Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 3/15/2025

Sergei Eisenstein

I've gone through the work of one other Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, who was more of a religious dissident than a loyal propagandist for the Soviet regime. However, there's one Soviet filmmaker that stands above them all: Sergei Eisenstein.

Born in Tsarist Russia in 1898 (technically, the Governorate of Livonia), Eisenstein entered film through the theater. Working experimentally on stage, he had the perfect mindset for a nascent Soviet film industry looking for ways to break from Western traditions in art but also to keep costs low. His first film, Strike made in 1925, told the story of a workers' strike in 1905, part of an ambitious plan to make six films detailing the workers' revolution from 1905, the first Russian Revolution (which failed), through 1917 and the October Revolution that saw the Bolsheviks overthrow the Provisional Government. Strike wasn't a huge success, but the second film Eisenstein made, came out less than a year later.

Battleship Potemkin is one of the most influential movies ever made. It goes well beyond the well-known Odessa Steps sequence (directly inspiring things like The Untouchables) and into how to create coherent sequences through non-linear editing. The dominant mode of editing in film had been much more influenced by Melies and, mostly, D.W. Griffith: editing shots in sequence that logically cut together to convey a string of events. Eisenstein, instead, built sequences, in particular the final sequence of two naval vessels steaming towards each other, out of disparate parts (engine pistons moving, earnest looks from sailors, deck guns with flags waving above them) which put the effects that he had first attempted in Strike in a much more popular film.

And yet, both those two first films, and the next five completed films, are 100%, unquestionably propaganda for the Soviet Union. Eisenstein's career lasted from 1925 to 1945 with the screening for Ivan the Terrible Part II: The Boyar's Plot for Joseph Stalin (Stalin hated the film, refused to allow its release, Eisenstein never completed a film again and died three years later). That creates two main themes to me when discussing his work: the revolutionary aspect of his approach to storytelling and the changing needs of propaganda.

Editing

When the Soviet Union was new, the country was poor. Its film industry extended to the Tsarist era, including even the first animated film in history, but Lenin, new leader of a minority party in total control of the government through a violent overthrow of the temporary order, saw cinema as a key building tool for establishing his party's dominance on the culture. Putting his wife in charge of the national film industry, he established a film school in Moscow where taught Lev Kuleshov, the father of the idea of montage. Eisenstein was his student.

With Lenin's directive for cinema's importance, Kuleshov's influence, and the expense of film stock, the stage was set for Eisenstein to carve a new way forward for narrative filmmaking (alongside fellow student Vsevolod Pudovkin).

Speaking of the expense, it's necessary to talk about how much film stock simply gets wasted during a typical production. Extremely efficient productions use about a third of the film that they shot (pre-digital, of course), but those productions were rare. What I've read is that an average production would shoot for a 1:12 ratio of usable film against "wasted" film, film shoot or trimmed that doesn't make it into a final film. So, for a two hour film, you expect to have twenty-four hours' worth of film shot. Each frame of film costs money, so if you're a poor production (or a poor industry), you look for ways to cut that cost more than usual (even MGM at its height tried to cut film stock cost).

Imagine for a minute that you are filming a shot that lasts for 30-seconds. The average says that you'll end up shooting 360-seconds to get that 30-seconds (Kubrick would shoot a lot more, Hitchcock would shoot a lot less, it's an average). That's a lot of film, and a 30-second shot will include people hitting marks, saying lines, lights getting in place, a whole host of things. The 30-second shot is probably going to be on the high end range of getting retakes.

Now, imagine that you've gone into the production with the idea of creating the whole thing through montage. You just need quick, 1-3 second long shots of people looking this way or that, turning around, establishing shots, etc. Do you need to do those twelve times on average? Most likely not. You're designing your production to be more efficient with its precious film stock. And that's exactly what Eisenstein did. The average shot length for Strike is 2.5 seconds. The average shot length for Battleship Potemkin is right around 2 seconds. As a comparison, Michael Bay's Transformers has an average shot length of...just over 3 seconds.

In addition to the limited shot length due to poverty, there were limits to what Eisenstein could do with physical production. I mentioned the battleships at the end of Potemkin barreling towards each other, and we hardly see any long shots of either of them. We don't see both in the same shot until the chase is over. Eisenstein apparently didn't have the money or resources to show two battleships running at each other (I was reminded of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Battle of the River Plate where the pair were given nearly unfettered access to Royal Navy ships to make grand sequences of naval vessels maneuvering around the open sea), so he had to build it through editing. And he did that through shots of random things with a strong focus on them all feeding the same core idea at the heart of the sequence.

Really, it's kind of amazing how well that sequence works. And I focus on Battleship Potemkin because it's the most famous, but he kept on this tract for several more years through October: Ten Days that Shook the World, the recreation of the revolution through 1917 ending with the storming of the Winter Palace, and The General Line, Eisenstein's first film with a main character about a young woman who fights to create a kolkhoz and modern farm in the earliest days of the death of the old order and the birth of the new.

Early Needs


And that brings me to the needs of propaganda.

Eisenstein's first three films are the story of masses of people. There are hardly any individuals, and the only ones who make serious impressions are victims of the previous regime (a factory worker in Strike, the sailor Grigory Vakulinchuk in Battleship Potemkin, Lenin as a supporting character in October: Ten Days that Shook the World, though reportedly Trotsky was effectively the main character before Eisenstein was forced to remove him almost completely, he appears in a single shot). Those first three films feel decidedly revolutionary in spirit with the ideas of the communist takeover of the nation: the eradication of the individual in favor of classes, the proletariat as the only important character with victims/leaders being the only important individuals to highlight at all.

The General Line breaks from that, focusing on the female farmer Martha as she struggles against kulaks and with a Communist Party representative to introduce a dairy separator, convince the people to give up their wages for the collective pot to buy a bull, and to get a new tractor fresh off the communist factory lines, to work well for the first time (the irony of a brand new, Russian-made tractor immediately breaking down in the field was seemingly lost on everyone involved).

With that done, Eisenstein made the greatest mistake he could make in his career as a propagandist for the Soviet Union: He went to Hollywood. What follows is a nine-year period where he never completed a film, mostly spending time in Mexico with money supplied by people like Upton Sinclair to make a film about Mexico. He ran out of money, the stock was impounded, and the film didn't get back to the Soviet Union until a couple of decades after his death. Eisenstein's directing partner on October and The General Line, Grigori Aleksandrov, assembled a 90-minute long film that approximated, according to him, what Eisenstein had been trying to do.

The Meadow


That brings us to one of those fascinating things in the annals of film history: the completed film that was intentionally lost. Returning to the Soviet Union after the failure to even complete something in support of socialist upheaval in Mexico, Eisenstein took on the project of Bezhin Meadow. He apparently filmed two completely different versions, neither of which appealed to Soviet censors who ordered the film destroyed once they decided that it was unsalvageable. All that survives are individual frames that Eisenstein himself saved which an editor has put into order to roughly tell the story (it's borderline incomprehensible but available on The Criterion Channel for those really interested).

It's not often that completed films get actively destroyed. Films got lost all the time back in the day. Little films forgotten, left to decay in a vault, or even famous films lost in a fire, but a person or organization taking a film and literally burning it because they don't want it seen? That's unusual.

A lost film, though, wouldn't be that noteworthy if it weren't for this: "[I will] rid myself of the last anarchistic traits of individualism in my outlook and creative method." It's part of Eisenstein's apology he had to publish in Pravda for even trying to make the film in an essay called "The Mistakes of Bezhin Meadow." It's a piece of self-criticism where he admonishes himself for focusing on a real event (the murder of a child by his father) that was atypical of life in the Soviet Union, not exemplative, and his emphasis on formalistic tendencies rather than social realism. Think of the montage itself. It's not real. It's created reality, formalistic, and distanced from the real world that we see day to day.

The needs of the revolution had changed because the revolution was over. It was the late 30s. Lenin had been dead for more than a decade. Stalin had cemented power, and the calls for revolution couldn't be quite that overt or didactic anymore. Revolution against the established order now mean revolution against Stalin, so propaganda had to change with the time.

Heroes


The fallout from Bezhin Meadow was...much worse than you realize. It seems to have been part of a series of domino falls (Domino Theory! Ha!) that led to the execution of Boris Shumyatsky, the head of the Soviet GUK, the film division of the government. It looked like Eisenstein would never get the chance to film a movie again, but his reputation for Battleship Potemkin was strong enough to get him to make a film about the Russian war hero, Alexander Nevsky in 1938.

Alexander Nevsky was Eisenstein's return to prominence, and it was obvious that he had an official over his shoulder the whole movie. Quite literally. There's a credit for Dmitri Vasilyev called "with the collaboration of Dmitri Vasilyev". Vasilyev did not have many directing credits (nine total), and all but two of them are some variation of that collaborative one he shares with Eisenstein. The Criterion Collection's essay in the DVD release calls him the "studio-appointed watchdog". It also says that the writer on the film, Pyotr Pavlenko, was most likely secret police, Pavlenko having never worked with Eisenstein before or after.

But, it worked. Nevsky is one of two films Eisenstein made that average cinephiles can name (the other being Potemkin), and it was hugely successful in the Soviet Union. Eisenstein even made efforts to draw explicit parallels between the Russia hero and the Soviet Union's leader in an essay for Izvestia, a Russian newspaper. And it holds up really well. It's straight propaganda, pro-Russian and anti-German in that awkward period between Hitler's rise in Germany and before the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact when the two nations were antagonistic before WWII, but it's really entertaining and fun.

Villain


From all I have read and seen, being Russian is...complicated. Especially for its leaders. The history of Russia is long, bloody, and decidedly medieval, and the unification of the separate boyar fiefdoms into a singular Russian empire under a single tsar was not a peaceful process. However, that's exactly what Eisenstein decided to tackle: a trilogy of films detailing the life of Ivan the Terrible, the first Tsar of all the Russias. However, this wasn't The Lord of the Rings, and Eisenstein made one film at a time.

The first was a huge hit, especially with Stalin personally. The portrait of a firm-handed dictator violently bringing Russia under control in opposition to the boyars' desires for personal power, all done in the name of the people, was the exact kind of propaganda that Stalin wanted. Pro-Russian. Pro-him. Pro-unification under him. It was everything he wanted.

The second part is the stuff of legends, though. Thankfully, Stalin only had it suppressed instead of destroyed, but nevertheless, he reacted very poorly. In Part II, Ivan is shown as being deeply paranoid, cruel, and violent. Reportedly, Stalin objected to the lack of framing around Ivan's actions, especially the birth of his secret police called oprichniks. Ivan's violent rule was, seemingly, viewed in too much isolation without cause.

Another aspect that could have negatively affected the film was how Eisenstein filmed it. I should note that I've largely stopped talking about editing since Eisenstein got back from Mexico, and there's a reason for that: after the failure of Bezhin Meadow, Eisenstein had to leave that kind of experimental montage behind forever. Nevsky and Ivan and very traditionally assembled. Heck, Nevsky could have been made by Cecile B. DeMille it's so traditional.

Ivan, though, returns to formalism, but a different kind. The second is more out there than the first, but performances are arch and affected, people are positioned in frame unnaturally to create interesting angles. It's almost like Russian icons come to life. The second has an extended color sequence (the only bit of film in color in Eisenstein's entire filmography), though, that is almost Lynchian in its portrayal of a descent into madness. It's extreme, and I loved it completely. It's also a marked departure from the more realistic efforts at dramatizing cinema Eisenstein started (with authorities influencing every decision) in Alexander Nevsky).

Essentially, it was probably two major factors that led to the cancelling of Part III, which had already started filming and of which about five minutes survive.

Propaganda


There is no question that Eisenstein exclusively worked in literal propaganda. There could be some kind of exception for Strike since it seems to have been financed independently instead of by the literal government, but that's a distinction without a difference. All seven were propaganda. Que Viva Mexico was meant to be socialist propaganda for a socialist Mexico. Bezhin Meadow was destroyed because, officially, Eisenstein didn't portray the ideals of the government cleanly enough.

What interested me was how the needs of propaganda changed. Eisenstein's earliest films have no main characters. They are the story of the revolution told through the masses, a deeply socialist outlook on how there should be no individuals dramatized in cinematic form. However, when he returned to Russia after his Mexico experiment, and after the failure of Bezhin Meadow, he made propaganda of a very different sort: nationalistic hero worship. No longer were there stories of revolution. It was actually stories of established figures (Nevsky had already beaten the Swedish army when his film starts), consolidating power in Russia to more effectively face off against external threats (in Ivan those are more conceptual than literal, so much time spent on the boyars, but we do briefly see King Sigismund of Poland at the start of Part II).

I have no idea what kind of stories Eisenstein wanted to tell as an artist. The closest was probably Bezhin Meadow, but its incomplete form is very difficult to parse. What we got was how he wanted to tell stories: experimentally. He was going to bend rules visually no matter what the story was, at least. Even the early embrace of the masses as characters is an experiment, even if it dovetailed nicely with socialist narrative needs. Or, that idea of the masses as characters could have come from a deeply ingrained desire to advance the revolution through cinema.

I wouldn't trust a whole lot of Eisenstein's public remarks about intention, though. He was a party man in a party system using party organs whenever he needed to say anything publicly. Privately, he was seemingly gay in a system that sentenced gay people to long prison sentences and hard labor. He was on the wrong side of authorities because of his self-admitted "individuality". Maybe he was a dedicated idealogue. Maybe he was just someone caught in the system. Maybe he didn't hold strong political beliefs at all. I dunno. Based on his films, though, I see an artist straining against the limits of a totalitarian system, and doing it very well.

Eisenstein was one of the fathers of one of the major strains of editing. He made good films, even some great ones (seriously, Battleship Potemkin is just quality filmmaking, even if it is anti-Tsarist propaganda). Is he worth discovering? Yeah, very much so.

Just know what you're getting into.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Novocaine

Black Bag

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Strike (Rating 3/4) Full Review "There's hardly any depth to it, and it's nakedly propaganda for the newly risen communist rule under Lenin. However, it's an interesting and, honestly, entertaining little film." [Personal Collection]

Battleship Potemkin (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It works, and it works really, really well." [Personal Collection]

October: Ten Days that Shook the World (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's a good exercise in propaganda, but not much else." [YouTube]

The General Line (Rating 3/4) Full Review "In some ways, this is my favorite of Eisenstein's silent films, but it's also his least in some other ways." [YouTube]

Alexander Nevsky (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's a high quality entertainment that just happens to be propaganda for the Soviet Union." [Personal Collection]

Ivan the Terrible: Part I (Rating 3/4) Full Review "And it's no surprise to think that Stalin loved the film. It justified and glorified him by implication. It was propaganda for his reign as the supreme and unquestioned ruler of Russia. That it's still a well-made film with something to latch onto is praise to Eisenstein, but approaching the story of Ivan as a drama rather than thin praise for Stalin would have made a better story." [Personal Collection]

Ivan the Terrible Part II: The Boyars' Plot (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's part musical, part fever dream, and part nightmare. Its closest cinematic relation I can think of is the Powell and Pressburger film The Red Shoes." [Personal Collection]

Tower of London (Rating 3/4) Full Review This is far from high art. It's dragging Shakespeare a couple of levels lower than normal, but Corman attacks the material with verve and a sense of darkly humorous fun. Really, I had more fun with this than most of Corman's work." [YouTube]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 4/5, and it will be about the directing career of Roger Corman.