Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict (Hardcover)

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Amazon.com Review

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 Hogan

From Publishers Weekly

A colleague of the great Soviet director once remarked, "I am absolutely convinced that Eisenstein was a Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century." This biography argues for the validity of that claim. Drawing on the many documents that have become available to researchers since the end of the Cold War, Bergan's study ranks as a clear improvement over the last Einsenstein biography published in English, a translation from the Russian that appeared 25 years ago. For instance, Bergan demonstrates, as Eisenstein's previous biographer, Marie Seton, did not, that the director's celebrated development of montage was rooted in a long study of the visual arts, providing him with a mental backlog of images to realize on screen. Quoting heavily from Eisenstein's posthumously published memoirs, Bergan reveals that somewhere between the meticulously organized work of the former engineering student and the inchoate gay sexuality and occasional childishness of the private man lay a sensibility at once polymathic and in touch with the most elemental human emotions. The biographer also examines Eisenstein's abortive sojourns in Hollywood and Mexico with an incisiveness missing from Ivor Montagu's first-hand account of the period. Finally, Bergan presents the most detailed picture yet of Eisenstein's love-hate relationship with the Stalin regime, whose combination of meticulousness, philistinism and cruelty echoed the circumstances of the director's upbringing. Despite Bergan's effort to portray Eisenstein as a human being as well as an artistic icon, something about the director still remains distant and impersonal when the book is finished. But this portrait goes further toward resolving the riddles of Eisenstein's career than its predecessors, and will reward the attention of anyone interested in either film or Soviet history. Photos.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 385 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087951924X
• ISBN-13: 978-0879519247
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,619,713 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The life of a great intellectual, November 20, 2001

By	Alessandro Bruno (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ronald Bergan shows that although Eisenstein was committed to the Bolshevik cause and contributed to its development, his films must, in no way, simply be dismissed as propaganda. Eisenstein pioneering visual techniques, explorations in montage and lyrical representations have earned him an indisputable position as among film makers.
The culminating scenes in `Strike!', for instance, are built on an alternating sequence of shots that show soldiers chasing and shooting the strikers while a butcher is slitting the throat of farm animals in the slaughterhouse. This allegorical interpretation of the Czar as a butcher wa not fully understood by a large portion of the viewing public, as Eisenstein himself witnessed when the film was shown in the rural areas throughout the country. Indeed, many farmers were unable to grasp the metaphor of the slaughtered beasts as an association of the Czar as a criminal, a butcher, a murderer of innocents because for farmers the killing of an animal did not constitute a crime.

The rally to arms in `Alexander Nevsky' culminated in the battle on ice scene (which runs for almost a third of the film). The scene, which Eisenstein duly prepared with the aid of sketches, appears as if inspired by the paintings of the Italian renaissance artist P. Uccello, as both show the violent clash of armor, horses, arrows, spears and iron.