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Eisenstein 1898 - 1948 (50)

Language is much closer to film than painting is.


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Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (January 22, 1898 - February 11, 1948) was a Soviet filmmaker and theorist of the 7th art, one of the pioneers of film editing and world cinema. He was born in Riga, Latvia, in a wealthy family. He learned three foreign languages (English, German and French), attended engineering and architecture courses at the university (his father was an architect), but did not complete his studies, he then became interested in painting and in the end became theater and cinema director.

His first film was “Strike” (1924), the story of a strike that was crushed in blood by the employers. In this film, the bosses are depicted as caricatures, the informers have nicknames like Monkey, Fox, Bulldog; the most important innovation was the metaphorical use of editing. It was the first time in history of cinema that editing no longer was used just to bond the individual parts but took place as an independent means of expression. The following year created the "Battleship Potemkin", which is considered as one of the greatest masterpieces of world cinema. This is the narrative of sailors’ rebellion when they refused to eat rotten meat. The leaders of the rebellion sentenced to death but the rebellion spread to the city where the workers went to the harbor to support the sailors. Police attacked people and started to shoot and kill; the scene with the panicky crowd running down the stairs of Odessa, hunted by the tsarist army, considered as the most powerful in the history of cinema:

He then made the film "October or Ten Days That Shook the World" (1928), "General Line" (1929), "Alexander Nievsky". His following film "The Bezin meadow", remained unfinished as it was censored. Because of this film he was dismissed from the film center and had financial difficulties, while the cameraman and scriptwriter of the film sent to concentration camps where they died. He was saved by the fact that he had a global reputation.

In 1929 he had traveled to Europe and then in America, where he has suffered heavy attacks from the press that considered him as "communist danger". He left for Mexico where he designed a film titled "Viva Mexico" which would start from the Aztecs to record the history until Emilio Zapata, but due to lack of funding the project did not proceed. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1934 and married a childhood friend, they didn’t have any children. Many biographers believe that the marriage was white, forced because there were suspicions regarding his homosexuality at a time when homosexuality was punishable with five years in prison. In 1945 he directed "Ivan the Terrible" and the following year the Ivan the Terrible number two. In this movie Eisenstein risked his life as presented the degeneration of the rulers and the Soviet bureaucracy. He was determined to make and a third part but he died on February 9, 1948, from a heart attack.