I am a Westerner. I feel at home in Paris. I feel as though I’m walking across the pages of books when I am there. There is Victor Hugo, there the Three Musketeers … And so I stood there in that Paris, whose ancient masonry appealed to the best in mankind, and at the same time I was in the grip of reactionaries who permitted the nearest sign of freedom to vanish without trace!
During his second, longer visit to Paris, Eisenstein stayed at the tiny Hôtel des Etats-Unis at 135 Avenue Montparnasse. ‘I was preoccupies with the United States. Which was why out of all the possible small hotels I might have taken – and of which there were dozens in that area! – I chose the one with the sign announcing the aim of my wanderings.’1 But he was no closer to getting a contract in Hollywood, and had to earn more money than was provided either by friends or by lectures in the meantime.
Luckily, Grigori Alexandrov’s charm had persuaded Leonard Rosenthal, a millionaire Parisian jeweller, owner of the Maison de Perles, to sponsor a short film whose main purpose was to indulge his Russian mistress, Mara Gris, who could sing chansons reasonably well, and longed to act in a film.
With Tisse as his cinematographer, Alexandrov was permitted by the police to motor across France, shooting forests, landscapes, seascapes in Brittany and flowers in bloom in Provence. The film was called Romance Sentimentale, and Mara Gris was seen ‘singing a sentimental song while gazing tearfully at the rain’ as Eisenstein told his friends, taking off her actions as he did so.2
It is a strangely quirky twenty-minute film that opens with a four-minute montage sequence of the billowing sea (almost the same as the opening shot of The Battleship Potemkin), and a storm in which trees are blown down. What these rather arbitrary nature scenes have to do with what follows is unclear unless they represent the torment within Mademoiselle. She sings the sad Russian song at a grand piano, while her greyhound looks dolefully on. Then, suddenly, she is spirited up into the sky, playing a white piano in the clouds, before returning to her drawing room. At the happy ending, she is back in the clouds, smiling for the first time as the sun comes up.
Although Eisenstein’s name appears on the credits as co-director (the producer insisted on it), his participation in it was peripheral, and it was largely the work of Alexandrov. But the opening sequence bears his mark. Edited to a mixed track of music and natural sounds, it gave Eisenstein the first opportunity to experiment with some of the ways in which images and sound might be used together both creatively and emotively.
Eisenstein himself later wrote a fair summary of Romance Sentimentale in a letter to Léon Moussinac. ‘You know very well that there’s not a lot of me in it (to say the least), except for the principles and possibilities of sound utilisation that are popularised in it … In any case we got what we wanted from it; we made some very valuable montage experiments, and it gave us enough money to stay in Paris.3
One of the first among the roster of luminaries that Eisenstein met during his four-month sojourn in Paris was the cosmopolitan composer Darius Milhaud. Together they ‘strutted along in our broad overcoats, headed for the Galeries Rosenberg. A “house” which dealt exclusively in Picasso and Braque.’4 Eisenstein adored Milhaud’s Brazilian-inspired orchestral piece, Le Boeuf sur le Toit, to which Jean Cocteau later wrote a choreographic scenario that is enacted in an American bar during the Prohibition period.
In the nightclub named after the piece, Eisenstein watched Kiki (the stage name of the cabaret artist Alice Irine) doing a belly-dance in Spanish shawls on top of a grand piano played by Georges-Henri Rivière, curator of the Trocadéro Museum and father-in-law to Paul Cézanne’s son. Kiki gave Eisenstein a copy of her memoirs suggestively signed: ‘Car moi aussi j’aime les gros bateaux et les matelots.’ (‘Because I also love big boats and sailors.’)5 In the estimation of the Cuban cinematographer Nestor Almendros, ‘Kiki was no dummy, and might have owed her great popularity not only to her good looks but to her wit. That clin d’oeil (wink) to the Soviet film director proved that she had a better insight into The Battleship Potemkin, otherwise considered an austere film, than most of her contemporary critics and scholars with their Marxist analysis.’6
Besides modelling for most of the leading artists of Montparnasse, Kiki was a painter in her own right, and got Eisenstein to sit for a portrait. During the second sitting, Alexandrov walked in. According to Eisenstein, ‘She squinted her large almond eyes like a well-disposed filly in the direction of Alexandrov.’7 As a result, Eisenstein’s portrait ended up with Grisha’s lips, which was, supposedly, one way of Eisenstein actually possessing them.
With Ivor Montagu, he visited a brothel in the Rue Blondel where, as described by Montagu, ‘the hostesses, all middle-aged and plain but with a special talent, sat beside us on the red plush sofas but without any clothes, chatting calmly of their husbands and children and kitchens and how much they earned in their working day, until the time came to display this talent, which was an ability to pick up coins from the edge of the table with an organ not usually so employed.’8
Eisenstein’s first meeting with Jean Cocteau was at the French poet-playwright-novelist-painter-cinéaste’s apartment behind the Madeleine church. ‘I had been warned. Cocteau had two ways of receiving guests. He would either pose as the condescending Maestro. Or he would play the “slightly afflicted”, admitting visitors [while] lying down, holding forth on his health in a plaintive voice, his huge hands lying across the counterpane. I was received in the latter way. I was even accorded the highest token of recognition. In the middle of our conversation there was an unexpected and expressive pause. And he spake unto me: “I see you now suddenly filled with blood …”’9
A few days later, Cocteau sent Eisenstein an invitation for two for a private dress rehearsal (une répétition intime) matinée of his new play, the monodrama, La Voix Humaine, at the Comédie Française on Saturday, February 15 at 2.15 p.m. Eisenstein dined the evening before with four antique dealers and two surrealist poets, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. The dealers had a little shop in the Rue des Saints-Péres which contained gilt-carved madonnas and Peruvian pitchers shaped like dogs, that appealed to Eisenstein.
At that time, Aragon and Eluard, both in their early thirties were still followers of André Breton, with whom Eisenstein had a cool association. ‘I think that Breton, whose Marxist pose was fairly unconvincing, took offence somewhat when I failed to announce myself to him on my arrival in Paris,’ explained Eisenstein. ‘I find it an unrewarding experience mixing with drawing-room snobs who play at Marxism … What made Breton still more angry was my close association with a splinter group, young people of a more democratic outlook. Its headquarters was in a café which has two Chinese idols above the doorway – hence its name Les Deux Magots. This group had none of the arrogance, posiness or snobbery of the “elders”’.10 (It was at Les Deux Magots, in St Germain des Prés, a favourite haunt of Eisenstein’s, that he met the surrealist painters Max Ernst and André Derain.) The autocratic Breton might also have been envious of Eisenstein’s reputation as a great radical left-wing artist who hailed from the country believed to provide the paradigm framework for radical left-wing art.
After the dinner with the antique dealers, Eisenstein invited Eluard to accompany him the following day to the theatre although he knew that the Surrealists of both groups detested Cocteau for what they considered his misbegotten attempts at surrealism, his dandyism and his bourgeois tastes and friends. In addition, Breton, like most of his group, was anti-homosexual – ‘Ce n’est pas serieuse,’ was one of their declarations – though it is unlikely that Breton considered Eisenstein to be homosexual. Thus, on accepting the invitation to the Cocteau play, Eluard said ominously, ‘But I warn you, I shall cause a scandal.’
‘Whether I did not fully believe his words, or I was curious to witness a scandal – and there was every chance of one – I had to ignore what he said,’ Eisenstein remarked. ‘So there we were in the dress circle of the Comédie Française. Starched shirt fronts. Cuffs. Gold pince-nez. Sleek beards. The women in severe dresses. Society so respectable is was nauseating … A decorous drowsiness settled on all the propriety. There was only one actor in the play – a woman [the actress Berthe Bovy]. With an imaginary partner … at the other end of a telephone. An endless monologue. The endlessness slowly drained the scene of any fragments of possible drama. But my view of the stage was suddenly blocked by the towering four-square figure of Eluard. A piercing voice. “Who are you talking to? Monsieur Desbordes!?” [The twenty-four-year-old Jean Desbordes was Cocteau’s current boyfriend.] The actress dried. The audience, unable to believe their ears, turned round to look at Eluard. An unheard of insult! A two-pronged one at that. First, insulting the tradition of the sacred walls of France’s leading theatre. And second, a direct attack on the author – a hint at his all-too-well-known proclivities; in this case his name was linked with a young Monseiur Desbordes, a rising novelist. But Eluard gave the audience no time to come to its senses. He hammered out with percussive rhythm the classic: “Merde! Merde! Merde!” … This word fell like a hammer blow on the heads of the audience … “Merde! Merde! Merde!”’
[The audience reacted to this by rushing up to Eluard and attacking him.] ‘Eluard stood still, like St Sebastian with the self-consciousness of Gulliver in Lilliput. But flecked with saliva, the Lilliputians dragged him downwards. The jacket ripped. Dinner jackets also ripped. The poet’s pallid face sank like a frigate in the unequal combat, then it lunged upwards once more, jaws tightly clenched, before rolling down the massive staircase of the dress-circle, with a heap of other bodies.’
[After the intercession of Cocteau, the play continued, and was greeted with tumultuous applause at the end.] ‘The success of Cocteau’s work was assured … But for the incident would there have been such an ovation? If it comes to that, could Cocteau have much reason to complain? Perhaps he should even have been grateful. Anyway, I tried to slip out of the theatre without meeting him.’11 Although Cocteau never blamed him, Eisenstein felt, that by inviting Eluard to the performance, he had been the indirect cause of the scandal. Two days after the incident at the Comédie Française, Eisenstein was at the centre of an even bigger scandal.
At the invitation of Léon Moussinac, and under the aegis of the Social Research Department, Eisenstein was to give a lecture in the Salle Richelieu at the Sorbonne following a showing of The General Line there. Arriving with thirty minutes to spare, he was greeted at the large lecture theatre by Moussinac and Dr René Allendy, the psychoanalyst and art collector. The projector had been set up and the hall was filling rapidly. An estimated three thousand people – many of them French Communists – finally crammed into the amphitheatre with a seating capacity of a thousand. But the hall was also crowded with right-wing agents provocateurs, including members of the Camelots de Roi organisation of young monarchists, who were there to make trouble.
It all took place against an atmosphere of anti-Soviet feeling in France, especially among burgeoning right-wing groups including White Russian emigré organisations. One of the leaders of the latter, General Kutepov, had disappeared under mysterious circumstances for which the Soviet government was widely held to be responsible.
Shortly before the appointed time of the screening, a policeman in képi and white gloves took up a stand beside the projector, and the organisers were informed that the showing had been banned on the orders of Jean Chiappe, the Paris Prefect of Police, for reasons of ‘security’. Although The General Line had not been passed by the Board of Censors, it had been thought that a screening inside the Sorbonne would count as a private one. Chiappe, who had already created difficulties for Eisenstein over his French residence permit, was the man who, in December of the same year, would suppress Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or after the screen was splattered with ink by a fascist group.
There were thoughts of contravening the ban but that was just what the police were waiting for. There were police divisions in the courtyard, and the situation looked nasty. To catcalls and boos, Dr Allendy announced that the police had banned the film, adding that Eisenstein would nevertheless give an impromptu lecture on ‘the intellectual film’ and answer any questions afterwards. Eisenstein had prepared a mere twenty-minute introduction, but said he would try to stretch it out to forty minutes and then open up the talk for questions from the floor.
‘I suddenly felt acute resentment and anger,’ he recollected some years later. ‘You – in the very heart of French scholarship and thought, the France of Descartes and Voltaire, the France of the Rights of Man and the Communards, the France of age-old struggles for freedom. And now some dirty flic dared to sit (now he was even sitting by the projector!) at the foot of the great cardinal! … Paris whose corridors of power impudently refused to recognise Soviet cinema … Paris which dared in its reactionary blindness to turn its back on the country which had taken the torch of the ideals of freedom from France and raced onwards with it to new horizons.’12
He kept these feelings about France to himself as he delivered his lecture on The Principles of the New Russian Cinema. ‘I’m sorry that you cannot see my film … This makes my task much harder as I will have to make up what you cannot see with my limited French. When I am through speaking you may throw questions at me and I will try to answer. A sort of friendly ping-pong game. But I beg you not to ask me the whereabouts of General Kutepov or what salary I earn in the USSR, for if you do I am certain that my replies will not satisfy you.’13
Much of the speech was a celebratory description of the way the Soviets had organised the cinema, going on to praise the successes of the collectivist movement, its relation to the way films were produced and as the subject of The General Line.
‘When the script is finished, we discuss it collectively in the factories or places with a special interest in the issue that is being dealt with. If it is a peasant film, like The General Line that I am unable to show you, we discuss the script with peasants, and every peasant, knowing that it is a film made for his benefit, shows an interest, gives his opinion, says what he thinks of the subject, assists and contributes to it through his familiarity with the background, and the interests involved and thus fulfils the role that we want him to fulfil … When the film is finished, and before it is shown in cinemas, we send it to factories and villages, and the classes represented in the film subject it to very severe criticism … You have to take it to the factory, listen to what people say about it, change your film when required, add what is necessary to ensure that it faithfully expresses what you intend.’14
It sounded so simple and practical, though it is doubtful whether one single film made in the Soviet Union was ever altered because of views expressed by the peasants or workers. Eisenstein gave not an inkling that there was ever any criticism or censorship from above, especially not for The General Line. A few months later, the Soviet authorities censored a number of scenes from Dovzhenko’s Earth, a story of collectivisation in the Ukraine. The particular scenes that displeased them were when a dead man’s betrothed mourns him, naked and hysterical, and when a peasant urinates into the radiator of a tractor.
After his talk, Eisenstein answered questions from the audience, scoring ‘bull’s-eyes’, as he put it, on the Board of Censors, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Prefecture, producing ‘great hilarity from the auditorium.’
Floor: Could an independent artist with anarchic tendencies develop freely in Russia?
Eisenstein: I think that the most fertile ground for that is France.
Floor: Do you really think that the Russian peasant is capable of making useful criticisms of your film?
Eisenstein: Of course I must say that the best criticisms come either from critics who understand art, but these are unfortunately very rare, or from primitive peasants, genuinely sincere and direct people. Most people who fall between these categories are of no use to us in films. They are people who have been deprived of their spontaneous élan and who know absolutely nothing of what might interest us.
Floor: French reporters who have been there tell us that laughter is dead in Russia. Is this true?
(‘My reply was an outburst of laughter. In those days I had very strong, healthy white teeth.’)
Eisenstein: There are so many things to make fun of that you can be sure that people still laugh at them. When I tell them the tale of my evening here I think they will laugh a lot!15
Le Matin the next morning wrote, ‘Don’t worry about Bolsheviks with daggers between their teeth – look out for those with laughter on their lips!’ Five years later, when Eisenstein had very little to laugh about, he wrote an article, devoid of humour and in his exigent sycophantic mode, entitled Bolsheviks Do Laugh (Thoughts on Soviet Comedy), in which he retold the story of that evening at the Sorbonne. What he now demanded was ‘a new kind of humour, filling in a new page in the world history of humour and laughter, just as the very fact of the existence of the Soviet Union has inscribed a new page in the history and diversity of social forms. It is early days yet for us to chuckle idly. The task of building socialism is not yet finished. There is no place for random frivolity … It is only possible to rise above the constraints of crude slapstick and schoolboy humour by aspiring to understand perfectly the social significance of the ugly mug you direct your laughter at. The comedy of social mask, and the force of social mockery, must and do lie at the basis of the forms of that militant humour that our laughter must constitute. And that, I think, is what laughter, when we have reached the last decisive battles for socialism in one country [echoing Stalin’s slogan associated with the Five-Year Plan], must and will be.’16 How different from the spontaneous laughter that Eisenstein engendered that evening in the Salle Richelieu five years previously!
After that lecture, flanked by Dr Allendy and Léon Moussinac, he left the Sorbonne in triumph, through cordons of police. ‘We could not believe what we saw! Lorries full of police were parked in alleys and courtyards. They were obviously expecting a regular battle.’17
At nine the next morning, the police descended upon Eisenstein’s hotel in Montparnasse. In fact, they had arrived three hours earlier, but the hotel proprietor, an ex-diamond cutter, stopped them from going up to his room. The proprietor declared: ‘Monsieur Eisenstein got back late last night … Monsieur Eisenstein is still asleep … I will not allow anyone to see Monsieur Eisenstein before nine o’clock.’18
Eisenstein spent the whole day being dragged around the security forces, the police, and the Prefecture, after which he was given twenty-four hours to leave the country. In desperation, he had no choice but to approach the Soviet Plenipotentiary in the Rue de Grenelle.
‘Posters and slogans, posted along the walls right up to the very gate of the building, shrieked inaudibly, “Throw the Soviets out of Paris!” “Run them out of town!” The papers were filled with anti-Soviet shrieks. “Of course it took some doing to find the very worst time for this case of yours,” our plenipotentiary, Dovgalensky, said to me … I felt sorry for Dovgalensky. The “mysterious matter” of General Kutepov’s disappearance had come crashing down on his head. The reactionary yellow press was accusing the Soviets of kidnapping him. “It would be useless to send a communiqué to Tardieu [André Tardieu, the French prime minister] about you. You yourself must understand that.”’19 However, Eisenstein discovered another way of getting Tardieu to lend him a sympathetic ear.
When he learned of Eisenstein’s predicament, Jean Cocteau immediately sent a note asking him to come to his apartment. ‘Cocteau met me with his usual affectation … He excitedly held out his hands to me … He entreated me to “Forgive France” for the insult she had borne me. He wanted to help me. He was in despair. He could not now use his contacts in the police force.’20
Cocteau explained that his ‘rascal’ valet, a young Vietnamese had just been caught in possession of opium. But, he explained, there was another possibility. Mary Marquet, the actress, who was in The Carriage of Holy Gifts by Clara Gazul (the pseudonym of Prosper Merimée), currently at the Comédie Française in a double bill with La Voix Humaine, was the Prime Minister’s mistress. ‘She is making a lot of money because of me,’ Cocteau explained. ‘She won’t object to talking to Tardieu in bed … In France, women are the key to everything.’21
Another friend of Eisenstein’s who came to his aid was Jean Painlevé, the twenty-nine-year-old director of short scientific films, many of them on sea creatures. Having dinner with Painlevé, Eisenstein noted, ‘He tucked into a crab or some other variety of crustacean which, had it been alive, would have found itself on his screen.’ He was the son of Paul Painlevé, a former socialist member of the War Cabinet, and a renowned mathematician. ‘My father has already written his letter of protest to the Prefecture,’ he told Eisenstein.22
Renaud de Jouvenal, a motor car fanatic who took Eisenstein wherever he wanted to go in his sky-blue Bugatti, was the son of the statesman Henri de Jouvenal. ‘I’ve heard all about it. Papa has already sent a letter of protest to the Prefecture.’23 This might have had some effect as Senator de Jouvenal had no communist sympathies; he was ambassador to Rome at the time, and was trying to reach an entente cordiale with Mussolini. Jouvenal had been married to the novelist Colette for twelve years, but she had been unfaithful to him with her eldest stepson, Bertrand, Renaud’s brother. Because of this, Renaud felt awkward about meeting Colette, who also had pull in high places. However, Léon Moussinac took Eisenstein to see her.
‘Colette had a few tiny rooms above the arcade, with windows facing inwards on to the gardens of the Palais Royal.’ Eisenstein remembered that, ‘Colette arrived in a man’s jacket, and her fringe tousled. Dark eyeliner. She will do everything … She would have a word with Philippe [Berthelot, director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs]. The way I bowed and kissed her hand had something of the Regency period about it.’24 Thanks to both Colette and Cocteau, Eisenstein got to see Berthelot.
Georges Henri Rivière, the curator of the Trocadéro Museum, introduced Eisenstein to the Museum’s director, who had influence with the Foreign Ministry. Roland Tual, founder of the Revue du cinéma (with Jean-Georges Auriol) took Eisenstein to meet Anatole de Monzi, a former French minister who sympathised with the Soviet Union. With a phone call, he managed to extend Eisenstein’s stay by a further seven days.
However, on March 4, despite all these powerful advocates, Eisenstein received a final police notification of his extradition from France. The Refus de Séjour gave him two weeks to leave the country. The reason for the extradition was given as ‘décision ministérielle’.
In the meantime, Eisenstein took a trip to the south of France. In Cannes, he visited the pro-Soviet author Henri Barbousse; spent a few days writing at Léon Moussinac’s cottage in Toulon, went dancing in a bar for sailors in Saint Tropez, and was invited to the villa of the Vicomte de Noailles at Hyéres. In Paris, Eisenstein had already entered the artistic salon of the Vicomte’s wife, Marie-Laure de Noailles, who fascinated him because she was a direct descendant of the Marquis de Sade, and her house was crammed with editions of Justine, The Philosophy of the Boudoir and the 120 Days of Sodom. Her husband had given financial backing to Cocteau’s first film, Le Sang d’un Poete and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, which got him black-balled from the Jockey Club. Cocteau suggested that Eisenstein make a film in Marseilles with the backing of the Vicomte. But Eisenstein never even got to meet him.
On his return to Paris, Eisenstein’s itinerary was as crowded as ever. He visited Abel Gance, the director of Napoléon, at his house at 27 Avenue Kléber, filled with both mock and genuine Gothic artefacts, and sat on one of the uncomfortable straight-backed chairs. What intrigued him was a life-size plaster copy of the ‘Androgyne of Naples’, which took up a great deal of the room.
He accompanied Gance to the Studio de Joinville where the director was in the middle of shooting The End of the World, in which he himself took the role of the carpenter who played Christ in the Oberammergau passion play. Gance presented Eisenstein with a photograph of himself in the guise of a weeping, bloodied Christ with a crown of thorns upon his head. ‘Gance tried to persuade me that he was so overcome by an ecstasy that he began speaking in ancient Hebrew.’25
In Paris, Eisenstein, who ‘had been examining the question of religious ecstasy as a particular aspect of pathos’, spent much time browsing in the Catholic bookshops, where he bought the works of St John of the Cross, St Theresa and St Ignatius Loyola, in pursuit of the theory, if not the practice, of states of ecstasy – ex-stasis, ‘stepping outside oneself.’ This had preoccupied him since he had begun trying to rationalise the effects The Battleship Potemkin had on audiences.
‘Pathos is what makes a viewer leap from his seat. It is what makes him jump. It is what makes him throw up his arms and shout. It is what makes his eyes sparkle in delight, before that same feeling makes him cry. In a word, it is everything that makes the viewer “come out of himself.”’26
He also paid visits to the cathedrals of Reims, Chartres, Amiens and Lisieux, though, above all, he really longed to go to Lourdes, which had captivated him ever since his childhood reading of Emile Zola’s novel Lourdes. ‘I was fascinated by the onset of mass hysteria as crowd psychosis during “miracle cures.”’27 He did not make it to Lourdes because his stay in France did not co-incide with the dates of the pilgrimages, but he did see a copy of the grotto – with life-size models of the Madonna and the little Bernadette – in Marseilles in a side street full of brothels, a perfect symbol of Eisenstein’s sacred and profane temperament lying side by side.
Marie Seton explained: ‘It seems to me a little fallacious for critics in the West, who are probably rationalists, to assume that individuals in a society based upon a materialist philosophy can eliminate religious influences and interests at will simply because they desire to be thoroughgoing materialists. Having no predilection towards religion myself, I was considerably jolted to discover Eisenstein’s conflict between his intellectual desire to be rationalist and his emotional pull towards mysticism. I was also exceedingly aware of Eisenstein’s “horsing around”, for no-one could be more double-edged than Eisenstein … Allowing for the fact that a conflict between rationalism and mysticism is not an uncommon phenomenon, it is easy to understand that Eisenstein would keep his problem to himself during that period 1918 to 1929 when a policy of active anti-religious activity was carried on by the League of the Godless …’28
However, Seton suggested that when Eisenstein arrived in France, no longer in the environment of anti-religious activity, in the different intellectual climate where belief in religion or adherence to atheism was solely a matter of personal disposition, Eisenstein, for the first time in his adult life, was able more openly to express this side of himself. Perhaps, even more so than Buñuel, Eisenstein could say, Thank God, I’m an atheist.’
On the secular side, Eisenstein was frequently seen at Shakespeare & Co, Sylvia Beach’s celebrated bookshop on the Left Bank. ‘I greatly loved this modest quiet bookshop and the grey-haired Sylvia Beach. I often dropped in on her. Sat in her back room. And gazed at the walls for ages; they were hung with innumerable faded photographs. An idiosyncratic pantheon of literature.’ At her shop he was delighted to find Paul Verlaine’s Hombres, banned for its homo-eroticism and ‘sold under the counter quite openly.’29
It was through Sylvia Beach that he got to meet James Joyce, whose Ulysses she had first published. He received a first edition of Ulysses, one of his favourite novels, signed by the author, and a recording Joyce had made of readings from Finnegans Wake. Eisenstein’s first impression of Joyce, whose glaucoma had brought him to the brink of blindness, was of a modest and jocular man totally dedicated to his work. They spent hours together at subsequent meetings during which Joyce sometimes read from his works or discussed examples of interior monologue from Ulysses. He fired Eisenstein with enthusiasm for his technique of ‘unfolding the display of events simultaneously with the particular manner in which these events pass through the consciousness and feelings, the associations and emotions’ of Leopold Bloom. So much so that Eisenstein yearned to adapt Ulysses, ‘the Bible of the new cinema’, to the screen. Joyce for his part was fascinated by ideas Eisenstein had evolved over the previous five years for conveying the interior monologue on the screen, where, he was convinced, it would find even fuller expression. Though almost completely blind, and the films were silent, Joyce wanted to ‘see’ The Battleship Potemkin and October. So impressed was he by his talks with Eisenstein that he commented to a friend that if Ulysses were ever filmed, only two people were capable of directing it – Walter Ruttmann or Eisenstein.
Ulysses certainly helped Eisenstein master ‘the obvious tangibility of the technique of musical counterpoint … the multiple passages of regular, intricate constructions from the chapters of this novel’s exceptionally musical prose whispered the secrets of these melodic structures in my ear one by one.’30
Between the completion of October and the resumption of The General Line in 1928, Eisenstein had spent a short holiday at Gagri in the Crimea, taking Ulysses with him to study. A few months later, unable to try out an interior monologue in a sound film, he wrote some ‘stream of consciousness’ pages, mostly in English.
At Shakespeare & Co, Eisenstein made the acquaintance of ‘a young man with a fringe and slightly powdered cheeks – George Anteil … He had just become famous.’31 Anteil, the American composer and pianist, who, at thirty, was only three years younger than Eisenstein, had recently had a great success with his jazz-influenced first opera Transatlantic. Someone else Eisenstein met at the bookshop was the poet Léon-Paul Fargue, who signed a copy of his verses for him, with the dedication ‘A Eisenstein poète. Léon-Paul Fargue poéte. Paris 1930.
At the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara’s house, he met ‘the close-cropped’ Gertrude Stein, who gave him advice about his trip to America. Tzara, ‘never to be seen without his monocle …’ had a superb collection of masks and early Picassos. ‘Dadaism,’ Eisenstein noted, was ‘the latest stage of artistic notions in disintegration, and the retreat not merely to the nursery but to the cradle itself.’32
Enrico Prampolini, the Futurist artist whom Eisenstein had met (and disliked) at the conference at La Sarraz, took him off to an exhibition and party largely attended by other Italian Futurist painters and poets. ‘The limping figure of Prampolini … belonged to the belligerent camp of followers and minions of the then fairly active Marinetti, in whom the Italians found a figure of authority,’ Eisenstein wrote. ‘Italian Fascism was increasingly spurring on that herald of militant Futurism, which in those years had long outlived itself … The painting may have been bad but the poetry was atrocious. I found myself quite unexpectedly shaking hands with Marinetti. For my part such a meeting could give me no pleasure at all. As one newspaper put it, in its account of the exhibition’s opening, it was only “piquant to watch one of the prophets of Fascism in the same room as one of Communism’s angry disciples.”’33
More to his taste was twenty-nine-year-old André Malraux, with whom he had long discussions on literature and who told Eisenstein that he could quote from memory any passage from any Dostoevsky novel he could name. They talked about Lady Chatterley’s Lover for which Malraux was writing the preface to the French translation. As it had been banned in America and England, Eisenstein quickly obtained a copy in English, which he took with him to the United States, ‘not to read it, but out of snobbery.’ But when he did get round to the novel, it ‘completely bowled me over.’34 He later bought every D.H. Lawrence book he could find. What he found attractive in Lawrence’s work was his ability to ‘step outside the boundaries of sex and into (inaccessible for a limited being) a cosmic, universal confluence. Which is why I find pre-logic so attractive: it grants the subconscious sensuality but does not subordinate it to sex.’35 Among the other books he bought in Paris was Lucien Lévy-Bruell’s La Mentalité Primitive (Primitive Thought), which dealt with just such pre-logic theories, which he would draw upon in his teachings.
Apart from writers and painters, Eisenstein also formed friendships with the photographers Germaine Krull, Eli Lotar and André Kertesz. Krull specialised in documentary ‘photo-novels’ and she, Joris Ivens and Eisenstein filmed some counters in cafés in the suburbs. Ivens, the Dutch director of left-wing documentaries, recalled his short time with Eisenstein in Paris.
‘Often when we walked together in Paris, he would take his camera with him, but the subjects he chose to photograph were never conventional “sights” of the city, but human beings in comical situations. I suspect that this highly developed and very conspicuous sense of fun might have been a form of compensation for his basic shyness. For although he was undoubtedly a very good friend to many people in many countries, he was far less emotional in his personal friendships than most others I have known. With Eisenstein, and especially at the beginning of a relationship, there was a feeling of reserve. He must have been conscious of this, and might even have been ashamed of it, trying to compensate for it by an excessively extroverted sense of humour.’36
As the Hollywood contract had still failed to materialise – Eisenstein was upset to hear that Douglas Fairbanks had been in London and not bothered to contact him – Eisenstein felt insecure even though he had had his carte de séjour extended slightly, and he continued to discuss the possibilities of making a film in France. But he was unable to agree with producers who proposed that he should make ‘mass-appeal’ films, using certain young actresses in alluring roles. Eisenstein was dumbfounded and managed to blurt out, ‘But I don’t use actors … Actors are too artificial! … How could you suppose for one moment that I would give up my ideas? Doesn’t my success in France rest entirely on their realisation? Why do you think the showings of Potemkin are packed out?’37
However, he was approached with a proposal to make a film of Don Quixote, starring Fyodor Chaliapin. The great Russian bass had only once appeared on screen, as Ivan the Terrible, in a disastrous silent film version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov, made in 1915. Eisenstein had seen the film in which ‘his [Chaliapin’s] nobility, his statuesque bearing and dramatic performances all survived the ridiculous breakneck speed of the 16 frames per second film running through the projector at 20 frames a second.’ Chaliapin had since avoided films, but the prospect of a ‘talkie’ intrigued (and terrified) him. The proposal, however, was left hanging in mid-air when Eisenstein left for the USA. Three years later Don Quixote, starring Chaliapin, was made by G. W. Pabst in France, a film which Eisenstein, ‘to my shame’, found he could not sit through.38
Finally, towards the end of April, Paramount’s Vice-President, Jesse L. Lasky, turned up in Paris with a proposition from his studio. This was largely due to the diplomacy of Ivor Montagu, who had gone to Hollywood a few months earlier to use his contacts to get Eisenstein work there. Eisenstein’s first meeting with Lasky took place at Lasky’s hotel, the George V, in the Champs Elysées. Eisenstein described Lasky as ‘one of the real characters of the film business. One of the first to tread on the fertile soil of golden California … Mr Lasky gave me paternal encouragement.’39 The fifty-year-old Lasky, showman and co-founder of Paramount, who wore a pince-nez, was accompanied by a couple of other big guns, Albert Kaufman, general manager of the studio, and Richard Blumenthal, an executive producer.
Negotiations commenced on the basis that Eisenstein would spend six months in the USA making a film for Paramount, after which it would be open for him to return to Moscow to direct a Sovkino production. The subsequent plan was for alternate work on American and Russian films until he had completed three or four films for Paramount. The contract would be terminated only if he failed to settle on a subject for a film and conditions of work by the end of three months in the USA.
Several possible subjects were suggested by Lasky including the Dreyfus affair, a film on Emile Zola, and Vicki Baum’s bestseller Menschen in Hotel (Grand Hotel), none of which held much appeal for Eisenstein. He countered with three works, each of which had the advantage of having been offered to him personally by their respective authors: H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, James Joyce’s Ulysses and George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. (All of these subjects would eventually be filmed, but not by Eisenstein.) As Lasky was taking a huge enough risk in inviting a ‘dangerous’ Bolshevik to Hollywood in the first place, Eisenstein wisely resisted expressing his desire to make a film of Das Kapital.
While he awaited confirmation from Sovkino and the official extension to his leave of absence from the Soviet Union, the financial side of the contract was discussed. Lasky offered him a weekly sum of $500 until a subject was decided, and $3,000 weekly once filming began. But Eisenstein categorically refused to sign any contract that failed to include Tisse and Alexandrov – in whose services Lasky was not interested. Because of this condition negotiations were almost broken off. But Paramount, who obviously thought Eisenstein worth courting, came up with an offer of $900 a week from the beginning, out of which Eisenstein himself could pay his colleagues.
The general terms were spelt out by Eisenstein in an article that he sent to Moussinac for publication. ‘After a movie at Paramount – to be completed in about six months – our team will return to Moscow for our next Soviet production. After that we shall return to Hollywood for a second film. We foresee a third and fourth film under the same conditions, our team travelling to and fro between the USSR and America. If during the first three months of our stay in the USA we are unable to agree on a subject for the movie, or on working conditions, our relationship can be terminated, in which case we will return at once to Moscow.’40
That version of the contract reads more optimistically than the account given by Ivor Montagu, whose recollection is that the arrangement was not so much ‘a contract of service’ as ‘an agreement of Paramount to allow expenses for a period of six months.’41 Those expenses, given the riches of Hollywood, seem surprisingly small: $500 for Eisenstein, and a hundred each for Alexandrov, Tisse, Montagu and Montagu’s wife, Helle. It was hoped that this would be increased on acceptance of a script.
The contract was finally signed on May 3. Three days later Eisenstein received his visa and prepared to sail immediately for America.