Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) has become one of those filmmakers, like D.W. Griffith or Robert Flaherty, more spoken of than seen, in danger of becoming a purely historical figure whose work is mostly experienced only in a classroom setting and even then often in excerpted form. While this is true of many directors who began in the silent era, it is especially unfortunate in Eisenstein’s case, because a rich body of work risks getting reduced to one word: “montage.” Eisenstein certainly deserves the place reserved for him in the cinematic pantheon as one of the first filmmakers, alongside his Soviet colleagues Pudovkin and Vertov, to unlock the power of editing to bring the cinematic image roaring to life. But he also demonstrated a powerful visual style and a wide-ranging intellect in a truncated career that produced only nine feature films.

After a bourgeois childhood, Eisenstein arrived in Moscow in 1920 in the heady days of political and artistic ferment after the revolution. He was involved in designing for the experimental theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold, and a move to filmmaking followed shortly, with his feature debut, Strike, appearing in 1925. Released at the end of that same year, Eisenstein’s second film, Battleship Potemkin, rocketed him to international fame. Remaining his best-known work, the film makes a convincing argument for the power of montage. Its portrayal of collective action and eschewal of an individual protagonist brought it praise from the political left worldwide.

The problems that would mark the rest of Eisenstein’s career began with his very next film, October, about the Russian Revolution. While well-received internationally, the film was much more complex than Potemkin and not as warmly embraced by audiences. This left Eisenstein open to criticism at home that his work was too intellectual and formalist at a time when the movement that would result in the censure and even arrest of so many Soviet avant-garde artists was already beginning. As a result, his next film, Old and New, was re-edited by the authorities.

By that time, Eisenstein had already been sent to Western Europe to research sound cinema technology and to act as a cultural ambassador from the Soviet Union. He eventually traveled as far as Los Angeles where his attempts to make a film in Hollywood came to naught. There he did find support for a film about Mexico, but after a year of shooting, funding was withdrawn before the film was completed. Eisenstein was called home by Stalin himself and was never given access to his Mexican footage. This failure haunted Eisenstein for the rest of his life.

Back in the Soviet Union, Eisenstein found a film industry kept on a short leash by the government, and he spent much of the 1930s teaching and writing the essays on cinematic form still read by film students today. The one film that he did make in this period, Bezhin Meadow, was immediately shelved by the censors and then destroyed in a bombing raid during World War II.

Eisenstein managed a comeback of sorts in 1938 with the nationalist epic Alexander Nevsky. This success led to his being granted permission to make an ambitious trilogy of films on the life of Ivan the Terrible. Eisenstein worked feverishly on the first part during the dark days of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, but with Part Two, he once again ran afoul of Stalin. He was found dead of a heart attack in his Moscow apartment at the age of fifty.

Eisenstein was something of a renaissance man; he was extremely well-read and erudite. His writings include voluminous references to a wide variety of artists and to thinkers in all of the human sciences:  anthropology, literature, folklore, religion, psychology and history. He seems to have regarded the moving image as a medium that could unite these fields of knowledge and modernize the human fascination for images by channeling powerful religious and sexual impulses. Despite his reputation as a primarily formalist filmmaker, the films contain sexual imagery ranging from the allegorical to the sadomasochistic to the homoerotic. They also exhibit a sly wit and even a terrific draftsmanship; the vividly graphic quality of the images demonstrates Eisenstein’s skill at drawing and caricature. This complete retrospective magnificently illustrates Eisenstein’s multifaceted work in all its glorious complexity. – David Pendleton