In perspective: Sergei Eisenstein, film director 1898-1948
A film essay and review of the special centenary edition of The Eisenstein Collection (Tartan Video, Faber & Faber) by Anna Chen
The feature films directed by Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein during the 1920s provided much of the defining imagery of the Russian Revolution. Described as the father of film montage, he was certainly the first major theorist of cinema. The year 1998 marks the centenary of his birth. It is also 50 years since he died, leaving behind an invaluable legacy of writings but with very few of his scripts actually produced. A boxed set of videos of his 'Revolution' trilogy - Strike, The Battleship Potemkin and October,1 which includes his first collection of essays and articles, The Film Sense, published in 1943 - has been released to commemorate Eisenstein's centenary.
A prolific writer yet an underproduced film maker with only eight mostly monochrome epics completed, why is this director considered so important even today? What power was unleashed in The Battleship Potemkin which led UK authorities to ban it until 1954? Why do mainstream Hollywood directors pay him homage through direct reference, pastiche and even parody? In Spielberg's black and white feature film Schindler's List a small girl is picked out in red as she tries to escape her Nazi persecutors, the same device also finding its way into a TV ad for Peugeot. It was first seen, however, in The Battleship Potemkin, wherein the the director himself painstakingly hand tinted the flag, frame by frame, a flaming revolutionary red. Coppola's powerful use in Apocalypse Now, of the bull's slaughter from the end of Strike signifies, not the victim's pain - as with the 1,800 strikers killed at the end of the Russian film - but the horror that has fed the megalomania of Brando's Kurtz, extinguished only when he is hacked to death by Martin Sheen's Marlow. Read more here