To go abroad – it presents the ultimate test that one can set a Soviet citizen whose life has been inseparable from the October Revolution: the test of a free choice. Going abroad offers the final challenge to the creative worker: to prove whether he can really create outside the Revolution; whether he can even exist outside it.
The Moscow premiere of The General Line, retitled The Old and the New, the last film Eisenstein would complete for nearly ten years, took place on the anniversary of the Revolution, November 7, 1929. Yet, for once, Eisenstein was not present, and neither were Alexandrov and Tisse. They had already left for Berlin, preparing to tour Western Europe and thereafter embark for the United States of America.
A couple of years after Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford’s visit to Moscow in July 1926, during which they promised to invite Eisenstein to work for United Artists in Hollywood, Joseph Schenck, the president of UA, when in Moscow, reiterated the invitation. Schenck, who was born in Russia but who had lived in the USA from early childhood, had produced a number of films starring his brother-in-law, Buster Keaton.
When Schenck was touring the new Potylikha studio and criticising its layout, people were derogatory about Hollywood in front of him in Russian, until he shocked them by suddenly asking them questions in their own language, adding that on his way back he might visit his grandfather in Minsk.
Sovkino joined in the negotiations with Schenck, but at the beginning of 1929 Eisenstein commented wryly, ‘I won’t really be sure whether I’m going until I’m on my way back home from there.’1 On June 4, 1929, Eisenstein wrote to Léon Moussinac outlining his immediate plans and ambitions.
‘My personal future is gradually taking shape. It is my obsession to add sound to The Old and the New, and to do that I must go abroad … Then after the European premiere I want to go to the USA. The Hollywood side of the USA doesn’t interest me at all; I want to see the country! And the techniques of sound films. For I am absolutely certain that the entire future of the cinema lies with sound.’2
The reason for the trip was to study the use of synchronised sound, which at that time had not yet been developed in the Soviet cinema. But such a journey presented problems that were more than just technical; they were also political and philosophical, and Eisenstein himself was well aware of them.
In August 1929, Eisenstein left for Western Europe with Alexandrov and Tisse. Everywhere the three Russians were greeted with delight by film enthusiasts and harassed by government agencies who, with the increasing political isolation of the Soviet Union, treated them as undesirable visitors. The first stop was Berlin, where they attended the European premiere of The Old and the New on which Eisenstein wanted to collaborate with Edmund Meisel on the music.
The magnificent reception given to the film was marred by the news that Schenck’s offer of a Hollywood contract had fallen through. Nevertheless, the three of them determined to continue on their way to America, although they had arrived in Germany with only $25 apiece that Soyuzkino had given them for expenses. For a while, they boarded with Eisenstein’s widowed stepmother Elizabeth Michelsohn, and had to live on the charity of friends while trying to earn their way. With this in mind, Eisenstein had brought some of his writings to sell (the scenario of The Old and the New had just been published).
From Berlin, the trio left for Switzerland where they had been invited to the First International Congress of Independent Cinematography. At the frontier, however, the party was refused permission to enter the country. The refusal was rescinded twenty-four hours later, but only after their hostess had intervened. It was the first of a trail of difficulties that they would come up against on their travels.
The Congress was held between September 3 and 7 at the Chateau of La Sarraz near Lausanne, which the owner, Madame de Mandrot, had offered as a meeting-place for a group of avant-garde film-makers. (She had already hosted congresses for leftist architects and musicians.)
‘La belle châtelaine’, as the delegates addressed her, was a cinema enthusiast, as well as having a weakness for Russians on whose departure she was to sigh, ‘Oh! Those Bolsheviks! … The only true gentlemen!’3
The Congress was organised on the initiative of Robert Aron and Janine Bouissounouse, and was intended to bring together film-makers from all over the world who were eager to establish an independent industry, unfettered by commercial interests, and to lay the foundations for an International Film-making Co-operative with its headquarters in Paris. Among the sponsors were André Gide, Luigi Pirandello and Stefan Zweig, and included in the cosmopolitan gathering who attended were the experimental film-makers Walter Ruttmann, Alberto Cavalcanti and Hans Richter; Jack Isaacs, a British professor of English literature and one of the leading members of the London Film Society; the Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs, Jean-Georges Auriol, the editor and founder of the Revue du Cinéma (the forerunner of Cahiers du Cinéma), Léon Moussinac, Enrico Prampolini, a fascist member of the Italian Futurist movement and co-author with Filippo Marinetti of the Futurist Manifesto, and twenty-five-year-old Ivor Montagu, a film-maker, writer and table-tennis champion, whom Eisenstein recalled as ‘a particularly outspoken Englishman from Cambridge.’
The third son of the second Baron Swaythling, the Jewish Montagu developed a lifelong commitment to left-wing politics at Cambridge. In 1925, with Sidney Bernstein, he founded the Film Society in London with the main aim of showing the German and Russian films which were excluded from distribution. Among the Society’s patrons were Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, Maynard Keynes and H.G. Wells.
‘The biggest star’ attending, according to Le Cinéma Suisse, was Eisenstein. Ivor Montagu recollected: ‘Before they [Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Tisse] arrived we had all been sitting and chatting together in this gorgeous chateau, with its superb tapestry and its medieval walls, admiring each other’s films, and saying how wonderful and imaginative and important was everything we had done. Then, suddenly, as though through outer space, there came these three characters from the Soviet Union. As far as we were concerned they were already magnificent before they spoke a single word or performed a single action. We all knew and admired The Battleship Potemkin, and we regarded Eisenstein as an almost divine figure. And now here they were, three men in boiler suits; Eisenstein himself was short and squat, with the huge head that we already recognised from photographs, and a gigantic quiff, and eyes that sparkled with an amiable malice. The other two, Alexandrov and Tisse, were extremely good-looking, one younger than the other, but each with golden hair and golden skin, and both of them full of boundless energy.’4
At the chateau they showed, among other films, The Old and the New, Luis Buñuel’s startling first film, Un Chien Andalou, Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, considered by Eisenstein to be ‘one of the most beautiful pictures in the entire history of the cinema’, Man Ray’s L’Étoile de Mer, three of Richter’s ‘absolute’ films, in which he also acted with the composers Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud; Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin – Die Symphonie einer Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City), Joris Ivens’ The Bridge and Rain, and Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures and Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), which featured Jean Renoir as the wolf, and his wife Catherine Hessling in the title role. In other words, an impressive panorama of the best avant-garde films of the day.
‘For three or four hours our Soviet visitors behaved impeccably’, wrote Montagu, ‘and then they suggested that we should all stop talking and make a film. The immediate consequence of this proposal – which of course the rest of us accepted at once – was total annihilation of poor Mme de Mandrot. Her precious shields, the costumes and helmets and rare old weapons … everything was dragged from the walls. We were then all enlisted by Eisenstein and his two friends into a film that was really a dramatic simile of the commercial cinema, in which the art of film was at first imprisoned and rescued by the assembled intellectuals of La Sarraz. We all wore costumes of various shapes and colours and periods of history, but Eisenstein was careful not to make himself the director. He just ran about as a general dog’s body. It was my first introduction to him, and what I remember most about it all are his boyish spirits.’5
The film, The Storming of La Sarraz, was shot in one day and never edited. Janine Bouissounouse, personifying The Spirit of the Artistic Film, dressed in white with her bosoms stuffed with two film reels, was fastened with chains to the chateau’s chimney stack by the villainous Béla Balázs, the Commander of the Army of the Commercial Cinema, and had to be rescued by The Army of Independents led by Eisenstein. Jack Isaacs, who played a big business tycoon of Balázs’ Commercial Army, sweated under a heavy suit of medieval armour decked with ostrich feathers. Several ghosts appeared, one of whom was Léon Moussinac, swathed in a white sheet as d’Artagnan. Jean-Georges Auriol, brandishing a copy of the Revue du Cinéma as a banner, joined in the fray with his typewriter-turned-machine-gun. In the culminating sequence a Japanese member of the Congress, symbolising the ‘commercial film’, committed hari-kiri.
This inconsequential allegory of the conflict between the exigencies of commercial cinema and those of art was obviously close to the heart (and reality) of the celebrated participants. Although this little film could not possibly be considered in the same hemisphere as Bezhin Meadow, it is a pity that it too has been lost. One theory was that Hans Richter, in the process of taking the film to London after the congress, left it on the train. Another was that a Japanese member at the chateau took it back to Japan, where it might have been destroyed during the bombing of 1945. Luckily, a number of still photographs were taken of many of the participants in their costumes and attitudes.
Although Eisenstein was enraptured by the company of his peers at La Sarraz and enjoyed their admiration, he was conscious of the necessity to earn some money. While he was in Switzerland, a young Swiss producer, Lazar Wechsler, suggested to Eisenstein that he might direct a short documentary on the subject of abortion in Zurich. Eisenstein refused, saying, ‘Let me abort all Zurich, then I’m interested; but one woman, definitely no! After all, I am a director of mass spectacles.’6 Tisse, however, took up the offer to direct, with advice from Eisenstein. Called Frauennot-Frauenglück (Woman’s Joy is Woman’s Woe), it portrayed a slum family expecting yet another child; the mother has an illegal abortion and suffers serious physical damage as a result of the incompetence of the doctor who performs it. (In 1935, Wechsler added new sequences with synchronised sound, which is the only version available.) On the strength of The General Line, a Swiss dairy firm offered Eisenstein the chance to make an advertising film. Turning it down, he hoped to give a series of lectures in Switzerland before the Swiss authorities again raised objections and asked him to leave the country.
Back in Berlin, Eisenstein helped on an advertising film for beer, with the American screen actor George Bancroft and Emil Jannings, who had only recently returned from America, and had begun filming The Blue Angel under Josef von Sternberg’s direction. At the coming of sound, Jannings’ thick German accent had put an end to his short Hollywood career, during which he became the first star to win the Best Actor Oscar (for The Way of All Flesh and Sternberg’s The Last Command). Jannings, who three years earlier, had been cool to Eisenstein during the making of Faust, insisted that the Russian director make a film on Prince Potemkin, the lover of Catherine the Great, with him in the title role. ‘Potemkin had only one eye. If you were to do the film I would gouge out one of mine,’ Jannings told Eisenstein.7
Sternberg showed Eisenstein the rushes of The Blue Angel. ‘He took each scene about twenty times,’ Eisenstein recalled. ‘He had a most pronounced inferiority complex … Snobbery could not hide Sternberg’s trauma about his own inadequacy … A predilection for well-built males probably brought Sternberg some compensation. In Berlin, he even stayed at the Hercules Hotel, across the Hercules Bridge, opposite the Hercules Fountain with its huge grey statue of Hercules …’8
This curious statement by Eisenstein seems to be completely unfounded, unless the heady atmosphere of the last days of the Weimar Republic was penetrating everybody’s psyche. The sexual licence in Berlin at the time highlighted the conflicts in Eisenstein’s own sexuality. Certainly, codified notes in his diaries hint at wet daydreams, many of them involving Grigori Alexandrov.
Much concerned about these desires, he visited the psychoanalyst Dr Hanns Sachs, a disciple of Freud, ‘a shrewd old salamander with the horn-rimmed glasses.’ Eisenstein remembered that ‘he had a terrifying African mask – “a symbol of complexes” – which hung above his small, low, patient’s couch. We became great friends. He gave me a most interesting book about psychoanalysis. Essay in Genital Theory by Sandor Ferenczi, which explained a great deal of things (admittedly post factum!) which I had come across on my obsessive quest to penetrate the secrets of ecstasy.’9
Eisenstein also visited the Institut für Geschlechts Wissenschaft (The Institute of Sexual Science) under the directorship of Magnus Hirschfeld, where sexual ‘abnormality’ was analysed. The following year, in his notes for the death-cell scene for the screenplay of An American Tragedy, Eisenstein has Clyde Griffiths visited by a psychiatrist modelled on Magnus Hirschfeld.
He was particularly engrossed in the study of homosexuality, but, as he told Hans Feld, a friend, ‘My observations led me to the conclusion that homosexuality is in all ways a retrogression – a going back to the state where procreation came with the dividing of the cells. It’s a dead end!’10 This may have accounted for his interest in pre-natal experience. Ian Christie believes, ‘He was a figure that felt outside of sexuality. Something the grown-ups did.’11 In a sense, his erotic drawings, puns and jokes do have the element of a little boy giggling at ‘rude’ words. Eisenstein confided to Marie Seton, ‘A lot of people say I’m homosexual. I never have been, and I’d tell you if it were true. I’ve never felt any such desire, not even towards Grisha [Alexandrov] though I think I must, in some way, have bisexual tendencies – like Zola and Balzac – in an intellectual [author’s italics] way.’12
Presumably what he meant in reference to the two 19th-century French novelists was their ability to enter all their characters’ psyches, regardless of gender. His meaning was less clear in his own case. Anyway, Eisenstein was given plenty of opportunity to satisfy these tendencies in both an ‘intellectual’ and a carnal way in the notoriously decadent night-life of Berlin in the late 1920s.
Apart from visiting homosexual clubs, both male and female, the lionised Eisenstein was able to meet many of the great artists and intellectuals of the day, who found themselves in Berlin in 1929. Under the influence of the Soviets, working class theatrical groups, the German counterparts of the Proletkult, calling themselves Red Shirts and Red Rockets, had sprung up around the city. Between 1928 and 1930, there were about three hundred such groups in Germany. Alongside them were the more professional agit-prop associations, many inspired by Erwin Piscator, originator of the ‘epic’ theatre.
At the time of Eisenstein’s visit, Piscator, who married Vera Yanukova, the actress in Every Wise Man and The Strike, had reached the peak of his achievements. Writers and artists such as Bertolt Brecht, Georg Grosz and John Heartfield had joined him at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz. One of the first directors to employ films and animated cartoons on stage, Piscator introduced a background film of Red soldiers on the march in his production of Alexei Tolstoy’s Rasputin, and the sardonic drawings of Grosz illuminated his staging of The Good Soldier Schweik.
Piscator had opened his first season with Ernst Toller’s expressionist drama Hoppla! wir leben. Eisenstein described a visit he paid to Toller’s ‘two small clean rooms which were a little effeminate in their floral decorations.’ At the end of the visit, the thirty-six-year-old Toller, who had been imprisoned for his part in the Communist uprising of 1919, told Eisenstein he could take whatever he liked from his apartment as a memento. ‘What should I take? Taking nothing might have caused offence. On the wall hung two early Daumier lithographs. Not particularly good ones. They were in narrow gilt frames. A cup, perhaps? One of the little vases? … There was something! A Mexican horseman made of wickerwork – a toy which, in its style and method of weaving looked like Russian bast-work. I took that. A little later – terrible embarrassment. The horseman had belonged to Elisabeth Bergner.’13 Bergner, one of the most popular actresses at the time, had been Toller’s lover for a short period.
Fortunately, considering his financial situation, Eisenstein hardly paid for a meal during his stay in Berlin. One evening he was at a Japanese restaurant dining with two Japanese film executives returning the courtesy after a visit to Moscow, the next at an Indian restaurant where Rabindranath Tagore’s nephew was repaying his hosts for a reception in Moscow.
Eisenstein had a meal with Luigi Pirandello in a small Italian restaurant in Charlottenburg, on one of the less frequented Berlin side-streets. At the lunch was a gentleman who was a good friend of Otto H. Kahn, the American banker and patron of the arts. Eisenstein saw him as a potential patron who would somehow get him a contract in America. In fact, Paramount had invited Pirandello to Hollywood. But Eisenstein admitted that his ‘interest in the business side of the meeting was slight.’ What preoccupied him most was the delicious zabaglione and Pirandello sitting in front of him, despite his lack of appreciation of the Italian playwright’s work. ‘If I were “in search of an author”, I would hardly turn to him. He is too fin-de-si ècle somehow.’14
Eisenstein remembered another business dinner, at the Hotel Adlon, during which he felt most uncomfortable. ‘I experienced for the first time how inconvenient a butler can be if he stands behind your high-backed chair … These men walked up and down in their light blue coats and whipped the unfinished plates of steak away, shoving a salad before you, suddenly covering a dish that you were barely familiar with, with a dressing you weren’t expecting. They seemed irritated, annoyed. Here, appearing out of nowhere, these hands paralysed your oesophagus.’15
There was talk of his making a film of Albert Londres’ book, Le Chemin de Buenos Aires (the English edition had an introduction by Theodore Dreiser) about white slave traffic to Brazil. He also discussed a film for dogs with Jascha Schatzow, a representative of Debrie, the ciné camera manufacturers.
‘He was interested by this, bearing in mind that Berliners of both sexes were very fond of their dogs – and there was a colossal number of dogs in Berlin. If one of the most picturesque graveyards in Paris is the one for dogs in Auteuil, then why should Berlin not have its own charmingly appointed dogs’ cinema? This thought occupied me, of course, purely from the point of view of a reflex testing of a series of filmic elements (the degree of suggestiveness, questions of rhythm, “form”, which would all be different from our customary system of thinking and imagery, and so on.) The project, of course, remained just that, going no further than two conversations: one in Schatzow’s amazing billiard room in his house, and one in a nightclub in Berlin.’16
Eisenstein had formulated many of his theories before becoming acquainted with the physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s work on the ‘conditioned reflex’. Seven years later, in his ‘Teaching Programme for the Theory and Practice of Direction’ at the State Film School, Eisenstein included the study of Pavlov ‘as an adjunct to the question of expressiveness.’ In an interview, Eisenstein once claimed that his three gods were Marx, Pavlov and Freud.
At the invitation of the workers’ cinema club, Volksfilmverband, he left Berlin for a three-day visit to Hamburg. Ten cinemas had been hired for a Sunday morning showing of October, but still crowds had to be turned away. At one of the cinemas, he gave a short introduction and met the audience afterwards. The rest of the time he spent touring Hamburg and meeting cinema enthusiasts.
On his return he felt unwell. He mentioned cardiac weakness – the phragma behind the left and right ventricles had never grown properly – which had troubled him earlier, and which was clearly linked to the infarct which was to kill him less than twenty years later. Some years before, in Moscow, he had visited a doctor who recommended that he take a break from his usual activities and mental pursuits. ‘Take up photography!’ advised the doctor. This was reminiscent of the story of the great French pantomimist Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who went to a doctor complaining of depression. The doctor’s advice? ‘If you want cheering up, go and see Deburau.’
The director Friedrich Ermler arrived in Berlin where he shared the furnished room which Eisenstein had at the Pension Marie-Luise in Martin Lutherstrasse. Ermler, born in Latvia in the same year as Eisenstein, was the director of Fragment of an Empire, just released in Russia, a film which combined political parable with social satire. He had organised KEM (the Experimental Film Workshop), which advocated revolution through content rather than form. Ermler and Eisenstein had little in common.
One night, while the two of them were lying on their two king-size beds, Ermler mentioned that ‘No word of you has reached Moscow … in Moscow they feel that your travels lack impact …’ Eisenstein mused that ‘nobody in Moscow understood, obviously, that to go to Hollywood – the aim of the trip – was a problem fraught with difficulties. Negotiations took up a great deal of time. Still, in Moscow, in Moscow cinema circles, they felt that my travels – what was the phrase he used – lacked impact? “Now, if you would cause a bit of a stir, politically, somewhere …” “Cause a bit of a stir? Lacking impact? Wait let me find a way. Give me time. Moscow will be happy.” What form would it take? For the present nobody knew … The light went out. We both fell asleep.’17
In November 1929, a month after the Wall Street Crash, the consequences of which were becoming evident, Eisenstein collected Tisse and Alexandrov in Zurich and together they all went to Paris where the editing of Woman’s Joy is Woman’s Woe would be completed.
At the end of the month, Eisenstein crossed to England where he had been invited by Ivor Montagu and Jack Isaacs as a guest of the London Film Society, for which he would give a series of lectures and attend a showing of The Battleship Potemkin, still forbidden to the general public. Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the anti-Semitic Home Secretary who disliked films in general and radical films in particular, was responsible for the banning. H.G. Wells, protesting about the censors, declared, ‘We cannot be allowed to be ruled by a gang of mystery men.’ In a letter to the socialist M.P. Fenner Brockway, George Bernard Shaw wrote, ‘Potemkin was exhibited to me privately. It is, artistically, one of the very best films in existence. Its suppression is an undisguised stroke of class censorship, utterly indefensible and inexplicable on any other ground. Simply an incident in the class war, as waged by our governing classes. Remind them of it when they next wax indignant against Soviet censorship.’18
In Britain, the provocative film could not have arrived at a worse time. The General Strike had collapsed earlier in the year and fear of a working class insurrection dominated the newly-elected Conservative government under Stanley Baldwin. Eisenstein visited the Houses of Parliament to watch Lloyd George argue for the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United Kingdom.
Potemkin was kept out of British cinemas until 1954. Eisenstein later commented: ‘One censor was blind: for silent films? Another was deaf: for talkies? and, while I was there, the third one actually died! True, none of this was enough to ensure that my films were shown in London although the Board of Censors is not even a governmental body.’19
Many years later, in 1946, the British censor writing a note on the Boulting Brothers’ social drama Fame is the Spur, scribbled ‘Very reminiscent of the famous Montague [sic] in the Russian films, Potemkin and Odessa [sic] many shots of which the Board cut.’ Someone then drew a pencil line through ‘Montague’ and inserted ‘montage’.20
Among the films first shown at the Sunday performances at the New Gallery Kinema were Nosferatu, Greed, and The Passion of Joan of Arc. On this Sunday in November 1929, the Film Society gave a double bill of John Grierson’s Drifters (a study of herring fishing in the North Sea) and The Battleship Potemkin. However, after the screening, Eisenstein, never one to mince words, said that the Film Society’s version of his film, with music by Edmund Meisel, had transformed a fine work into a ‘mediocre opera’. For this he blamed Meisel for having run ‘the speed of the projector to suit the music, without my consent, slightly more slowly than it should have been! This destroyed the dynamism of the rhythmic correlation to such an extent that people laughed at the “flying lions” for the first time in the film’s existence. The time allowed for the three different lions to merge into one, was crucial: if it took any longer than that the artifice would be spotted.’21
This caused a split with Meisel, although Eisenstein later added another reason. According to Eisenstein, Meisel’s wife, Elisabeth, ‘was unable to hide – indeed in an inexplicable outburst, confessed to her husband – a certain liaison that had existed between her and the director of the film for which he had written the music.’22 There seems no other evidence of this so-called ‘liaison’ between Eisenstein and Meisel’s wife other than this statement from someone who once wrote about his own ‘Donjuanism.’ This was defined as ‘a fear for one’s own potency. It sees each successive conquest as yet further proof of one’s potency. But why admit Donjuanism only in sex? It is a much stronger impulse in other areas, especially those where the important questions are to do with “success”, “recognition” and “winning”, which are no less important than sexual conquest.’23
Eisenstein’s lectures in London, where ‘I found the authentic atmosphere of Oscar Wilde’,24 were presented as part of a course of film studies that also included a lesson in practical film-making under the direction of Hans Richter. Richter gave film-directing classes in his studio over Foyle’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road. A short film was made, of which only a brief sequence remains. This shows Eisenstein miming the part of a London bobby complete with uniform and helmet. At first he looks stern, then makes funny faces, blows a whistle and does a little can-can, kicking his legs up in the air. Perhaps he would have satisfied his own criteria for typage as a British policeman. It was characteristic of his sense of satirical observation and also, typically, was never in the original script.
Eisenstein’s actual lectures, delivered at Foyle’s in excellent English, were a tremendous success, and had a profound influence on the British documentary movement. John Grierson, the leading force behind the movement, never hesitated to acknowledge his personal debt to Eisenstein. ‘All of us in the British documentary movement were influenced by Eisenstein’s “montage”, but in its poetic possibilities rather than its intellectual ambition … if you want to know where the courage of Song of Ceylon came from, or the courage of poetry in Night Mail, then you must go to the poetic rather than the violent sequences in Eisenstein.’25
Basil Wright, the future director of Song of Ceylon (1934) and Night Mail (1936) was then an enthusiastic twenty-two-year-old student at Eisenstein’s lectures, of which he gave the following description: ‘There we were, with notebooks and pencils, thinking passionately about films, the great new art form; and there was Eisenstein, chubbily built, plump in face; a pliable and expressive nose; a shock of dark hazel-coloured curly hair rising briskly from an imposing brow. There he was, with blackboard and chalk, about to expose us to the inner Eisenstein mysteries of film art. But what happened? He talked instead of Japanese Kabuki plays, about William James and Charles Darwin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Daumier; about Kenyon’s proposition that “two opposite reactions can be provoked by the same stimulus”; about Duchenne’s studies of muscular movements, and his conclusion that “L’action musculaire isolé n’existe pas dans l’expression humaine”, about Stefan Zweig, Zola and James Joyce. As the lectures progressed we began to understand and appreciate all these surprising references. Eisenstein never forgot that film is a synthetic art. He made it clear that the approach to film theory, and in particular to montage, was not something in a vacuum. He claimed, in fact, that film montage was the cinematic aspect of a particular form of expression used by artists in other media – and in particular in poetry, painting, drama and the novel.’26
Others, still in their twenties, who attended the lectures, were Anthony Asquith, Thorold Dickinson, Ian Dalrymple and Herbert Marshall, later to become Eisenstein’ student in Moscow. Ivor Montagu commented: ‘How live he was! How one could laugh with him!’27 Jack Isaacs thought Eisenstein was ‘the most intelligent man I ever knew, and one of the nicest, with a sense of humour both robust and Rabelaisian.’28
The ginger-haired, myopic bald-headed Jack Isaacs, who had been at La Sarraz, showed Eisenstein around Oxford, Hampton Court, Windsor, Eton and the Tower of London. Eisenstein concluded, ‘Properly speaking, you will understand nothing about the composition of a Briton – and a Briton as a civil servant above all – without a visit to the Penates of his logical development – Eton, Cambridge (or Oxford), London with the Tower, Westminster, the gentlemen’s clubs and Whitehall.’29
Of Isaacs Eisenstein wrote, ‘He was like something out of a Dickens novel, with his black gloves, inevitable black umbrella and galoshes all day long, all year round.’30 At Windsor, Eisenstein admired Rubens’ The Rape of Ganymede, ‘who was here portrayed as a chubby little boy of six or seven. His mortal fear burst out in a stream he could not contain.’31 One picture at the National Gallery affected him profoundly, El Greco’s Agony In the Garden, which he saw as ‘a scream of colours.’ It ‘stood out sharply in the dull rooms … The dark red of the garment cuts like a razor through the greenery … It was as if I had already known it, seen it somewhere.’ What the painting reminded him of was a priest from his childhood, who ‘went through Holy Week as if suffering the Lord’s Passion.’32
At Cambridge University, according to Professor Maurice Dobb, Eisenstein ‘talked magnificently and … the audience listened to him spellbound … When he started to talk (and at that time he knew English reasonably well) he talked with great animation and force, using words with great deliberation and the sense of their import and meaning.’33
Pyotr Kapitsa, the Soviet physicist who worked with Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge, invited Eisenstein to high table at Trinity ‘with the professors and the Master, beneath the high Gothic vaulting of the naves which vanished into the gloom … the antiphonic prayers sung in Latin by two voices before the food was served … the general setting and atmosphere of the whole scene remained so powerful that after many years it could still “surface”, first on the screen of my memories and then in the screen images of Ivan the Terrible in the antiphonic reading of the psalter and the report of the boyar’s treachery with the overlying voices of Pimen and Malyuta in the scene with Ivan and Anastasia’s coffin.’34 Even knowing of Eisenstein’s extensive spectrum of allusions, it is surprising that so quintessential an English ritual and setting should have influenced such quintessentially Russian ones.
What interested Eisenstein at Madame Tussaud’s, given his fascination with the French Revolution, was the chamber of horrors and the fact that the waxworks were founded when Monsieur Tussaud brought two wax models of the severed heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to London. He visited the British Museum where he pored over a letter written by Elizabeth I, the contemporary of Ivan the Terrible, to Mary Stuart in her dungeon. Much more exciting was, as he put it, a letter ‘written by a young, dark-skinned French Commander-in-Chief, of Corsican extraction.’ In the letter to his brother from the battlefields of Africa, Napoleon wrote: ‘I am bored with human nature. I need solitude and isolation. Greatness bores me. My feelings are dried up. Glory is insipid at twenty-nine-years-old. I have done everything. Only one thing is left: to become a true egotist.’
Thirty-one-year-old Eisenstein left London towards the end of December 1929, concluding that England was ‘hidebound, petrified and conservative. It is difficult to say what gives rise to this physical sensation that you feel again when your foot touches its soil … The why and wherefore of this image is not important, but only half an hour from the moment you’ve begun to get to know London, Cambridge, Oxford or Windsor, this image is inevitably implanted in you causing you an almost physical pain.’35
He had hoped to spend Christmas in Switzerland, but once again he was refused entry and so stayed in Paris, revising the manuscript of some theoretical studies, until the middle of January, when he set off on another lecture tour.
The first stop was Antwerp, followed by Seraing-la-Rouge, a suburb of Liège where workers, who had seen a clandestine showing of The Battleship Potemkin, welcomed him warmly. He intended visiting Ostend and the ageing artist James Ensor, whose works he much admired, but repeated pestering from police enforced his hurried departure for Holland. His arrival in Rotterdam was greeted by a battery of journalists and photographers who thought they were meeting Albert Einstein.
‘Ever since my childhood I had been unable to dissociate Van Houten’s cocoa, the pointed caps of the ladies, and of course huge wooden clogs, from my idea of Holland. My first question when I got off the train was, “Where are the clogs, then?” The next day all the papers carried the banner headline, “Where are the clogs, then?” Eisenstein asks.’36
Following a lecture in Rotterdam, Eisenstein left for the Hague, where he went to the Van Gogh museum and enjoyed ‘the whirlwind of colour produced in Arles by the great madman with the missing ear.’37 In an essay on montage in 1937, Eisenstein wrote of Van Gogh’s ‘unity between drawing as gesture and the power of colour as the basis of representation … It is a mistake to take the crazy, wriggling outline of what he is depicting as drawing in our sense of the word. Drawing and contour in our sense burst out of these limitations and surge into the heart of the colour background itself, solidified by means not only of a new dimension but of a new expressive environment and material: by the movement of the brushstrokes, which simultaneously both create and define the picture’s areas of colour.’38
During these travels he wrote several articles on the adventures of ‘Eisenstein’s team’ which were published in the Moscow Kino under the pseudonym of R. Orick, echoing Rorick, the nickname his nanny had given him as a child. After spending his birthday in Berlin, Eisenstein was back in Paris in February 1930, where he was to satisfy Moscow’s call for him to ‘cause a bit of a stir, politically …’