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Eisenstein

By Robert Keser

Robert Keser teaches English and Film at National-Louis University in Chicago. His writing appears in Daily-Reviews.com and Bright Lights Film Journal.

"Property is theft, comrade!" cries a young revolutionary to Eisenstein across a crowded street at the beginning of this attempt to dramatize the great Russian director's life. The youthful Bolshevik's slogan as greeting, while not inconceivable in 1922, still exemplifies the literal-minded shorthand that plagues this handsomely mounted German-Canadian production. Writer-director Renny Bartlett channeled his obsession with Russia's great revolutionary of cinema into this first feature film, introduced at the Toronto Film Festival of 2000 but now trying its luck on the commercial market. His popular approach, apparently aimed at introducing general audiences to the most familiar highlights of this brilliant career, could be justified as a way to blow the dust off the director's reputation and reinvigorate interest in his work. After all, though universally recognized for its historical significance, Eisenstein's output now represents a kind of art cinema that lives more in textbooks and film school classes than in modern film culture.

However, as it hops, skips and jumps across the biographical facts, Bartlett's script arguably reduces a complex personality to a burgeoning ego who is also grappling with his gay identity. While tossing out slogans, the film fails to adequately formulate the ideas which propelled the director. Eisenstein rose out of the avant-garde, won acclaim for his first films, but foundered in Hollywood and Mexico, and then encountered repression in Stalin's era, yet eked out more excellent work. If this sounds like a satisfactory précis of Eisenstein's career, then this movie is for you. Yet the film teems with untold stories waiting neglected in the shadows.

Opening in 1922, when engineering graduate Eisenstein follows a marching phalanx of young people clad in blue jump suits and red caps into a rehearsal conducted by the imperious theatrical innovator Meyerhold, Bartlett produces some amusing (if condescending) recreations of the Constructivist stylings of the period. When he conflates Eisenstein's design work for Jack London's "The Mexican" with his actual production of "Gas Masks" staged in a gas factory, this can be chalked up as a forgivable convention of film biographies, similar to the cast's British accents.

The production's lavish use of location shooting in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Mexico makes an attractive bonus (when we watch Eisenstein scouting locales for Battleship Potemkin, seeing the actual Odessa Steps proves surprisingly affecting, though the chance appearance of a baby carriage does not). Other filmmaking details look credibly accurate, such as a partial recreation of Kuleshov's famous experiment with Mozhukhin that established the power of montage. (Less convincingly, another scene has Eisenstein manning a camera, but so seriously undercranking it that the result onscreen would be unwatchable chaos). Brief snippets from Eisenstein's actual films are shown, often projected in clever contexts: for example, as images seen through a camera viewfinder or on an editing machine.

Yet, as Bartlett attempts no organizing interpretation of Eisenstein's life (beyond the recital of an artist's struggle to express himself within the social and political conditions of his time), the result is a biography with a one-damn-thing-after-another structure, relying on the considerable energy and imagination of scraggly-haired Simon McBurney's performance to fill in the gaps in psychological truth. Despite the actor's committed characterization, one may question the emphasis on Eisenstein the prankster, consumed with facile wordplay and clowning, compared to the short shrift given to Eisenstein the intellectual and theoretician.

The Que Viva Mexico sequence, as problematic for Bartlett as it was for Eisenstein,
is conceived as a hedonistic wallow that becomes a hell when Eisenstein's lover Grigori Alexandrov spurns him and the film's backers (never named as Upton Sinclair) stop the cash flow. What's fatally missing in this sequence is any psychological or dramatic indication to account for his behavior. Was Eisenstein surrendering to into steamy self-indulgence in frustration with the crassness of Hollywood? Did Mexico free him from the constraints of his own culture, or was this his despairing reaction to the compromising of the revolution ideals that had driven him for a decade? Was he finally embracing his identity as a gay man? (If so, then why is the sexual content here so oblique?)

To explore the gay theme, why not dramatize the scandal Eisenstein provoked with his pornographic drawings (glimpsed here from the collection preserved in Russia) which shocked Mexican customs agents? Such a scene would beg for a stirring speech from the Soviet artist to espouse sexual freedom. In fact, despite the impressive widescreen landscapes in Yucatan locations, the film barely tries to convey any sense of interaction with Mexicans. (For that matter, where was the cinematographer Edouard Tissé while these shenanigans were going on?) And why not mention Sinclair's impounding of the Mexican footage which Eisenstein considered a major loss that depressed him for years?

No biographical film can avoid the eliding and fictionalizing of characters, so it seems fair enough to paint Alexandrov as a career opportunist who went on to function as Stalin's go-between to the film world. Yet from this script Eisenstein seems no less an opportunist, doing what was necessary to continue working, cutting Trotsky's scenes out of October without complaint and refashioning The General Line to Stalin's agenda. It's also a tolerable fiction to have an old comrade show up at a Bolshoi rehearsal of 'Die Walküre' to upbraid Eisenstein for betraying his Jewish heritage by staging Wagner (but why not indicate that he was also conducting the orchestra?). Whatever its defects, this film still never descends to the theatrical grotesquerie and historical dishonesty of the portrayal of Murnau in Shadow of the Vampire.

Yet the true story is always more interesting. If commercial considerations demand a female role in a story largely without women, then why not tell the real story behind his marriage(s) of convenience rather than a contrivance like the 'meet-cute' scene of bickering in a library with the woman who would eventually become his first wife, let alone a later egregiously feel-good encounter over a milking-machine (made bearable by the pungent acting of Australian Jacqueline McKenzie)? Why not imagine a scene where Eisenstein explains why he entered into a second marriage of convenience (to a pupil of Stanislavsky) without bothering to divorce his first wife?

If Eisenstein's troubles in Hollywood are to be shown, why not write a confrontation at Paramount's front office showing why Hollywood and Moscow were such a poor fit? A passionate defense from Eisenstein of his An American Tragedy project while the brass scowl and scoff at the critical look at U.S. society would be both more compelling and more meaningful than this film's jokey press conference with Hollywood reporters.

Back in the USSR, the intellectual repression of the late 1930s culminates in the public denunciation of Eisenstein by his colleagues, staged under a gigantic portrait of Stalin, yet World War Two oddly passes through Bartlett's script without effect. Doesn't this linear narrative cry out for the drama of the bombardment of Moscow in 1944, forcing Eisenstein to uproot the huge production of Ivan the Terrible and move it to studios in Kazakhstan?

Even more linear than the narrative is Bartlett's visual style, quite handsomely accomplished by Alexei Rodionov, cinematographer of Klimov's impressive war epic Come and See. When the camera glides alongside Eisenstein as he runs through flames and smoke, the movement looks stylishly expressive, as does the swooping and swiveling crane shot that shows the gas factory theatricals. Yet these fluid visuals are the very antithesis of Eisenstein's assembly of static compositions, making for an undeniable (and surely unintended) irony in a film that celebrates the great exponent of montage.