Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict Book

Sergei Eisenstein's essays about the art of cinema have influenced film theorists for decades, but it was his films that redefined what cinema is capable of achieving--the "Odessa Steps" sequence from Battleship Potemkin, with its rapid cutting and juxtaposed images, is one of the most famous scenes in all cinema, and is often used as evidence of the power of film as an art form. For biographer and film historian Ronald Bergan, "Eisenstein, though his films are thoroughly Russian in content and context, belongs directly in the current of 20th-century Western art with such other 'cosmopolitan' Russians as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninov, Vassili Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Vladimir Nabokov, George Balanchine, and Sergei Diaghilev." A Life in Conflict is a fitting subtitle for this biography of the iconoclastic filmmaker, who was able to complete only seven feature-length films in a career spanning just over two decades, in the midst of frequent clashes with the Soviet Union's official tastemakers, including Joseph Stalin himself. (Among the book's highlights is a lengthy quotation from Eisenstein's journals transcribing a conversation he had with Stalin and other Soviet officials about "mistakes" in Ivan the Terrible, Part 2.) Critics have often denigrated Eisenstein for toeing the Communist Party line; Bergan reminds us that doing so was a simple matter of survival. Bergan also provides much more detail than previous accounts of the director's experiences in Hollywood under contract to Paramount, drawing upon Eisenstein's memoirs and Moscow archives. This personal material, which also helps contextualize decades of speculation about Eisenstein's sexuality and its relationship to his work, is perhaps the single factor that makes the biography worth reading no matter what one's degree of familiarity with the films. --Ron HoganRead More