Thirty years ago the film bureau of the Brussels World Fair declared The Battleship Potemkin--a Soviet silent film on an obscure episode of the Russian revolution of 1905--the best picture of all times. The award came only ten years after the untimely death of its director, Sergey Eisenstein, who died on February 11, 1948, at the age of fifty-three.
Of course, the decision was not hailed by everybody. Disputes regarding Eisenstein's importance are carried on as heatedly today--forty years after his death--as they were during his lifetime. There is no consensus on the value of his contribution to film theory and art philosophy or of his influence as a teacher for younger filmmakers either within or outside of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, despite occasional extreme antipathy to Eisenstein's art or politics, no one disputes that he is a major figure of twentieth-century culture on a level with Picasso, Kafka, and Joyce. What is most striking, however, is that Eisenstein was admitted to the "pantheon" when he was still in his early thirties.
Troubled Life
Sergey Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born in Riga on January 22, 1898, to Julia (née Konetsky), the daughter of an Arkhangel'sk merchant, and Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, a prominent Riga architect whose houses are among Riga's most elegantly built. The new Soviet Film Encyclopedia states that Eisenstein's father was a Baltic German. Most Western sources, however, mention that he was of German-Jewish origin, a fact that would make his son's troubled life even more complicated, though Sergey Eisenstein was baptized in the Russian Orthodox faith. The U.S. public campaign to expel "red dog" Eisenstein in 1930 after he arrived in this country at Paramount's invitation bore clear anti-semitic overtones. Ten years later, when he was invited by the Bolshoi Theater to stage Die Walkure after the signing of the Soviet Nazi Pact, the German diplomatic community in Moscow was dismayed at the premiere, some of them even accusing Eisenstein of indulging in "deliberate Jewish tricks." Some years earlier Joseph Goebbels himself had praised Potemkin and expressed regret that German filmmakers were not able to match its propagandistic power.
Eisenstein died not because he consciously willed death. Like all people, Eisenstein--the man, the biological creature--resisted death until the last moment by sheer instinct. Like a gigantic computer whose autonomous compartments are being deprived of power one by one, he continued working even while fighting crippling heart disease. During the last year, from the time of his discussion with Stalin regarding the conditions under which the banned second part of Ivan the Terrible might be released up to the very night of his death, Eisenstein accomplished more than some of his healthier colleagues achieved during their lifetimes. Most importantly during this time, Eisenstein established a Department of Film in the prestigious academic institute the History of the Arts, and was appointed its first chairman. During that year he also worked on the outline for a six-volume history of Soviet cinema, wrote articles on color in film (such as "Stereoscopic Cinema" and "Pushkin and Gogol"), and he was planning a color film to celebrate Moscow's eight-hundredth anniversary.
Even when Eisenstein's physical strength was dwindling, his creative talents continued to move beyond cinema. Nearing the time of his death, he was considering a
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