Sergei Eisenstein - The Eisenstein Reader

THE EISENSTEIN READER

Contents

Richard Taylor

Transliteration from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet presents many problems and no system will resolve them all. Perhaps the most important is the difficulty of reconciling the two principal requirements of transliteration: on the one hand the need to convey to the non-Russian-speaking reader a reasonable approximation of the original Russian pronunciation, and on the other the necessity of rendering for the specialist an accurate representation of the original Russian spelling. There is a further complication in that some Russian names have a non-Russian origin or an accepted English spelling that takes little heed of the two requirements just mentioned. We have therefore used two systems of transliteration in this edition. In the main text and in the index we have used the generally accepted spellings of proper names (such as Alexander Nevsky) or the spellings that reflect their linguistic origins (such as Meyerhold, Strauch and, indeed, Eisenstein), whereas in the endnotes we have attempted to cater for the needs of the Russian-speaking specialist. There the names listed above will be found as Aleksandr Nevskii, Meierkhol'd, Shtraukh and Eizenshtein. There are inevitably some inconsistencies in this practice but we hope that the system we have adopted will clarify rather than confuse the issue.

Eisenstein was unfortunately not always consistent in his use of key terms and the reader should bear this in mind. In this and other volumes the editor and translator have offered a particular version of a particular term but some degree of ambiguity, if not downright confusion, must always remain. When talking about 'plot' Eisenstein, like other Russian writers of the time, distinguishes between fabula and syuzhet, which we have normally rendered as 'story' and 'plot' respectively. Naum Kleiman, consultant editor on this edition, has offered the following distinction:

fabula: a Formalist concept, the structure of events, what actually happened, the facts.

syuzhet: everything connected with the characters, all the associations, motivations, etc. Formalist critics also used the term to include technical aspects of film-making, such as lighting, camera angle, shot composition and montage.

Other problematic words include the following, and the reader is strongly advised to bear the alternatives constantly in mind:

kadr: shot or frame

kusok: piece or fragment or sequence of montage

material: material or raw material

montazh: montage or editing, the arrangement of the shots, frames or sequences through cutting. In Eisenstein's view, as in the view of others, it was montazh that distinguished the specificity of cinema as opposed to related art forms such as theatre, literature or painting.

To minimise the risk of confusion, the original Russian word is occasionally given in square brackets thus, [...], in the text.

Lastly, Russian does not have either an indefinite or a definite article and it is a moot point whether one sometimes needs to be supplied in the English translation. We have preferred The Strike to Strike as a translation of the title of Eisenstein's film Stachka, The Battleship Potemkin to Battleship Potemkin for Bronenosets Potemkin, and so on. We have done this in the hope of clarifying the meaning of the original Russian title for the English-speaking reader.

Documents 112 were translated by Richard Taylor, 1317 by William Powell. Minor alterations have been made to some of the previously published versions. Eisenstein's own comments are rendered as footnotes with editorial comments as endnotes.

The master

'I lived, I contemplated, I admired.'

Eisenstein, 1944

Eisenstein has become a myth. He has been acclaimed as a genius, as the greatest film-maker of all time, as the maker of the greatest film of all time (The Battleship Potemkin), and as one of the great philosophers of art of our century. More has been written about him than about any other film director and he himself wrote more than any other film director both about his own work and about cinema as a medium and as an art form. It is the purpose of this collection to bring together in a single affordable volume the key shorter film-related writings that illuminate the background to his films. For reasons of space the longer writings on montage contained in the second volume of the BFI Eisenstein edition, Towards A Theory of Montage, including those relating specifically to his later films, have had to be omitted.

Because of his prominence, if not his eminence, Eisenstein has also been virulently attacked: most notoriously as a formalist and dilettante in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, a fear that was obviously rather widespread at that time, because Eisenstein must have been expelled from more countries than any other European artist of the 20th century.

But he has also been attacked on artistic grounds for the perceived 'totalitarianism' of his montage theory, most notably by Andrey Tarkovsky, who in Sculpting in Time remarks:

I reject the principles of 'montage cinema' because they do not allow the film to continue beyond the edges of the screen: they do not allow the audience to bring personal experience to bear on what is in front of them on film ... Eisenstein makes thought into a despot: it leaves no 'air', nothing of that unspoken elusiveness which is perhaps the most captivating quality of all art, and which makes it possible for an individual to relate to a film.

In this Introduction I want to try to rescue Eisenstein from both his most fervent hagiographers and his most virulent detractors by tracing, as far as I can, the developing relationship between his writings, his films and his life as a leading Soviet artist, widely acknowledged by his colleagues through the epithet 'the Master'.

The little boy from Riga

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire and now capital of independent Latvia, on 23 January 1898. who were to help to liberate his own imagination and eventually to free him from the dominance of his father.

As a child, Eisenstein attended the German Realschule in Riga, which was at that time a predominantly German-speaking port. He spoke German before he spoke Russian, and he never spoke more than a few words of Latvian, which was then scarcely recognised as an official language. In some senses he was a child of the colonial class, an outsider in an outpost of German culture in a Russian state. As the only child of a broken home, his sense of isolation was intensified. His escape route lay in books, above all those that he had discovered in his parents' respective libraries, which opened up the world to him so that, while he may have been then, and remained later, in many ways an isolated outsider in his own country in his own time, he also became an intellectual citizen of the world, drawing his inspiration now from Freud or G. K. Chesterton, now from Chinese theatre en travestie or Japanese watercolours, now from so-called primitive images of the deity or Mexican notions of religious ecstasy, both Christian and pre-Christian.

In 1915 Eisenstein graduated from school with his best marks in religious studies. Making use of his childhood talent for drawing,

He never forgot this debt to the Revolution, even during the time of troubles that overshadowed the last decade and a half of his life. These and many other influences informed his films and his writings, and indeed his approach to both, from his first published article in 1922 to the very moment of his death twenty-six years later.