7

Constructivism: Tatlin's Monument
and Eisenstein's Montage

The generation of the constructivists added the cult of the collective and the mass to the urbanism of the futurists. In the 1920s the umbrella term “constructivism” implied that the revolutionary artist should be a builder whose use of modern technology was both socially useful and aesthetically inspirational for the new mass audience. In technique, the constructivists retained the futurist juxtaposition of the unfamiliar, its antagonism, but added the vision of a mass culture. Two artists were particularly significant as examples of the constructivist outlook. The painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, in age a member of the futurist generation, created the most famous machine structure of the period, a monument to the Third International, the utopian aspirations of which were realized only in a scale model of 1920. The film director Sergei Eisenstein, a member of the constructivist generation, recreated the Revolution of 1905 in his film Potemkin in 1925; the film’s revolutionary heroes were a battleship and the anonymous masses. Both men pursued a revolutionary art of juxtaposition and construction.

I

Vladimir Tatlin was a lapsed architect who envisaged himself a Renaissance man and who turned his art to the support of the revolution after 1917. An avant-garde visionary, Tatlin sought to transform his private vision into useful public objects. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he hoped to realize Icarus’s dream of setting man free of the earth with wings of his own. To this end he designed and built a glider, which he named Letatlin, a combination of his surname with the Russian verb “to fly.” But he was best known for his monument of 1920, a massive double spiral of steel and glass which, if it had been built, would have exceeded the Eiffel Tower in height. Despite Tatlin’s fascination with the functional possibilities of art, as in his “productivist” designs for workers’ clothing and stoves, he remained a frustrated visionary. His glider never actually flew; it remained suspended from the ceiling of a bell tower at the Novodevichy Monastery in Moscow; his monument to the Third International never developed beyond a twenty-foot model to be paraded through the streets of Moscow in a horse-drawn cart—and even the model burned in a fire. Like the ideals of the Russian Revolution, Tatlin’s vision faded in the face of material limitations and political exigency.

The Western tradition that influenced Tatlin was a fusion of art and life, form and function, architecture and engineering. A central theme of all his work was the articulation of the perfect geometric forms found in nature. In part, this was a legacy of the Greeks : the perfect numbers of the Pythagoreans and the perfect geometric solids of Plato or Archimedes. Renaissance painters like Da Vinci and Albrecht Diirer also were fascinated with divine proportions, such as the Golden Section, a ratio of 1:1.618, which appears in numerous mathematical forms. In the nineteenth century Gustav Fechner claimed to find ideal ratios and forms in everything from the Parthenon and Greek music to the organic plant life of nature; Fechner’s ideas and his scientistic “psychophysics” later had considerable influence, via Ernst Mach and Lunacharsky, on Soviet artists in the 1920s, among them both Tatlin and Eisenstein. The form of the spiral was of particular interest to some European writers before World War I. Theodore Cook’s The Curves of Life (1914) and D’Arcy Thompson’s Growth and Form (1917) traced the appearance of the spiral in conch shells, staircases, towers, screws, plants, and other objects. Often this geometric tradition, in its search for perfect forms in nature, mixed the practical and the mystical, seeing a close relationship between man the builder and God the architect of the natural world.¹ The spiral of Tatlin’s tower and the rectangle of Eisenstein’s movie screen both reflected this general search for perfect form, as did Malevich’s square.

The idea that art should serve society was popular in the West before World War I, particularly among architects, who had long been interested in combining aesthetic beauty with the new materials and needs of industrial society. One of the great admirers of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 was Gottfried Semper (1803-1879), a German architect, who envisaged new areas of textile design, ceramics, metalwork, iron architecture, and industrial design schools. By 1914 his ideas were realized across the continent, especially by the Darmstadt architect Joseph Olbricht and the Berlin architect Peter Behrens. In addition to buildings (such as the German embassy in St. Petersburg, 1911-1912), Behrens designed a variety of useful objects: industrial brochures, fans, teakettles, stoves, and a turbine factory for his employer, the Allgemeine Elektrische Gesellschaft. Behrens’s offices in Berlin soon became a training ground for an entire generation of young architects, among them Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier.² In their careers, all went on to preach the virtues of an architecture of function as well as form.

There also existed a visionary and even mystical tradition in European architecture, especially in German expressionism. “Art is revolutionary,” wrote the Austrian architect Adolf Loos; it “shows mankind new roads and looks to the future.” Bruno Taut, another German architect, writing in 1914, urged the use of “constructive (aufhebenden) sculptures” in building design; he also admired attempts by Kandinsky and the Blue Rider painters to give art religious or spiritual meaning. The architect should build the “cathedral of the future” as a new form. In Holland, too, sources as diverse as Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses and cubist painting inspired the geometric building and furniture design of the De Stijl movement during World War I. “The machine,” wrote the twenty-eight-year-old German architect Eric Mendelsohn in 1915, “is already a law unto itself as the starting point of a new culture.”³

Theosophy provided one such vision. We have seen how the abstract painters Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich were, in different ways, impelled via theosophy to construct nonobjective works of art and to describe them in theosophical terminology. There were similar theosophical influences in architecture. Adolf Loos was a good friend of Rudolf Steiner, for whom he designed a house in Vienna. Erich Mendelsohn absorbed the doctrine through his painter friends Franz Marc and Kandinsky in Munich after 1910. Another friend of Steiner was Paul Scheebart, a utopian architect-writer who advocated the extensive use of glass as the building material of the future. In his book Glasarchi- tektur (Berlin, 1914), he urged the construction of glass and steel buildings for a “new glass culture” that would “completely transform mankind.” He also proposed that “towns and other places should always be distinguished by towers. Every effort must be made to lend enchantment to towers by night. Under the rule of glass architecture, therefore, all towers must become towers of light.”⁴ Theosophy naturally did not give precise guidelines concerning architecture (although Steiner later did just that in connection with the Anthroposophical Temple at Dornach), but it helped give architects a visionary rhetoric to inspire and describe their work.

Monuments were an integral part of these traditions in Western architecture. Their function was usually to memorialize the dead or to eternalize the transient. Monuments, whether actually built or not, were a familiar feature of the French Revolution. Art historians have devoted considerable effort to seeking prototypes for Tatlin’s own monument in everything from Athanasius Kircher’s painting of the Tower of Babel, through Etienne Boullée’s eighteenth-century tower designs, to Auguste Rodin’s 1897 monument to labor. All of these shared the common denominator of a helical or spiral form, but there is no real resemblance to Tatlin’s tower beyond this form, and no evidence that Tatlin ever saw, or imitated, such prototypes. More plausible sources of inspiration are the Eiffel Tower, which Tatlin saw in Paris in 1913, and the spiral monument designs of the Munich expressionist painter, Hermann Obrist, much admired by Erich Mendelsohn; in 1919 Mendelsohn designed and built a tower of his own in Potsdam as a monument to Albert Einstein. But again the Eiffel Tower provides a quite different type of iron revolutionary monument, and the abstract sculptures of Obrist provide only the spiral motif.

In sketching the background for the Tatlin tower, then, the intellectual historian must beware. Tatlin wrote little or nothing about which monuments he had seen or admired. One can say that in Europe before 1914 many young architects shared a common interest in geometric forms found in nature, including the spiral; wished to apply their art to practical and industrial use; hoped to employ steel and glass in constructions free of ornamentation; and described their work in visionary or mystical, sometimes theosophical, terms. All of this would have facilitated, but does not totally explain, Tatlin’s monument of 1920 in Soviet Russia. It is easier to see the source of Tatlin’s later “reliefs” and “counterreliefs” in Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-mades” and Picasso’s collages of 1913, or the inspiration for the Letatlin machine in the bird-like gliders of Otto Lilienthal. The point is that precedents for all of Tatlin’s subsequent creative experiments can be found in Europe on the eve of World War I.

II

Born in Kharkov in 1885, Vladimir Evgrafevich Tatlin grew up in a sprawling Ukrainian industrial town.⁵ His father was an engineer; his mother, a housewife who enjoyed writing poetry. But Tatlin barely knew his mother, who died when he was two years old, and he later grew to dislike both his father and stepmother. We know almost nothing else of Tatlin’s early life. In 1902, at seventeen, he escaped from home by enlisting in the navy. His career as a sailor took him to exotic ports of call, especially in Turkey, Morocco, and the south of France. When Tatlin returned home in 1904, he discovered that his father had died. He now decided to embark on a career in art, and entered the N. D. Seliverstov Drawing Academy in Meyerhold’s home town of Penza.

A member of the southern provincial avant-garde, at the time of the 1905 Revolution, Tatlin, at twenty, was in appearance a tall, thin, sad- looking and shy young man, “rather like a fish,” as Natalia Goncharova later remembered him.⁶ Tatlin met Goncharova and Larionov shortly after 1905, and spent the summers of 1907 and 1908 at Larionov’s grandparents’ estate near Tiraspol on the Rumanian border. Larionov had been to Paris in connection with Diaghilev’s 1906 painting exhibit; under his influence Tatlin was soon experimenting with the bright colors of Van Gogh and the tilted shapes of Cezanne. Larionov’s own painting of Tatlin in a sailor’s uniform at this time captures this unlikely and idyllic conjunction of Parisian modernism and a Bessarabian estate. Shortly afterward Tatlin was persuaded to join the stream of provincial artists heading toward the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.

Around 1910 Tatlin entered the Moscow School, where he made friends with the sculptress Sara Lebedeva and the architect Alexander Vesnin. Leaving the Moscow School a year later, Tatlin, by 1911, was showing his works with the Union of Russian Artists in Moscow and the Union of Youth in Petersburg. Along with Larionov, he was one of a number of Russian art students painting in a Parisian manner. After exhibiting with Larionov at the Donkey’s Tail show of early 1912, he broke off relations with Larionov and joined the rival Jack of Diamonds group. In January 1913 Tatlin became a full member of the Union of Youth, and he continued to share a studio with Alexander Vesnin. Now an indigent provincial painter with few prospects, whatever his talent, Tatlin was nearly thirty.

Tatlin had his only direct contact with Western art in 1913, when he managed to leave Russia by signing on as a dancer and accordionist with a Ukrainian folk ensemble. At a reception in Berlin, according to one story, Tatlin imitated a blind musician so effectively that William II presented him with a gold watch; by selling it he obtained the money to go on to Paris. Here Tatlin visited Picasso in his studio, where he watched the artist make his collages—paper and wooden objects pasted on a board. He also asked Picasso for a job, but was refused. While in Paris, Tatlin visited the Eiffel Tower, that monument to the French Revolution constructed for the exposition of 1889. We know little about the trip, except that Tatlin returned to Russia in the autumn of 1913.

The Paris contact with Picasso apparently inspired Tatlin to move away from painting and toward a kind of sculpture during the winter of 1913-1914. Along with Kazimir Malevich, Tatlin left the Union of Youth and set up his own studio in Moscow. Here he joined forces with two painter friends of Malevich (A. V. Grishchenko and Aleksei Morgunov) and two women artists just back from their studies in Paris, Nadezhda Udaltsova and Liubov Popova. In May 1914 Tatlin opened his first one-man show in Moscow, consisting of what he called “synthetic static compositions.” Not surprisingly, these turned out to be constructions of wood and metal not unlike the collages and “ready-mades” he had seen in Paris. These “reliefs,” as Tatlin began to call the compositions, marked a definite move away from the flat surface of the canvas to the creation of objects in space, an approach that would ultimately lead him to the monument and the glider.

During World War I Tatlin moved into the field of architecture. Exempt from the draft, he continued to paint and to construct reliefs in his own studio. In need of money, he also worked as a decorator and an assistant to Vesnin, now an established architect. This relationship did not last long, for Tatlin proved too independent and unreliable. In January 1915 Vesnin wrote his brother that Tatlin would no longer be doing ceiling decorations for him; “As you warned me,” he wrote, “working with him would be impossible—and that is what happened. He was not very interested in this work, and although he always said that it was interesting and useful, he himself did none of it. He is now working on a screen for a plaster composition, which he will show at a futurist exhibit in Petrograd.”⁷

At the Tramway V exhibit of 1915 Tatlin’s reliefs created a certain sensation, and he even sold one to Shchukin. A few months later, however, the famous fist fight with Malevich ended their artistic and personal relationship; when Malevich published his little booklet on Suprematism, Tatlin followed with a booklet on the art of “counter-reliefs.” He also organized an exhibit of his own, Magazin (The Shop), in Moscow in March 1916. But by the time of the March 1917 Revolution, his collaboration with both Vesnin and Malevich at an end, he was artistically isolated and had achieved little success. ^Ill

III

Tatlin welcomed the revolution, although he played no active role. Within days of the abdication of Nicholas II, artists began to organize into various groups. On March 12 an umbrella organization known as the Union of Art Leaders (Soiuz deiatelei iskusstv) appeared, dominated by Alexander Benois and the artists of the World of Art. Tatlin joined a more radical group known as Freedom for Art (Svoboda iskusstvu), whose members included Meyerhold, Nathan Altman, and Alexander Rodchenko. To these artists, even the “left bloc” of the Union of Art Leaders seemed too conservative. The radicalism of the Freedom for Art group had more to do with artistic independence than with social transformation; unlike Mayakovsky, Tatlin did not immediately support the Bolsheviks.⁸ He was an observer, not a revolutionary participant.

In early 1918 Tatlin accepted the Bolshevik Revolution and began to lend his art to its cause. By January he had joined the Fine Arts Section of Narkompros, headed by Shterenberg. In 1917 he had spent some time decorating the avant-garde Café Pittoresque in Moscow and trying unsuccessfully to revive the Union of Youth; in 1918 he became head of the Moscow section of IZO-Narkompros. A number of artists were now flocking to Narkompros, not only because of ideological conversion but also out of personal need for food rations and supplies paid as salaries. In the summer of 1918 Tatlin headed a group of Moscow artists including Kandinsky, Malevich, and other avant-garde painters, whose task was to decorate Moscow for the revolutionary anniversary festivities of November 7. The celebration was to feature a parade in Red Square, fireworks, banners, posters, wall murals, and outdoor concerts. Here the diversity of the avant-garde was permitted full expression; the Internationale was sung along with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, portraits of Marx hung alongside those of Stenka Razin, a cubist monument of Bakunin was unveiled in the presence of a Petroushka puppet show on an automobile.⁹ Not himself a Bolshevik, Tatlin led artists in commemorating their revolutionary victory.

The revolution rewarded Tatlin with success. In 1919 he was given new opportunities as an art teacher in Moscow and in Petrograd. In Moscow he headed the painting section of the new Higher Art Studios (Vkhutemas) ; in Petrograd he became an instructor at the Free Studios (Svomas), where he organized his own workshop on “volume, materials, and construction.” Some artists engaged in easel painting turned their new freedom into frivolity; at the Tenth State Exhibit that year Malevich showed his “White on White” painting, and Rodchenko promptly replied with his own “Black on Black.” Tatlin was more interested in turning his art to practical use. At the Svomas studios he received a state salary to teach twenty or thirty art students according to his own system. For the first time Tatlin had the money and the opportunity to realize his vision of an art of material construction in space. The most striking result of that vision was his model for a monument to the Third International.

It is not known how or when Tatlin decided to construct the model. The Communist (Third) International, or Comintern, held its first congress in the spring of 1919, but Tatlin did not receive a commission to design a monument until September 1920. The movement known as “constructivism” came into being in August 1920 when Gabo and Pevsner posted their “Realist Manifesto.” Gabo had studied engineering before World War I in Munich, where he had also audited the lectures of the art historian Heinrich Wolfflin. From his engineering training Gabo had created a new kind of sculpture, an art in space using real objects and new materials, a kind of abstract sculpture for which he became best known abroad after his emigration from Russia. From Wolfflin he absorbed the idea that artistic styles and movements obeyed certain laws of form, developing over historical time as a “spiral movement.” In revolutionary Russia Gabo continued to shift his art from the easel and the drafting board into space, from painting to sculpture and volume. “Reality is the highest beauty,” he proclaimed, “we shape our work as the world its creation, the engineer his bridge, the mathematician his formulas of a planetary orbit.”¹⁰

Gabo’s constructivism immediately preceded Tatlin’s monument. Still, Gabo’s Munich engineering training and art theory had led not to functional buildings or revolutionary monuments but to new art forms. Tatlin moved toward a more socially useful art which, as we have seen, became known as “productivism” to distinguish it from constructivism. His art did not merely assemble real objects in space, as did sculpture; it turned materials into useful creations. His first such project was the monument to the Third International, designed to be exhibited at the third anniversary of the October Revolution in 1920. Within a month of Gabo’s manifesto, on September 7, 1920, Tatlin received a government commission of 700,000 rubles for the project. Under the inflationary conditions of the Civil War, however, this amount was barely sufficient to support Tatlin and his two assistants—T. A. Shapiro and I. A. Meierzon—for a single month. Together they came up with a design for the monument, described by Tatlin’s friend, the painter Nikolai Punin:

The main idea of the monument is based on an organic synthesis of the principles of architecture, sculpture and painting. It was to comprise a new type of monumental construction, combining a purely creative form with a utilitarian form. In agreement with this principle, the monument consists of three great rooms in glass, erected with the help of a complicated system of vertical pillars and spirals. These rooms are placed on top of each other, and have different, harmonically corresponding forms. They are to be able to move at different speeds by means of a special mechanism. The lower story, which is cubic in form, rotates around its own axis at a rate of one revolution per year. This is intended for legislative assemblies. The next story, which is pyramidal, rotates around its axis at a rate of one revolution per month. Here the executive bodies are to meet (the International’s executive committee, the secretariat, and other administrative executive bodies). Finally, the uppermost cylinder, which rotates one revolution per day, is reserved for centers of an informative character: an information office, a newspaper, the issuing of proclamations, pamphlets and manifestoes—in short, all means for informing the international proletariat; it will also have a telegraphic office and an apparatus that can project onto large screens. These can be fitted around the axes of the hemisphere. Radio masts will rise up over the monument. It should be emphasized that Tatlin’s proposal provides for walls with a vacuum in between (thermos), which will make it easy to keep the temperature in the various rooms constant.¹¹

A model for Tatlin’s monument was constructed in Petrograd at the Svomas studio in the autumn of 1920. Although the monument itself was to be built of steel and glass, the basic material used for the model was wood. The model consisted of a series of wooden laths nailed together as struts, with the spiral pieces constructed out of intersecting narrow pieces of veneer. The internal cube, pyramid, and cylinder were also made of wood, connected by ropes and pulleys, and rotated not by a machine but by a hand crank operated by a small boy. It was unveiled to the public in Tatlin’s studio on November 8, 1920, the day after the Bolshevik storming of the Winter Palace was reenacted with 8,000 actors to celebrate the revolution. Since the model was only twenty feet high, it was easily moved. In December 1920 it was shipped to Moscow for the Eighth Congress of Soviets, where Lenin was among its viewers. It was also paraded through Moscow on a horse-drawn cart under a banner which read: “Engineers Create New Forms.” Tatlin and his assistants wrote an accompanying artistic manifesto, which declared that glass and steel were the building materials of the future and that the task of artists was to unite “purely artistic forms with utilitarian intentions.”¹²

Tatlin’s moment of innovation was at best a limited success. The model attracted considerable attention, especially in European art circles, where Tatlin was seen as the creator of a new “machine art.” But under the more pressing conditions of the Civil War, critics reacted less favorably to his utopian dream. “Where are we to find the iron and other material (for its realization), so that the model can be a monument?” asked the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. Even Lunacharsky, who had subsidized the project, wrote two years later, “In my view the Eiffel Tower is a thing of real beauty in comparison with the twisted structure of Comrade Tatlin.”¹³ In the end the model burned in a fire; the monument itself was never constructed.

IV

Tatlin’s utopian dream was a characteristic component of early Soviet art. Intended to mythologize the revolution, the project could not be realized, given the economic difficulties and tightening political controls of the period. For its spiral form, its materials of glass and iron, and its utilitarianism, the plan for the monument drew heavily on European modernism in architecture, which was then hardly known in Russia. In addition to the Eiffel Tower, it appears to have drawn upon many sources common to German expressionist architecture. Both Obrist and Scheebart would have appreciated its spiral form and its intensive use of glass. Wölfflin would have found it typical of the “style” of the period. But it must ultimately stand quite alone as Tatlin’s peculiar vision of the revolutionary monument, an innovation which made him well known among both Russian and European artists at the age of thirty-five.

Above: Left to right. S. Dvmshits-Tolstaia, Tatlin, T. A. Shapiro, and I. A. Meierzon (seated), at work on Vladimir Tatlin’s model for a monument to the Third International, Petrograd, 1920. Below: Tatlin (with pipe) next to completed model. Photos courtesy of Troels Andersen.

In later years Tatlin suffered a gradual fall into oblivion. In the summer of 1921 critics demanded that his Svomas studio be closed down, which it was in 1922. For a while he joined Malevich and Punin in organizing a museum under the auspices of the Institute for Artistic Culture in Petrograd. He later produced a play by the futurist poet Khlebnikov entitled Zangezi, did textile designs for the Shveiprom factory, and taught art at the Institute. In 1924 he began designing a stove and clothing for practical use; the next year he rebuilt his model for display at the great exposition of decorative arts in Paris. That summer he became director of Teakino, a theater and film institute in Kiev. In 1927 he returned to Moscow to teach metalworking at Vkhutemas. In 1931 he received permission to use the bell tower of the Novode- vichy Monastery in Moscow to design and build a glider, Letatlin. Although Tatlin claimed only Icarus, Da Vinci, and the flight of cranes as his inspiration, the design closely resembled those of Otto Lilienthal in the 1890s, rather than the more sophisticated and streamlined gliders then in use in Germany and the Soviet Union. Actually, Letatlin was not avant-garde at all, but rather atavistic.

During the Stalin era, Tatlin virtually disappeared. Attacked for “formalism,” he turned to the creation of stage sets for the theater, still lifes, and work for the Soviet gliding club, DOSAAF. At his death in 1953 he was virtually forgotten.

There is little evidence that Tatlin ever shared the larger concern with death and immortality that we have traced in the life and work of other artists. His tower was one of many attempts to eternalize the revolution in art, and to use real materials to create useful objects for the proletariat. His artistic innovations—the reliefs, the monument, and Letatlin—belonged more to the European world of 1913 than to the world of early Soviet art. But their vision and individualism were typical of that culture. Tatlin’s constructivism was a remarkable example of the fusion of art and life through the combination of materials and of the desire to utilize the geometric forms of nature in engineering to facilitate man’s dominance over the natural world.

V

Like Tatlin, Sergei Eisenstein was an admirer of Leonardo Da Vinci and sought to create a new world through the fusion of the aesthetic and the practical. For Eisenstein, the Bolshevik Revolution was a Renaissance, and he considered himself a Renaissance man. Engineer, mathematician, artist, linguist, bibliophile, actor, director, and writer—the list of Eisenstein’s many interests and changing careers makes the comparison with Leonardo seem not so farfetched. Throughout his life Eisenstein was fascinated with Da Vinci, from the tormented oedipal figure invented in 1910 by Freud, through Leonardo’s paintings in the Louvre, to the unpublished notebooks at Windsor Castle, which Eisenstein saw in 1929. One of his favorite examples of a literary description of a potential film sequence was Leonardo’s terrifying word picture of the Deluge. Eisenstein’s own Renaissance came not through the written word or the painting, but through the novel medium of film.

Eisenstein’s moment of innovation occurred in the spring of 1924, when he first watched an editor at work in the cutting room, in this case on a German film, Dr. Mabuse, by Fritz Lang. Together with the films of Griffith and the Proletkult theater of Meyerhold, this experience started Eisenstein on the road to montage, a technique common to French cinema as well as to the photography of Hausmann, which Rodchenko and Mayakovsky had recently discovered in Berlin. For Eisenstein montage was not simply the combining of disparate shots into a new visual unity, but the collision of two objects in such a manner as to create or release tensions in the audience. Such a concept grew out of the fast-moving “attractions” or individual acts of the music hall and the circus, with their physical collisions of bodies, fists, and bicycles. What Eisenstein did was to translate theater into cinema, first in Strike and then in the film which made him famous, Potemkin.

Both the medium of film and the nature of Eisenstein’s own personal life gave him a strong sense of death and immortality. The editing process of film, he once wrote, gives dead material new life and transforms individual pieces of film into something quite novel. In his own life Eisenstein became increasingly fascinated with death and resurrection, especially during the making of the film Que Viva Mexico. The revolution, too, created a new world from the old, where the masses as a collective whole survived the death of any individual, such as the sailor Vakulinchuk in Potemkin. All of this gave Eisenstein a sense that his own work resurrected the events of the revolution on film:

Many of Eisensteins comments suggest the influence of Mach and Lunacharsky, with their notion that the self lives on through the memory of others. But through the agitational medium of film he contributed a metaphor of resurrection to early Soviet art that was quite his own.

VI

At the time Eisenstein moved from theater to film, Russian cinema was still largely a product of European and American sources. By 1925 the cinema in the West was an established art form and industry nearly a quarter of a century old. Germany and the United States were the main centers, where directors like Lubitsch, Lang, and Griffith were all well established, and newcomers such as Cecil B. DeMille and Robert Flaherty were already at work. The year 1924 witnessed the production of DeMille’s Ten Commandments, René Clair’s Entr’acte, and Eric Von Stroheim’s Greed, all now considered film classics of the silent era. In 1923 there were 467 films produced in the United States and 347 in Germany, a year when wartime recovery brought Soviet film output to 143 films.¹⁵ Many prewar Russian film directors had emigrated, and large quantities of film supplies had been destroyed during the revolution and the Civil War. Soviet cinema was far behind the West.

The process of editing was a familiar cinema technique by this time. In 1903-1904 Edwin S. Porter had broken his scenes into individual shots and recombined them in new sequences, as in The Great Train Robbery and The Life of an American Fireman. D. W. Griffith went beyond this in his film classics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Griffith shifted the camera angle in the middle of a scene, developed the close-up, panning, and tilting, along with other novelties such as the dissolve, the fade, and the iris. He was also the first to control the duration of a shot for effect, utilizing ever shorter intervals to build toward a climax. In Intolerance Griffith cut from story to story and period to period in mid-film, used extreme close-ups, blocked out sections of the screen, and divided the screen down the middle. These techniques made a great impression on the young Russian film makers who saw Intolerance after the revolution.

From the start, the cinema played an important role in the Russian Revolution. By 1917 the Russian film industry was well established and increasingly independent of the French companies that had dominated it prior to the war. During World War I a number of Russian cameramen and directors were employed by the government, filming scenes at the front under a wartime organization known as the Skobelev Committee. The Skobelev documentary (khronika) films provided some of the earliest shots of the revolutionary events of 1917, including Lenin at May Day festivities and the violence of the July Days. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Narkompros under Lunacharsky moved quickly to consolidate its control over film operations throughout Russia. It took over the Skobelev Committee, established new committees in Moscow and Petrograd, and in August 1919 nationalized the entire Russian film industry. During the Civil War, Russian directors worked under extremely difficult conditions. Many skilled operators had left the country, and the stock of negative film was low or nonexistent in most regions. Yet even in 1919 Lunacharsky anticipated the future significance that film would have as “revolutionary propaganda” for a mobile mythology appealing to the masses.¹⁶

In its early years, Soviet cinema was a rather crude art form, typified by the Civil War chronicles of Dziga Vertov (D. A. Kaufman) and others. Vertov made his first films on the original agit-train running from Moscow to Kazan in August 1918, serving as an assistant to Eduard Tisse, who later became Eisenstein’s cameraman. Vertov soon began putting together newsreels from the fronts, letting the camera eye open up to life around it with a minimum of staging or editing. In Vertov’s mind, art was a product of bourgeois society, and his own documentary realism, a revolutionary form of anti-art that reproduced life as it was. Tampering with the film through montage and editing was unthinkable. Yet Vertov soon developed his camera work into a skillful form that was crucial to the later films of the 1920s.¹⁷ Its central message was that the director should record reality, not create it.

The philosophy of another Soviet cinema pioneer, Lev Kuleshov, was quite different. Kuleshov, a student at the Moscow School before World War I, had turned from painting to cinema, creating his first film in 1917 at the age of seventeen. Even in this first experimental film, entitled The Project of Engineer Prite, Kuleshov combined separate shots of people in different places in order to make them appear to be together. Like Vertov, he worked for the Moscow cinema committee in 1918, but as an editor rather than as a cameraman. This job, combined with the Civil War film shortage, led him to editing as the central feature of film making. In 1920 he shot an entire documentary film On the Red Front on positive, rather than negative, film stock, splicing in old newsreels and staged scenes as needed. A great enthusiast of Griffith and “American editing,” Kuleshov taught Eisenstein and other students in Moscow in the early 1920s that the camera only recorded life, but the editor was the true creator of the final film. “Our mistake in life,” Kuleshov said bitterly toward the end of his life, “was that we were not the people who were to create the first revolutionary films, like Eisen- stein. Rather, we were people who laid the groundwork for creating revolutionary films.”¹⁸ Kuleshov, in other words, developed montage as technique, but Eisenstein utilized it to create a myth of the Russian Revolution.

VII

Eisenstein belonged to the generation of “constructivists,” which had barely come of age when the revolution broke out. Artistic innovation and revolutionary commitment were part of a process that had first swept over him as a young man. Born in 1898 in Riga, Eisenstein was the son of a German-Jewish municipal architect, Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, and his Russian wife.¹⁹ Like Meyerhold, he experienced the crisis of a mixed national identity at an early age, and he received a well-to-do upbringing. Like Dobuzhinsky, Eisenstein suffered the consequences of a broken home; his parents were divorced when he was still a boy. In addition, Eisenstein’s non-Russian origins were concealed by a Russian Orthodox baptism. All of this made for an unhappy and confused childhood.

Eisenstein came from Russia’s new middle-class intelligentsia. His father was a highly successful architect, prosperous, educated, and a jovial punster. He emerges in Eisenstein’s later recollections as a tyrant who directed the child toward an engineering career. His mother was refined, elegant, and well educated. The Eisenstein family was also cosmopolitan; German, French, and English were spoken in their home as often as Russian. The young Sergei Mikhailovich received more loving and constant care from his Russian nurse and housekeeper, a warm and superstitious peasant woman who wore amulets and charms and regaled the child with the lives of saints. Outwardly, Eisenstein’s childhood was modern, materially comfortable, cultured, and apparently unhappy as a result of his parents’ constant bickering. Inwardly, he experienced the more pleasant fantasy of the nursery, the imagined Russia behind the European exterior.

In 1905 his mother left her husband to live in St. Petersburg, taking with her the seven-year-old Sergei. Here, after furnishing an apartment, she sent the child back to Riga alone by train, locked in his own compartment. The following year father and son, on a vacation, visited Paris, where Eisenstein saw his first cinema. Upon his return to Riga, Sergei entered the local Realschule. Hypersensitive, isolated, lonely, he found new escapes through visits to the circus and the cinema with his governess, summer trips to the Baltic coast, and the world of books—Zola, Dickens, Hugo, and Dumas. He made very few friends, with the notable exception of Maxim Shtraukh, a future actor who became a lifelong companion. After a last attempt at reconciliation in 1912, Eisenstein’s mother left his father once again and emigrated to France. Sergei was fourteen.

Eisenstein’s unhappy family life heightened the usual adolescent tension between the world within and the world outside. He continued to follow in his father’s footsteps at the Realschule and, after 1914, at the Petrograd Institute for Civil Engineering. But he was unenthusiastic. In his spare time he sketched, painted, read books, and haunted the circus, where he identified most closely with awkward clowns, whose painted faces appeared to mask their inner selves. During World War I he lived with his father in Petrograd, pursued his engineering and architecture studies, and read voraciously on the commedia dell’arte theater of the Renaissance, art history, and Leonardo Da Vinci, including Freud’s recent psychobiography.

Eisenstein engaged in no political activity and played no role in the Russian Revolution. A nineteen-year-old engineering student in Petrograd in 1917, he had little awareness of the events raging around him. When the rebellious Izmailovsky guards regiment took over the Engineering School during the March Revolution, his class voted en bloc to join the militia. Dropping his engineering studies, he began to sell cartoons to Petrograd journals, thus displaying the first real evidence of his artistic talent. He watched the street fighting of the July Days from a hotel doorway, and in November noticed only that there was more noise than usual on the night that the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace. His main concern was that he could not see Meyerhold’s production of Lermontov’s Masquerade at the Alexandrinsky Theater because it had closed its doors.

The Russian Civil War of 1918-1921 was the crucial political experience for Eisenstein, not the revolution. In 1918 his father emigrated from Russia, and Eisenstein enlisted in the Red Army as an engineer. In this capacity he helped to construct pontoon bridges across the Neva River in anticipation of a German breakthrough and to build fortifications near the town of Kholm. In late 1919 Eisenstein was assigned to the Fifteenth Army’s Military Construction Unit Eighteen outside Velikie Luki. Here he found time to continue his reading—Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Hoffmann, and Schopenhauer—and to join a local army theater group. As far as we know, this was Eisenstein’s first involvement in the theater. By January 1920 he had written down a number of ideas on how to organize a Proletkult theater studio in the army, and within a few weeks his troupe was staging its first productions.²⁰

At twenty-two Eisenstein thus began to strike out on his own amid the turmoil of the Civil War. He had joined the Red Army to pursue his father’s initial career of engineering; in its ranks he embarked on his own career, in the theater. The revolution he had barely noticed thus began to change his life. In Eisenstein’s words: “It took the shattering of the foundations of the country and two years of technical engineering work on the Red fronts in north and west to make the timid student break the chains of the career worked out for him by solicitous parents from early youth, abandon an almost completed education and assured future, and plunge into the unknown future of an artistic career.”²¹ Like that of other members of the “constructivist” generation, Eisenstein’s formative experience was not the influx of ideas from prewar Paris and Munich, but the domestic crucible of revolution and civil war.

VIII

From the Red Army Eisenstein passed into the world of Proletkult, organized by Rogdanov and Lunacharsky to draw the average worker and soldier into mass art. The Red Army provided him with more opportunities to dream of theater than actually to create; he filled his notebooks with sketches and ideas, but lacked the facilities to realize them. When he was demobilized in the autumn of 1920, he went to Moscow with the intention of studying Japanese, a language that always had fascinated him because of its combination of the pictorial and the semantic. In Moscow he ran into his old Riga friend Maxim Shtraukh, now an actor, who suggested that they go to work for one of the many Proletkult theaters subsidized by Narkompros. Proletkult was then as much a haven for unemployed actors, writers, and artists, as for ordinary workers. Shtraukh found a job doing scenery and costumes for a play entitled The Mexican, taken from a Jack London story; he arranged with Eisenstein to work with him, and invited him to share an apartment with him and his wife.²²

Eisenstein discovered that Proletkult theater lacked actors and money for sets and costumes, not to mention adequate salaries. Its repertoire was borrowed heavily from the circus, the carnival, and the music hall. Proletkult productions usually featured fast-moving episodes known as “attractions,” a word taken from fairground and music hall terminology, and emphasized physical movement and slapstick: tightrope walking, juggling, fist fights, and somersaults. Eisenstein employed all of these techniques in his production of The Mexican in 1921, undoubtedly repeating his earlier enthusiasm for the circus. He placed wigs and plaster patches on his actors, staged a boxing match, and in other ways destroyed the accepted unity of action, having several on-stage performances in progress at once. Overnight Eisenstein became a young sensation of the Moscow theater world.

The real center of Moscow professional theater at that time was, not Proletkult, but the First RSFSR Theater of Meyerhold. In 1918 Lunacharsky had appointed Meyerhold head of the Theater Section of Narkompros, where he produced works under the slogan “October in the Theater.” Among his early productions were Mayakovsky’s Mystery- Bouffe and Verhaeren’s Les Aubes (The Dawn), a favorite play of Lunacharsky, which set revolution within the Christian context of resurrection.²³ Meyerhold had also become head of the new State School for Stage Direction; Eisenstein enrolled in the school in the autumn of 1921.

While Meyerhold’s training introduced Eisenstein to the rich tradition of Western theater, it also reinforced the Proletkult emphasis on body movement, rather than the spoken word, as the essence of the stage. In his lectures in 1921-1922 Meyerhold taught that the director should control and dictate every action of the actor (a main principle of Stanislavsky) and that what the actor said mattered less than how he moved and gesticulated. In part, these ideas reverted to the pre-1914 theories of Fuchs and Gordon Craig, which, as we have seen, enjoyed considerable popularity in Russia. But it also took on new connotations in the “biomechanics” gymnastic exercises designed to relate the actor’s movements to the motions of the worker at the bench, in the manner of Taylor’s time-and-motion studies, then popular in Moscow. Meyerhold had all his students engage in some acrobatic exercises, a physical training program in which Eisenstein took great delight. By the end of 1921 Meyerhold had become deeply impressed by Eisenstein’s brilliance, and he became a kind of spiritual father to the young man. He greatly admired Eisenstein’s production of The Mexican.

Meyerhold was not the only director to stress theater as artifice, rather than imitation of reality. Eisenstein worked for a time in the MASTFOR studio of Baron Foregger von Greiffenturm, a Kiev philologist-turned-director and friend of Eisenstein’s fellow theater student, Sergei Yutkevich. Foregger was an enthusiast of the commedia dell’arte theater of stock characters and masks, and probably encouraged Eisenstein in his later use of “typage” in film, using an ordinary person who physically resembled the type of character he would play. In 1922 Eisenstein toured Leningrad with MASTFOR and encountered yet another theater group, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) of Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. Kozintsev and Trauberg, teenage actors from Kiev, reinforced Eisenstein’s interest in physical movement with their interest in boxing, ju-jitsu, and gymnastics.²⁴ Involved in organizing a new film studio as well, they were fans of Charlie Chaplin and popular American actors such as Pearl White, Lon Chaney, and Billy West. For Kozintsev and Trauberg, the antidote to bourgeois culture was the circus, the Western, and the detective story. Their techniques reached the screen in 1924 in the photographic tricks and acrobatics of The Adventures of Oktiabrina.

Thus when Eisenstein returned to Moscow in the autumn of 1922 he was familiar with the physical collisions of the “attractions” and the new possibilities of film. Still, he remained in the theater. With Sergei Yutkevich, he produced a commedia dell’arte parody of a play by Arthur Schnitzler, transformed from Columbine’s Scarf to Columbine’s Garter. In their version of the play, Pierrot became a bohemian, and Harlequin a capitalist banker. It was a far cry from Meyerhold’s production of Balaganchik with the same characters. The “attractions” included a scene where Harlequin enters on a tightrope; prompted by Yutkevich returning from an afternoon at a carnival, Eisenstein decided to call his method “stage attractions.”²⁵ Foregger ultimately would not produce the play, and Eisenstein took on a new job as Meyerhold’s assistant in a production of G. B. Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Here again, Eisenstein planned to use eccentric attractions, somersaults, and other acrobatics, but the play never opened, and Eisenstein broke away from Meyerhold, much as Meyerhold had broken with Stanislavsky fifteen years earlier. By 1923 Eisenstein was again on his own; he later remembered: “I was, beyond all argument, unlucky with my fathers,” first the real one and now the adopted one, Meyerhold.²⁶ He was twenty-five and had not yet found a vehicle for his innovative creativity.

The catalyst for Eisenstein’s moment of innovation turned out to be Proletkult, which encouraged his shift from theater to film. In fact, his theory of the “montage of attractions” grew out of theater in 1923, although it was effected in film only in the course of the next two years. In the autumn of 1922, fifteen members of the Central Proletkult Theater in Moscow seceded and formed their own theater known as Peretru (Peredvizhnaia truppa, or Wandering Troupe). At their request, Eisenstein agreed to direct them. He immediately launched classes in which he taught the techniques learned from Meyerhold: circus art, gymnastics, boxing, fencing, and voice training. Eisenstein’s first Peretru production was Ostrovsky’s Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man, in which he worked out in practice some ideas described in his theoretical article on the “montage of attractions,” published in LEF in January 1923.²⁷ According to Eisenstein, an attraction was simply an “aggressive moment” which shocks the audience, as for example, the Théâtre Guignole in Paris, which terrified audiences of the time by on-stage gouging, knifing, amputation, and other niceties. A montage of attractions was a combination, or “colliding,” of such actions according to the whim of the director. In Wise Man Eisenstein created these effects by seating the audience around a stage resembling a circus arena, with attractions such as juggling, tightrope walking, singing, political satire, water squirting, firecrackers, and acrobatics following one another in dizzying succession. He also showed a film in the middle of the play to illustrate Glumov’s dream. The film was a comic parody of the early news films of Dziga Vertov. Indeed Vertov was initially engaged to supervise its production, but he walked out after one session with Eisenstein. The shooting of the film was rushed through in two days, just in time for the opening performance.

By 1923, then, Eisenstein had arrived at the montage of attractions through theater, not film. The theory had echoes of American films, the British music hall, French cinema and theater, and the circus. The basic principle of juxtaposing dissimilar objects for effect was also familiar to Russian futurist poets and linguists. One of Eisenstein’s close friends, Viktor Shklovsky, a student of the linguist Baudouin de Courtenay and a literary critic, argued that words should be “made strange” by unusual combinations and juxtapositions that made the reader take notice.²⁸ Shklovsky was also a member of Peretru.

Eisenstein continued to pursue his theatrical innovations for another year or so before converting to film. In the autumn of 1923 he produced Sergei Tretiakov’s agit-play Listen, Moscow!; in March 1924 he set the play Gas Masks in the middle of an actual gasworks in Moscow. Unlike Wise Man, Gas Masks was a failure; it closed after four performances. In the spring of 1924 Eisenstein was twenty-six—with a theater and a theory, but lacking fame or even a reputation outside of Moscow theatrical circles.

IX

In the spring of 1924 Eisenstein began to see the implications of montage for film rather than theater. The French word monter means, simply, to construct, and its cinematic derivative, montage, had been used for some time to describe the process of film editing. Lev Kuleshov had pioneered in the use of montage in Russia, but had developed it more as a cinematic trick than as a serious technique. Dziga Vertov had opposed its use as unwarranted interference in the recording process of the camera eye. In 1923 the term gained currency again in connection with the photomontage of Raoul Hausmann and the Berlin Dada artists, who were popular in the circle of intellectuals assembled around Mayakovsky and his journal LEF; among them was Eisenstein. In his LEF article of 1923 Eisenstein had developed the term into a theory of theater. But as of the spring of 1924 Eisenstein had never actually seen a film edited.

Eisenstein had, however, seen edited films. In 1921 he and Yutkevich attended a performance of Griffith’s Intolerance in Moscow, and the American director’s editing of the film to manipulate both space and time left a strong impression; Yutkevich called it a “revelation.”²⁹ Undoubtedly, Eisenstein had also seen the re-edited foreign films then popular in Russia. Alert cutting and splicing, along with suitable subtitles, easily turned the products of capitalist film industry into Soviet propaganda. Even Viktor Shklovsky found useful employment doing this for a time: “We re-montaged the American films which we received in minor ways, but skillfully and cheerfully,” he later recalled.³⁰ In one famous experiment Kuleshov pirated shots from old films of a monument to Gogol, the White House, and figures climbing church steps in Moscow, to create a completely imaginary landscape in which some Russians are climbing the White House steps near a monument to Gogol.³¹ The re-editing of old films was thus an answer to both the shortage of negative film in Russia and the need to propagandize the revolution. But it produced only crude anticipations of the great revolutionary films yet to come.

Eisenstein’s teacher in the art of montage was Esfir Shub, a young stenographer for Lunacharsky and later Meyerhold’s secretary in the Theater Section at Narkompros. When Eisenstein met her in 1922 she had just taken a job with Goskino, the State Cinema Committee, as a re-editor of both foreign and prerevolutionary Russian films. She soon answered Lunacharsky’s call for an increase in the production of propaganda films. “From 1922 to 1925,” she later recalled, “I had to re-edit and make subtitles for some two hundred foreign films which reflected their bourgeois ideology.”³² She introduced Eisenstein to re-editing in March 1924 when he observed her cutting-room work on Dr. Mabuse, a popular German film by Fritz Lang.

The German director Fritz Lang, like Eisenstein, had given up architecture and engineering to undertake a new career in film. Born in Vienna, he became a major director of German expressionist films in the 1920s. In 1919 he was to have directed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but the job ultimately went to Robert Wiene. In 1921 Lang produced the pessimistic and shadowy Der Mtide Tod (Tired Death), a dream sequence in which Death bargains with a young girl to save her lover. Dr. Mabuse, made in 1922, is typically expressionist in its evocation of a world dominated either by fate or by a sinister figure whose organization controls events. In this case Mabuse is an evil genius who heads a gang of thieves, counterfeiters, and murderers, who manipulate economic life in inflation-ridden Weimar Germany. Enormously popular in Germany, England, and France, the film was ideally suited for Soviet re-editing because of its stress on the evils of modern capitalism in the West.³³

Dr. Mabuse became the object of Eisenstein’s first experiment in montage. For a week he and Shub worked in the cutting room, shortening and editing the film for Soviet consumption by splicing and combining the most unrelated sections of Lang’s film with old films and newsreels. In this way the German expressionist film Dr. Mabuse emerged as the Soviet propaganda film Gilded Putrefaction, complete with new subtitles about the machinations of bourgeois society. Through this experience Eisenstein became aware of what Shub called “the magic power of scissors in the hands of an individual who understands montage.”³⁴

Within a few months Eisenstein and Shub went on to create a film of their own, Strike, for Proletkult. Strike was part of a larger Proletkult project, an eight-film series entitled Towards the Dictatorship, and Eisenstein immediately threw all his energies into it. He read books on the Russian labor movement, visited factories, and interviewed old party members and labor leaders. Boris Mukhin, the director of Goskino, assigned to him the skilled cameraman Eduard Tisse, also from Riga, who was to become his lifelong collaborator. Shub did most of the editing at her home during the autumn of 1924, while Eisenstein directed the shooting. Mukhin was not satisfied with the first two takes; he finally accepted the third. The resulting film was full of later Eisenstein techniques: elaborate attention to detail; massive crowd scenes using hundreds of extras; eccentric and acrobatic movements by Proletkult actors, as in the fight between striking workers and opposing boiler-plant mechanics; and montage effects, such as the comparison of the factory manager to a frog.

Strike, an experiment for Eisenstein, did not establish his reputation. Despite Shub’s editing, Goskino’s patronage and salaries, and Tisse’s camera work, the film was a box-office failure. Although pravda called Strike “the first revolutionary creation of our cinema,” other reviewers criticized Eisenstein sharply for his heavy use of eccentric and grotesque elements.³⁵ Crowd scenes required too many takes, at a time when negative film footage was still scarce. Shub left Eisenstein, feeling that she had received insufficient credit for her role in the film. Eisenstein himself perceived Strike as a failure, and he bemoaned the backwardness of Soviet cinema with respect to the film industry in America. The only course now, he felt, was to abolish the story and the stars altogether and to “push into the dramatic center the mass as the basic dramatis persona, that same mass that heretofore had provided a background for the solo performance of the actors.”³⁶ The failure of Strike thus caused Eisenstein to turn toward even more radical strategies of montage and collectivism—the use of the masses as hero.

X

Patronage opened the way for Eisenstein’s moment of innovation. On March 17, 1925, the commission to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution, meeting in Moscow, agreed to fund a number of projects. The commission, which included Lunacharsky, Meyerhold, and Malevich, also decided that “the central spectacle devoted to the events of 1905 in two large theaters of Leningrad and Moscow should be a great film.”³⁷ Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko, a thirty- six-year-old Armenian scriptwriter, whose husband happened to be on the commission, promptly began work on a scenario. The director was to be Sergei Eisenstein.

The initial plans were far more grandiose than the final result. On April 14, 1925, Eisenstein wrote his mother, “I will probably be filming a picture on The Year 1905 for Goskino—most interesting material.” The film was to encompass events of the revolution throughout the country, so that Eisenstein felt he would have to travel a good deal, “including the south where I will film an uprising in the fleet.” By early June, Goskino had accepted Agadzhanova’s scenario, Meyerhold had gone abroad to try to persuade Sergei Prokofiev to compose the score, and Malevich had been engaged to decorate the theater for opening night. Eisenstein’s cameraman was to be the veteran A. A. Levitsky. In early July Eisenstein promised the press a “grandiose” film that would be “a very popular picture for the worker and peasant masses,” in which the main hero would be “the single revolutionary mass of the proletariat.”³⁸ By late July 1925 preliminary research, interviews with revolutionary veterans, and script revisions were virtually complete. Yet the entire ambitious plan soon collapsed. Only Eisenstein’s power of improvisation saved the film and rendered it a classic.

The original script called for 250 shooting days and the use of 20,000 extras throughout the country. The project was to be completed by August 1926. A revolt on the battleship Potemkin, anchored off Odessa, was scripted merely as a prologue to the main film, which would be called 1905. The filming began well enough, with Levitsky shooting a printers’ strike in Moscow and a railway workers’ strike in Leningrad in August. Then problems developed. Meyerhold could not find Prokofiev in Paris. Eisenstein did not like Levitsky’s first shots. The naval fleet to be filmed in Leningrad had gone to sea on maneuvers. Finally, Leningrad’s weather was typically dismal, producing rain and fog instead of the sunshine necessary for successful filming.

The change to a film about the battleship Potemkin and Odessa was thus an accident. Odessa had better weather for shooting, and a number of old ships, permanently anchored there, were always available. In addition, in the Lenin Library, Shtraukh had discovered a French journal, L’Illustration, which contained a picture of a crowd on the Odessa steps that appealed to Eisenstein. The crowd and the steps merged with his childhood memories of street fighting in Riga and news of Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg; he began to imagine an event that had never actually occurred: a massacre on the Odessa steps. By August 24 Eisen- stein was in Odessa, where he engaged rooms for his crew at the Hotel London. Before breakfast the day after his arrival Eisenstein ran out to examine the setting for his film, a flight of 120 granite steps forty feet wide, descending in ten stages to the Black Sea harbor below. For a week Eisenstein sat on the Odessa steps making sketches, increasingly convinced that the Potemkin revolt, slated to be frames 170 through 213 of the original script for 1905, would now become the entire film. Limited resources and unfavorable circumstances steered Eisenstein toward his greatest film.

Taking control of the film, Eisenstein replaced the cameraman Levitsky with Eduard Tisse, then in Moscow; Tisse arrived in Odessa in mid-September. To his staff, Eisenstein added a group of friends from Proletkult who were known as the “iron five” because of the prison- striped shirts they wore: Shtraukh, Alexandrov, Mikhail Gomorov, A. P. Antonov, and A. I. Levshin. Men in their twenties, they all had followed Eisenstein in his move from theater to film. The initial sequences shot in Odessa turned out to be excellent. When they reached Agadzhanova in Moscow, she exclaimed, “Tisse is not an operator but a god.”³⁹

The obstacles in Odessa were no fewer than in Leningrad. The real battleship Potemkin had been scuttled, so it was necessary to use her sister ship, The Twelve Apostles. This was not easy, since it was chained to a rocky shore in the middle of a mine field left over from Civil War days and was used as a storage ship for mines and ammunition below decks. It therefore took little persuasion to keep noise, running, and smoking at a minimum during the shooting. Moreover, the ship had to be turned ninety degrees so that the shoreline would not appear in scenes supposedly taking place at sea. Since The Twelve Apostles had been partly dismantled for mine storage, Eisenstein had to rebuild the quarterdeck out of plywood, according to plans for the Potemkin located at the Admirality. Finally, scenes of the Russian battle fleet could not be filmed live, so Eisenstein had to use old newsreel footage of foreign naval maneuvers, probably British. An unintended result of this substitution, when the film was shown in Berlin in 1926, was an interpellation in the Reichstag about the apparent inadequacy of current German intelligence estimates of the Soviet fleet.

To make Potemkin on schedule Eisenstein had to improvise. Shtraukh scoured Odessa for suitable faces to fit Eisenstein’s “typage” conceptions of minor roles. The montage effect of a springing lion was achieved simply by separate shots of three stone lions, lying, sitting, and standing, at the Alupka Palace. Eisenstein and Tisse shot some of the best footage in the film in thick fog in the early morning, as an experiment. The terrifying scene of the tarpaulin thrown over the rebellious sailors about to be shot was invented by Eisenstein despite his naval adviser’s denial that the practice ever existed. The Odessa steps massacre itself was a brilliant fiction.

Arbat Square Movie Theater, Moscow, decorated for the opening night of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Potemkin, 1926. Decorations designed by Kazimir Malevich. From V. Shklovsky, Eizenshtein (Moscow, 1973).

By November 23, 1925, Eisenstein was back in Moscow with 4,500 meters of film for editing, leaving Tisse to shoot the final scenes. On Christmas Day 1925 Potemkin premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, which was decorated for the occasion by Malevich’s mock-up of a battleship. As the first two reels were being shown, Eisenstein was busy cementing the montage sections of the third reel with acetone and his own saliva. After racing to the theater on his motorcycle and running out of gas in Red Square, he managed to deliver the reel in time. The reel held together, and Eisenstein became a cinematic hero. “I awoke one morning and found myself famous,” he later recalled.⁴⁰

For the realization of his art, Eisenstein depended heavily on the contributions of others—editors, cameramen, and actors. The credit for Eisenstein's innovation must certainly be shared with Kuleshov, Shub, and Tisse. Many aspects of Potemkin turned out to be accidentally successful, rather than the result of anything planned. In later years Eisenstein liked to write of Potemkin as an example of montage techniques, carefully planned, and to describe a five-act plot structure modeled on the “golden section” of Fechner and the Greeks. But Potemkin was actually a marvel of improvisation, an act of genius, an overcoming of barriers, which achieved order and calculation only in later theory. French and American cinema, the British music hall, and German Dada with its photomontage all stimulated Eisenstein in his search for a cinema where the collisions of montage would articulate the revolutionary collision of the old and the new. Potemkin was the greatest example of that search.

XI

Like other artists in this study, Eisenstein was preoccupied with death and immortality in his life and in his work. His films abound with violence, conflict, and threatened death, from the boxing match in The Mexican, through his fascination with the sadistic Théâtre Guignole, to the bloody slaughter of oxen in Strike. They are also very much concerned with immortality and rebirth. The very process of montage is a form of rebirth: old film is regenerated in the hands of the editor. The result of juxtaposing two shots, Eisenstein once wrote, is not “a simple sum of one shot plus another shot,” but an entirely new “creation.”⁴¹ Christian metaphors are prominent in Eisenstein’s films; he even expressed his own uneasiness at becoming an official film maker in Christian terms: “We aren’t rebels anymore,” he complained in a letter written in 1928, “we’re becoming lazy priests. If you’re lording it with Jesus on the cinematographic Golgotha, I feel myself hanging at your side.”⁴² Such droll humor is reflective of Eisenstein’s more serious conviction that Christ’s death and resurrection provided an appropriate film metaphor for the Russian Revolution. In Eisenstein’s films, the death of an individual often heralds the birth of revolution, as, for example, the funeral of the sailor Vakulinchuk in Potemkin, which launches the revolution in Odessa. In October, made in 1927, Eisenstein again uses death to foreshadow revolution, with the dead horse on the drawbridge, the massacre on Nevsky Prospect, and the apparent explosion of the baroque statue of Christ.

As Eisenstein grew older, he expressed a growing sense of his own mortality and of the imminence of death. This sense became particularly acute after he was treated for a cardiac ailment in Berlin in 1929. During his trip to the United States in 1930 he sat in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York and said he experienced “the feeling of time turned off.” “The only important time,” he philosophized, “is the time you have to pass.”⁴³ During the filming of Que Viva Mexico later that year he became fascinated with the Mexican attitude toward death, as expressed in the bullfight, religious flagellants, and the carnival atmosphere of Death Day, a kind of Mexican Halloween. The film itself, never completed, begins with scenes of Aztec and Mayan death cults; it includes shots of skulls, peons being trampled by horses in the sand, bullfights, and the Death Day festival. Eisenstein described the importance of death in his own scenario ;

Eisenstein editing his film October, 1927. From V. Shklovsky, Eizenshtein (Moscow, 1973).

Death, skulls of people. And skulls of stone. The horrible Aztec gods and the terrifying Yucatan deities. Huge ruins. Pyramids. And faces. Faces of stone. And faces of flesh. The man of Yucatan today. The same man who lived thousands of years ago. Unmovable. Unchanging. Eternal. And the great wisdom of Mexico about death. The unity of death and life. The passing of one and the birth of the next one. The eternal circle. And the still greater wisdom of Mexico; the enjoying of this eternal circle.⁴⁴

The film itself was obviously important to Eisenstein. When it was not completed, he wrote that it marked “the death of my own child, on whom I lavished so much love, work and passionate inspiration.”⁴⁵ Such a comment suggests Eisenstein’s awareness that his generative power was embodied in his art.

Under Stalin, Eisenstein shared the guilt of the survivors. He had turned his art to the service of the revolution, even in its darkest hour, and had long ago sacrificed the antagonistic stance of the avant-garde. His teacher Meyerhold was shot, but his star pupil lived on, noting, not without truth, that “a dose of philistinism ensures peace and stability.”⁴⁶ His marriage to Pera Atasheva ended in separation and produced no children. Much of his earlier work came under attack; only conformity to Stalin’s wishes in Alexander Nevsky saved him from enforced silence or death.

Eisenstein’s final film, Ivan the Terrible, summed up his own life in many respects. He had often identified with young outsiders alone in a brutal world, such as Charlie Chaplin and David Copperfield. In his last work of art he identified with the young Tsar Ivan against the conniving adult boyars. “Is not the coronation of the young Tsar,” he wrote, “really the determination of the heir to free himself from the shadow of the prototype of the father?”⁴⁷ Eisenstein had escaped his own father by abandoning engineering for art, an experience paralleled by Ivan’s creation of his private army, the oprichnina. “If a series of childhood traumas coincide, in emotional context, with the burdens facing the adult,” Eisenstein once wrote, “well and good. Such was the case with Ivan. I consider that in this respect I, too, have been lucky with my life. In my own sphere I have proved essential to my times.”⁴⁸ In this way Eisenstein made the Russian Revolution a metaphor for the passage to adulthood, the rejection of old authority in favor of new ways.

Eisenstein’s metaphor of revolutionary immortality thus combined the sexual and social aspects of the family with the Christian metaphor of resurrection. Unlike Lunacharsky, he compared Soviet society not with the collective of humanity, but with related human beings, the family. “We can’t reproduce the cultural nursery of an ‘intellectual’ or ‘aristocratic’ family. But there is another means. Our genuine family has become our Socialist society.”⁴⁹ The broken home in Riga was thus replaced by Soviet Russia, not unlike the experience of Mayakovsky. Childhood remained an idyllic dream for Eisenstein, as it probably was for many who lived through the trauma and violence of the revolution. The film director could “make the children’s paradise of the past accessible to every grown-up”; while film could not recreate the revolutions of 1905 or 1917 in reality, it could evoke, “psychologically, a wonderful resurrection.”⁵⁰

Eisenstein’s death occurred, as he had predicted, at age fifty. On February 2, 1946, he suffered a heart attack, which he survived. For a time, he felt that he had gained a new chance at life. “I’m dead right now,” he told a friend several weeks later; “the doctors say that according to all the rules, I cannot possibly be alive. So this is a postscript for me, and it’s wonderful. Now I can do anything I like.”⁵¹ But this was not to be. In September 1946, Part II of Ivan the Terrible was banned by Stalin. Eisenstein fell victim to the ideological offensive being mounted by Andrei Zhdanov against all traces of “bourgeois” and “foreign” elements in Soviet culture. As his fiftieth birthday approached, Eisenstein became obsessed with thoughts of death. Death came at last on February 11,1948.

Both Tatlin and Eisenstein were concerned with immortality in the general sense of achieving artistic fame for themselves and eternalizing the revolution in monument or film. They also shared the “constructivist” interest in creating new art objects out of old forms through juxtaposition, and were greatly influenced by Western developments in their art. But Eisenstein’s concern ran deeper; he continually sensed the presence of death in his own life, utilized it on the screen, and sought to overcome it in his art. He believed in resurrection, not of the body after death, but of the past through film. Potemkin not only brought him lasting fame, but immortalized the 1905 Revolution as myth.