Sergei Eisenstein

"Perhaps the most synoptic view of Russian culture under Stalin is provided by the development of the cinema, an art medium with little history prior to the Soviet period. The innumerable movie theatres large and small that sprang up across the USSR in the twenties and thirties were the new regimes equivalent to churches of the new order – its chronicles of successes that promised bliss – were systematically and regularly presented to the silent masses, whose main image of a world beyond that of immediate physical necessity was so derived from a screen of moving pictures rather than a screen of stationary icons."

– James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe

Developments in the darkroom reflect, wrapping as they do around the lens of the this cinematographic pioneer, capture in cut-scenes the trudge towards the reinterpretation of a word. It is the march from the cameraman of a new revolutionary world-culture to the visual-crafter of the affirmation of a new ‘rossiski’ state-sponsored identity. This concept of being ‘rossiski,’ close but distinct to the word for an ethnic Russian identity, ‘russki’, is an expression that conveys an all imperial idea of state loyalty and belonging, the word for a culture that crosses racial and religious divides, uniting nationalities as varied as the Tartars or the Jews to Russians. The idea that Stalin, in his attempt to create a new mass culture for socialism in the run up to the Second World War abandoned revolutionary forms and ideals and chose instead to focus on an amorphous fusing of Imperial and old Russian cultures in a Soviet context is one that Geoffrey Hoskings has made his own, and can be seen reflected not only in the architecture of the Seven Sisters but above all in a mass-movie culture.

Michelet once said that the French Revolution really began not with the storming of the Bastille on July 14^th, 1789, but with the symbolic re-enactment of the storming a year later. In this manner one could say that the Russian Revolution – as a symbol of liberation was born not in the turbulent events of November, 1917, but in the subsequent scenes of pictorial pageantry and mythic recreation, one that was brought in reels and along agitprop-trains – and not by the by the bayonets to the Soviet people. This is where Sergei Einsenstein’s Battleship Potempkin and Ten Days That Shook The World enter the people’s story. Those clips of the street-fighting and the famous running-wave attack on the Winter Palace are our imaginative, ingrained images of the Revolution, used and over-used again and again in documentaries and across the Planet – more often than not without an asterix to remind us they are pure theatre. Yet these pictures are more deeply burnt into the psyche in Russia than abroad. Journalist John Kampfner once told men that when researching a piece for the London Times on the last survivors of that year 1917 in the early nineties, he would mostly find that the veterans ‘memories’ actually consisted of internalised moments of Einsenstein’s epic. Kafkaesque. Quite a way for a Director to be remembered.

However Eisenstein was not merely a Revolutionary as an Icon maker. As a disciple of the fanatical Movie-Eye clan, where Leo Kuleshov pioneered documentary accuracy, precise chronology and above all out-door scenes and monumental compositions – he would bring that verve forward, carrying as far as to Ivan the Terrible. The breakthrough at Mosfilm in the early tensely creative period of Soviet Cinema before Stalin turned his expertise to culture, was to be found in a unique, but now widespread montage. The moving from scene to scene, jumping from the steps of Odessa to the rebellious ship or from Ivan and swirling shadows to Boyars secrecies, was a momentous breakthrough in Cinema. Indeed, as is the case in thinking about so many Russian artists from these years, the deeply expressionist scenes in Ivan the Terrible where light and shadow inter-play or the depictions of the Teutonic Knights in Alexander Nevsky, oddly reminiscent of the Seventh Seal, are radically ahead of their time. The use of landscape in Alexander Nevsky was something rarely matched in Russian cinema until Mikhalkov’s nineties production Urga, but these aspects are not what it is striking about Einsenstein’s films. Like is moving procession of Icons across the Ice, a short and stringy-haired Jewish guy with a penchant for self-congratulation, created in these movies the unforgettable and iconic images that not only presented the Russia and Revolution, but defined her to herself. The shift in content from Battleship Potempkin and Ten Days That Shook The World, via an abortive screenplay devised with Isaac Babel on collectivisation, ending up at Alexander Nevsky and Ivan The Terrible, is the shift in what it actually meant to be ‘Soviet’ from revolutionary to ‘rossiski.’ Who is it though, making this mind-control? Maybe Stalin, laughing, was talking about himself when he said ‘artists are the engineers of the human soul.’

"On the stage an actor plays before hundreds of persons, the film actually before millions. Here is a dialectical instance of quantity increasing over the boundary into quality to give rise to a new kind of excitement."

– Vladimir Pudovkin