Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948)
Author of Film Form: Essays in Film Theory
About the Author
Potemkin, a silent film that appeared in 1925, was the great Russian film director's first brilliant "mass epic," originally commissioned just after the 1917 Russian Revolution to commemorate the 1905 anti-Czarist uprising. In it Eisenstein broke new ground in the cinema with his anti-narrative show more technique of "shock-attraction," or dialectical, montage---a series of shots in which each pair being spliced gives rise to a collision of images, thereby creating a sharp impression, or synthesis, in the viewer's mind. Eisenstein (who had been an engineer before he became a film director) compared this technique to the series of explosions made by an internal combustion engine driving a vehicle forward---just so, the famous sequence of slaughter on the Odessa steps and the slow descent of a baby in its carriage through the carnage drives Potemkin forward. Dynamic cutting is again evident in Ten Days That Shook the World (1928), in which he uses slowly mounting sequences and fast cuts to depict the gathering storm of the Russian Revolution and its ultimate triumph. Despite his glorification of the Russian Revolution and the new Soviet state, Eisenstein often found himself at odds with the Soviet government. For a while he even attempted to work in Hollywood, but he returned to Russia to make Alexander Nevsky (1938), his most popular film, and Ivan the Terrible, which he envisioned as a three-part epic. Part I (1944) was completed and released, Part II was withheld at first by the Soviet Film Trust and then later released, and Eisenstein died of a heart attack while working on Part III. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Sergei Eisenstein
Nonindifferent Nature: Film and the Structure of Things (Cambridge Studies in Film) (1975) 18 copies
Sergei M. Eisenstein: On the Composition of the Short Fiction Scenario (Eisenstein Texts) (1984) 10 copies
Udvalgte skrifter 3 copies
S. M. Eisenstein V.1 1922-34 3 copies
Romance Sentimentale 2 copies
Mettre en scene 2 copies
Oeuvres, Tome 2 : La non-indifférente nature / 1 (De la structure des choses, Le pathétique) -… (1975) 1 copy
Метод. Т. 1, Grundproblem 1 copy
Au-delà des étoiles 1 copy
Uber Kunst und Kunstler: Aus d. Russ. : [uber ElGreco, Gotik, Piranesi, Wagner, Puschkin] (Reihe Passagen) (German… (1977) 1 copy
Battleship Potemkin Excerpt — Director — 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Eisenstein, Sergei
- Birthdate
- 1898-01-23
- Date of death
- 1948-02-11
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Russia
- Occupations
- Film director
teacher
film theorist - Organizations
- Government Film Institute (Moscow)
Members
Reviews
Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 111
- Also by
- 4
- Members
- 1,825
- Popularity
- #14,094
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 10
- ISBNs
- 196
- Languages
- 14
- Favorited
- 4