but a device for colliding them, so that "independent images" produce "a new meaning or image not implicit in any of its individual components."

This is montage, and Eisenstein is universally credited as its father. He worked it out as a system, eventually setting out five distinct methods, and then spent his career testing it on film.

Potemkin

*Strike* (1925) was his first full-length feature. *Battleship Potemkin*, released the same year, was the proof. Built around a naval mutiny and the massacre on the Odessa steps, it demonstrated the theory at full power: fragments of faces, boots, wheels, a broken pair of spectacles, cut against each other to produce — in the BFI's description — "a kinetic, tense, violent and deeply allegorical set piece." Britannica summarises his method as presenting images "for maximum psychological impact," which is exactly right and slightly clinical for what the film actually does to an audience.

*Potemkin* placed in *Sight & Sound*'s top ten in every decade's critics' poll until 2012, and its editing survives, undiluted, in modern action cinema and in music video.

October, Mexico and Hollywood

*October* (1927), commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, was cut and altered after Leon Trotsky fell from favour: a lesson, delivered early, in what it meant to make history films for a state that was busy rewriting history. *The General Line* (1929) turned to the countryside and collectivisation.

Then he travelled. Paramount brought him to Hollywood and rejected his screenplays. He went south and began *Que Viva Mexico!* with the backing of the novelist Upton Sinclair, a vast project on Mexican history that was never finished and never fully his again. He returned to the Soviet Union with no completed film and a diminished position.

Under Stalin

*Alexander Nevsky* (1938) restored him: a medieval epic of Russian resistance to Teutonic invasion, and a score by Sergei Prokofiev whose fusion with the images is the film's most admired achievement. It was also, transparently, a piece of state work timed to a coming war.

*Ivan the Terrible* was to be his summation. Part I appeared in 1944. Part II — in which a paranoid autocrat destroys those closest to him — was banned in Moscow and not seen until 1958, a decade after Eisenstein's death. He continued to teach and to write; *The Film Sense* appeared in 1942. He died of complications of angina pectoris in Moscow on 11 February 1948, aged fifty.

Why Sergei Is Called a Genius

The claim for Eisenstein is unusual among filmmakers because it is genuinely intellectual rather than intuitive. He did not merely make films that worked; he identified, described and systematised the mechanism by which they work, and he did it from first principles, drawing on Japanese ideograms, Marxist dialectic and the psychology of the crowd. Before him, cutting was largely a matter of continuity — getting from one place to the next without confusing the audience. After him, the cut was an argument, capable of generating a meaning present in neither of the shots it joins. The BFI calls him "the father of montage" and one of the most important pioneers of early cinema, and this is not honorific; his five categories of montage are still taught, and the Odessa Steps remains the most dissected passage in the medium.

The counter-case is serious and has two parts. The first is political. Eisenstein's greatest films are instruments of a totalitarian state, and *October* was censored to erase Trotsky from a revolution he had led. To praise the technique without noting that its purpose was to make an audience feel what a government wanted it to feel is to miss half of what montage is. The method was engineered for persuasion, and it was very good at it.

The second is aesthetic. His theory can be schematic, and his people are frequently types rather than characters, deployed as elements in a design; viewers who want interiority find his films cold. And the career is a wreckage of unfinished and suppressed work: *Que Viva Mexico!*, the second part of *Ivan*. He was a great theorist who was permitted, in a working life of roughly twenty-five years, to complete remarkably little. The genius is not in doubt. What it was allowed to become is.

Legacy

The films remain, in the BFI's judgment, "as rousing and febrile now as almost 100 years ago." That endurance is the more remarkable given that the revolution they were made to celebrate has gone, along with the state that commissioned, censored and eventually stifled them. What survives is the grammar. Every trailer that builds tension by accelerating its cuts, every montage sequence that compresses a year into forty seconds, every action scene assembled from fragments of movement rather than continuous space, is working in a language a Latvian engineering student invented while teaching himself Japanese. Cinema had existed for thirty years before Eisenstein. He was the one who worked out what it was for.

Achievements

• Order of Lenin — 1939
• Order of the Badge of Honour
• Notable work: October: Ten Days That Shook the World
• Notable work: Battleship Potemkin
• Notable work: The General Line
• Worked as film director, inventor and film editor