In recent years I have become self-absorbed. I have retreated into my shell. The country fulfilled its Five-Year Plans. Industrialisation took giant steps forward. I remained in my shell. My alienation from life was, it is true, not complete. It was in those years that I was intensely involved with the younger generation, devoting all my energies to my work at the Institute of Cinema. But this was also a retreat within the walls of an academic institute; there was no broad creative exit towards the masses, towards reality.
The period after his return home was one of Eisenstein’s most painful. Cramped in his uncomfortable bedsitter (with shared kitchen and lavatory) on Chysti Prudi, ruminating on the warm days in Beverly Hills and Mexico, he still believed that the negatives of Qué Viva México! would soon follow him to Moscow. Negotiations with Upton Sinclair through friends continued until Eisenstein learned that his film had been turned over to other hands. There were rumours that Sinclair had sold some footage of Qué Viva México! to MGM for Viva Villa, the biopic on Pancho Villa which was begun in Mexico by Howard Hawks at the hacienda in Tetlapayac, but finished by Jack Conway in Hollywood. But Eisenstein, after seeing (and liking) the film, could recognise none of his material. However, there were scenes that had been influenced by his aborted film, such as where honey is spread over a prisoner’s face to attract ants.
Soon after his return to Moscow, he received a letter from his Mexican friend Augustin Aragon Leiva. ‘Where is Eisenstein?’ he wrote. ‘Tetlapayac is waiting for him … that corner room is filled with his thoughts and his tremendous devilish dreams …’1 Inconsolable over the abortion of the project in which he had invested so much time and energy, frustrated as an artist, and bitterly disillusioned, Eisenstein spent over a month at Kislovodsk Sanatorium with a serious nervous condition.
On October 13, 1932, Eisenstein wrote to Kenneth MacPherson, editor of Close Up: ‘At the present time I am finishing the licking of my Mexican wounds – it looks as if the picture is lost for ever … as soon as the thing is definite you will get an article about this chef d’oeuvre inconnu – the film that nobody will see.’2 Almost a year on, when his American student Jay Leyda asked why he had so far made no films since his return to Moscow, ‘He gave me the most genuinely anguished look I ever saw on his face and shouted at me: “What do you expect me to do! How can there be a new film when I haven’t given birth to the last one!” Eisenstein felt himself now “too old” and “done for.”’3
Four years later, he was writing to Salka Viertel: ‘I am slowly recovering from the blow of my Mexican experience. I have never worked on anything with such enthusiasm and what happened to it is the greatest crime, even if I have to share the guilt. But there are things that have to be above all personal feelings. Let’s not talk about it anymore.’4
Besides having to live with his deep disappointment, Eisenstein was also subjected to derogatory comments by Boris Shumyatsky, who had little time for the ‘intelligentsia illusions’ of the avant-garde and even less for someone like Eisenstein who had gone abroad for a protracted period when he was needed at home, and had not made a feature film for three years. Eisenstein felt an odd man out, and was perceived as already part of an older generation of film-makers, someone who belonged to the silent cinema.
Yet, such was his residual reputation that less than six months after his return to the Soviet Union, he was made Head of the Director Department at the State Institute of Cinematography where he had already been a lecturer before his visit to the West. ‘It was some compensation in all those years, when after the Mexican trauma, I was not able to make a single film,’ he remarked.5
Many of his students testified to his talents as a teacher. The director Grigori Rostotsky: ‘He was an extraordinary teacher, who never talked down to his students, and never taught them to imitate him. He knew perfectly well that none of us could possibly make films the way he made them, and he quite rightly preferred to develop what was best in each of us. Always he tried to raise each student to his own level, never himself sinking to the level of the person he was speaking to. Whenever you talked to him you became, quite involuntarily, more intelligent because you were receiving so much new information, new knowledge, new observations.’6
Rostotsky had met Eisenstein first when he was thirteen, then again at sixteen, when he asked him if he had the makings of a film director. ‘[Eisenstein] never gave a straight reply … his response was to begin teaching me, there and then, and in a most unexpected way. He made me read certain books, he told me to look at particular paintings by particular artists, and he made me listen to selected pieces of music. What he was doing, of course, was to give me a general education in the arts, and after reading the books and studying the paintings I would be invited to his Moscow flat and we would have long and detailed talks about my own reactions to all those discoveries. Those conversations were a reward as well as a lesson, and as lessons they were the greatest in my whole life.’7
Herbert Marshall, a lanky red-headed cockney with a Hitler moustache, was the only foreign student to go right through the course, starting in 1932 and graduating in 1935. On his master’s teaching methods, Marshall later wrote: ‘To Eisenstein editing was much more than usually conceived. It was the basic method of artistic composition applied to all works of art; the creation of a higher dimension from the conflict of opposing forces within a lower dimension. The creation of an abstract idea from the collision of concrete ideas. His favourite example was from Chinese hieroglyphs, where: Door plus ear = to eavesdrop. Mouth plus birds = to sing. Knife plus heart = sorrow. Which is montage in a nutshell, as he used to tell us … Eisenstein insisted that every director must be able to explain visual ideas visually to his art director and his cameraman … When we graduated, Eisenstein’s final words to us were: “When you come to make your first film, forget all about montage and about me! Here you have learned, but there you must do. And the doing should reveal the learning.”’8
As most of the students were mainly workers and peasants, Eisenstein once turned to Marshall and remarked, in English, ‘Thank goodness, you at least have heard of the Sistine Chapel and Sigmund Freud.’9 Jay Leyda, who had heard him lecture at Columbia University in 1931, arrived at the school two years later. He noted in his diary of October 13: ‘Lectures by tireless Eisenstein. His pupils adore him. He keeps them excited with new ideas expressed by his short, sturdy body, his rasping voice, and his amazing indicative face and head.’10
The director Mikhail Romm came to Eisenstein for advice in 1933 when he was starting his first film, Boule de Suif, based on the Guy de Maupassant novel, which Eisenstein knew almost verbatim. But Eisenstein refused to give Romm advice after disagreeing with him about his approach to the adaptation. Then, the day before shooting began, Romm dared to approach him once more.
‘Sergei Mikhailovich, tomorrow I start shooting. Please give me some advice. Say something. Anything.’
‘Very well, then, what’s your first shot?’
‘I’m beginning with the simplest of all. A close-up of a pair of boots standing by the door.’
‘Excellent. Now this is my advice. You must film those boots in such a way that if you happened to fall under a tram tomorrow night I’d feel justified in taking your shot to the Institute and saying to my students, “Now you can see what a great director we’ve lost. He took only one shot of a pair of boots, but on the basis of that shot I intend to put those boots in our Museum.”’
‘Thank, you. I’ll do as you say. I’ll shoot those boots in exactly that way.’
‘But try not to fall under a tram afterwards.’
‘I’ll do my best. And then? What do I do after that?’
‘Then you must make every shot in that same way, and every film, and every script. And you must continue like that for the rest of your life. That is all the advice I can give you.’11
Eisenstein’s lectures were stenographed by Vladimir Nizhny, a student and later a lecturer at the Institute. Nizhny’s transcriptions endorse the eulogies of former pupils to Eisenstein’s gifts as a teacher. Nizhny wrote: ‘For Eisenstein the work at GIK had multiple uses: his production inactivity in those years left him with a quantity of theories to be aired and tested; there were also teaching methods in a new field to be tried; and he grew profoundly involved in the problems and potentialities of his students.
‘“The Institute exhausts me,” he often remarked. But he had a need and love of teaching. It was one of his basic tenets as an instructor that the teacher is no more than primus inter pares – first among equals. He demanded absolute precision from his students, sometimes snapping, “Don’t say ‘I think!’ Until you know, I will not listen to you!” He invariably opened the course with a light-hearted discussion, listening to his students’ tales and launching into reminiscences of his own travels. Each new section of the course opened with several concrete problems to be solved, supplemented by a vast variety of illustrative material produced from his enormous yellow briefcase. Hokusai sketches, Daumier engravings, reproductions of Serov, exotic ritual masks from all over the world, books, photographs. “Always try to define things plastically,” was a method he urged his students to adopt.’12
Although teaching satisfied Eisenstein’s desire to communicate his ideas to others, he had every intention of continuing his career as a film director. In order to do so, he had to prove not his artistic credentials, but his ideological ones. In one of the first of his essays cautiously toeing the party line, he wrote, ‘As far as my personal creativity is concerned, my systematic scientific and pedagogical practice are inseparably intertwined … My Weltanschauung appears to have taken shape. I have accepted the Revolution. My activity is devoted entirely to furthering its interests … Abroad is the severest test that biography can set a Soviet man whose development is automatically and indissolubly linked with the development of October. It is the test of free choice. Abroad is the severest test for a “master of culture” to examine consciously “whom he is for and whom he is against”. Abroad is the severest test for a creative worker as to whether he is on the whole capable of creation outside the Revolution and whether he can go on existing outside it. This test appeared for us when we were confronted by the golden hills of Hollywood and we passed it, not with a heroic pose of arrogant rejection of the earth’s charms and blessings, but with our creative and instructive instincts modestly and organically rejecting the opportunity to create in a different social atmosphere and in the interests of a different class. This inability to create on the other side of the demarcation line between the classes reflects the strength and power of the revolutionary pressure of the proletarian revolution as a whirlwind sweeping away all those who oppose it, and as a still more powerful whirlwind engulfing those who have chosen to march in step with it. That is how everyone in the galaxy of active Soviet artists acts, feels and thinks. Many of us have come through the Revolution to art. All of us summon you through art to the Revolution!’13
Grigori Alexandrov arrived back in Moscow in June, and took on a Hollywood-style musical, jazz Comedy aka Jolly Fellows, using a pre-recorded music track, and making use of his experience on Romance Sentimentale and his previous work with Eisenstein. Eisenstein’s only contribution to the film was the sketches he made for the comic musical instruments. Jazz Comedy, which was a tremendous success, starred Alexandrov’s wife, Lyubov Orlova, who became the first popular star of the Soviet cinema. Alexandrov, whom Eisenstein had come closer to loving than anyone else, became immediately acceptable to the Soviet establishment, and became far less close to his old friend and colleague.
Jazz Comedy had originally been proposed to Eisenstein who turned it down. It seemed as though he was being deliberately offered subjects he would be forced to reject, while he seemed deliberately to offer subjects that would be rejected. For example, during the winter of 1932/1933, Eisenstein worked on a satirical comedy called MMM. It was a Mayakovskian idea, originally planned in 1928 when it might still have been possible to make. Now, given the sort of escapist and Socialist Realist films the Soviet Union was making in the early 1930s, Eisenstein was swimming against the tide.
Maxim Strauch was to play Maxim Maximovich Maximov, the MMM of the title, a newly appointed head of Intourist in an unnamed Russian city. Strauch’s wife, Judith Glizer, was cast as the vaudeville actress married to Maxim. The film, in which ‘the Russian boyars would be transplanted into the life of modern Moscow, giving rise to various possibilities of comic quid pro quo’, was intended to satirise the realities of everyday life by alternating them in a grotesque way with the fantasies of the hero. The action of MMM ranges (in the hero’s nightmare) through Russian history, with echoes of the Don Juan myth.
At one point in the script, Eisenstein the director was to play chess against Eisenstein the screenwriter. ‘The camera pulled back. The black and white tiled floor was like a chessboard. On the alternate squares stood the tired characters, looking for a way out of the utter mess of the action. And above the board, tugging at their hair, sat the writer and the director, trying to make sense of these labyrinthine human relations. A solution was found. The action proceeded. The paths of the characters converged and diverged fluidly.’14 (The Tsar Ivan demonstrates his tactics by using a chessboard in Ivan the Terrible, many years later.)
Eisenstein produced a scenario and shooting script of MMM, gave screen-tests to potential actors, and even rehearsed some of them. But, predictably, the project was ‘postponed’ by the new administrator of the Soviet cinema, Boris Shumyatsky.
MMM came out of the theoretical analyses and researches Eisenstein had been making into the sources of comedy, and by ‘combining logic with intuition’, he formed a theory of Soviet film comedy. ‘I work in a very academic way,’ Eisenstein explained. ‘I throw up ramparts of erudition to accompany the work … I do the accounts, the computations and draw conclusions. I like to imagine the music as I work. Sometimes I get ahead of myself … The screenplay halts and pages of film research build up instead. I do not know which is the more useful. But the cross that I often have to bear is that problems of creative production extend into matters of scientific analysis. Often when I have decided upon the principle, I lose interest in the application! Which is what happened with the comedy [MMM] … Perhaps I was not destined to make a Soviet comedy.’15
*
On June 6, 1933, Edouard Tisse wrote to Ivor Montagu in London: ‘We are hard at work. The comedy that we were planning with Sergei Mikhailovich has been postponed, and we are now preparing a grandiose production, a big historical film, Moscow. The work is big. Shooting is to start in February 1934 … We are now in the category of “elders”. Therefore, we have resolved to turn away from light comedies and to make huge screen canvasses as befits our age.’16
After the fruitless work on MMM, Eisenstein made detailed notes and drawings for Moscow, whose theme was no less than four centuries of the city’s history, intercut with the story of several generations of a working family. Structurally, it followed the panoramic picture of Mexico’s history in Qué Viva México! – different contrasting epochs within a historical unity. (Eisenstein knew Noël Coward’s episodic pageant of patriotism, Cavalcade, written three years earlier, which followed an English family through three decades of British history.) Moscow was envisaged as history seen through the four elements: water (the origins of the city), earth (Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great), fire (the peasant rebellions, the fire of 1812, the class struggle and the Revolution) and air (the construction of the new Moscow).
Among the number of sketches Eisenstein made to accompany the treatment, he again revealed a sado-masochistic interest: after the Tartar victory, a naked young Russian prisoner is lying prone, his bound feet turned upwards waiting to be whipped by a malicious looking Tartar, busy rolling up his sleeves for the task.
On the occasion of the 17th Party Congress in January 1934, Eisenstein wrote: ‘I am developing my activity in three spheres: 1) the creative 2) the academic and 3) research … Contrary to the gossip … that in terms of creativity I have become overgrown with grass like a burial mound, my creative work does of course come first (or, rather, my creative works – all three of them). The subject of my work is Moscow … My work on this theme has so far not been greeted by my immediate superiors with any great enthusiasm, encouragement, interest, or – most important of all – understanding.’17
The congress was called the Congress of Victors, at which Stalin announced complacently, ‘There is nothing more to prove and, it seems, no one to fight.’ There was ‘no-one to fight’ because most of the regime’s opponents, including peasants and workers, had been starved, killed or frightened into submission.
The proposal for Moscow was also turned down by Shumyatsky’s office as being counter to ‘the current needs of the Soviet cinema’. As stubborn – or as naive – as ever, Eisenstein then considered a second idea to be called Moscow the Second, to be made in conjunction with his direction of Nathan Zarkhi’s play of the same title. It was about the relationship between a worker-hero and a public statue erected in his honour, prefiguring the Stakhanovite ideal the following year. As Eisenstein explained, ‘a whole gamut of contradictory feelings and actions, which reflect the conflict between the old and new emotional concepts. Thus the theme of the play becomes the struggle for the new man, the new personality and new attitude towards labour and fame.’18 But this project ended tragically in June 1935 when Nathan Zarkhi, known best for his scenarios for Pudovkin, was killed in a car accident in which Pudovkin was injured.
In March 1934, Eisenstein wrote an open letter to Dr Goebbels in reply to a speech which the head of Nazi propaganda in Germany had made, complimenting him and wishing for a ‘National Socialist Battleship Potemkin.’ Eisenstein advised Goebbels that what he needed was ‘the whole Soviet system. Because in our days great art, the truthful depiction of life, the truth of life even life itself, are possible only in a land of Soviets … But truth and National Socialism are incompatible. He who stands for truth can have no truck with National Socialism. He who stands for truth stands against you … Because, despite the mellifluous tones of your speeches, you are keeping your art and culture in the same iron shackles as the thousands of inmates in your hundreds of concentration camps. Works of art are not produced in this way, as you imagine them to be. A genuine work of art is the formally organised striving of a class to consolidate its struggle, its achievements, its social profile in the lasting images of art. The higher the work of art, the more fully the artist has succeeded in comprehending, feeling and communicating this creative burst of the masses themselves … It is only the genuine socialist system of the Soviet Union that is capable of giving birth to the grandiose realistic art of the future and the present.’19
Two months later, in the ‘genuine socialist system of the Soviet Union’, the secret police came for the poet Osip Mandelstam. He was arrested because an epigram he had written for a small circle of friends had somehow fallen into the hands of the secret police. In it, he had called Stalin a ‘murderer and peasant-slayer.’ Mandelstam was granted temporary clemency, with the order to ‘isolate, but retain’. (He died in a detention camp in 1938.) Under this system, a novelist and playwright like Mikhail Bulgakov was allowed to write but not to be published. ‘I was the one and only literary wolf. I was advised to dye my fur. An absurd piece of advice. Even with its hair dyed or clipped a wolf simply cannot be mistaken for a poodle,’ wrote Bulgakov later.20
In August 1934 at the first Congress of the new Union of Soviet Writers, Andrei Zhdanov, a close advisor to Stalin, declared: ‘Soviet literature must know how to portray our heroes, it must be able to look into our tomorrow.’ Karl Radek of the Central Committee made clear his attitude to non-political foreign literature by calling the work of James Joyce ‘a heap of dung’ and denouncing the ‘morbid interest’ of certain Soviet writers in Joyce, John Dos Passos and Marcel Proust. There was a chosen list of Western classics, such as plays by Shakespeare and Molière, and later works of some ‘social significance’ by Dickens, Balzac and Mark Twain. It was at this conference that the guidelines of Socialist Realism in literature were laid down and, by implication, those of the other arts as well.
In 1934, the condition of the Soviet cinema was beginning to cause alarm even in official circles. The film critic of the Moscow News wrote that the past year and a half ‘has been, not to mince words, perhaps the most arid period in the history of the Soviet film.’ Izvestia surveyed the recent films and found them dull, lacking in artistry, and overburdened with propaganda.
There was a revival of literary adaptations, exemplified by Grigori Roshal and Vera Stroyeva’s A Petersburg Night (from Dostoevsky), Vladimir Petrov’s Thunderstorm (Ostrovsky) and Mikhail Romm’s Boule de Suif (Maupassant). The film that set the pattern of political conformity and hero-worship films was Chapayev by Sergei and Georgi Vasiliev (unrelated despite their shared surname). The film was about Red Army Commander Chapayev fighting against Czech and Kolchak forces during the Civil War. He has to resist the attempts of a commissar to tame his impulsive and heroic nature.
Shown as the highlight of the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet cinema, it was the first great Soviet success of the sound era, at home and abroad. The Vasilievs spent two and a half years on the film, more than twice as long as Eisenstein had spent on Potemkin and October combined. Ivor Montagu saw it as a sign of ‘an expanding delight in individualism and personalisation in all art fields of the Soviet Union, corresponding to the flowering of the individuality consequent on the raising of the level of living accompanying the Second Five-Year Plan … No picture so simple, so innocent of a desire to prove points, or even of a feeling that they needed proving … could possibly have been produced anywhere but in a society that had long lost its doubts about itself.’21
Although Eisenstein praised Chapayev in public as a ‘remarkable achievement’, privately he was expressing doubts about the current ‘hero-worship’ films. When he was reproached by a Party member for never having made a film about individual heroes of the Revolution, but only its masses (presumably not counting the peasant heroine in The General Line), Eisenstein retorted by quoting the Internationale back at him. ‘Nobody will give us freedom, neither God, nor the Tsar, nor a hero …’22
Despite Chapayev, Eisenstein felt that the best Soviet film of 1934 was Alexander Medvedkin’s Happiness, which was far closer to his own preoccupations. Using burlesque, music-hall jokes, surrealism, masked figures and folk-tale images, the film succeeded in producing what the title promised. Although finally orthodox in its praise for collectivisation (how could it not be?), it recalled the radical Soviet cinema of a decade earlier – surprising during the period of strict Socialist Realism.
Eisenstein wrote: ‘Today I saw Medvedkin’s comedy Happiness, and I cannot keep quiet about it, so to speak. Today I saw a Bolshevik laughing … This picture has not yet been released … It has not yet been through all the proper procedures. Not yet been approved. Not yet been tried out on an audience … A Chaplin gag is individually illogical. A Medvedkin gag is socially illogical … I feel that joy that is also possible only in a country where money-grabbing can serve as an object of laughter. I am glad that Medvedkin has resolved the problem of our humour in the same way that I would have done, had I been filming and making it!’23
During the summer of 1934, Eisenstein met H.G. Wells at the dacha of Maxim Litvinov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, whose English-born wife, Ivy Low, was a writer. He then left for several weeks rest in the Caucasus as his health was frail, and then went to the Crimea as production consultant on Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Last Masquerade. It was not unusual for directors from the centre, especially those actively involved in teaching, to travel to provincial studios in this consultative capacity. A few years before, the Georgian Chiaureli had made Kharbada, a sharp satire on personality cults; now he was perpetuating them through his films.
While staying at Yalta, Eisenstein visited the Young Pioneers’ camp at Artek, and revisited the Alupka Palace where he had filmed the stone lions for The Battleship Potemkin, his one and only real success. There he met a group of American engineers, whom he fooled by pretending to be an American tourist who began running down Eisenstein.
On October 27, 1934, Eisenstein married Pera Attasheva with little publicity. Their relationship was a purely platonic one – in fact, Eisenstein later told a friend that during their many years of friendship, they had ‘never even kissed’ – but their affection for each other ran deep. Pera was one of the few people Eisenstein trusted totally, and she stuck to him faithfully through the good and the bad times. The following year, when he went down with smallpox while filming Bezhin Meadow, she stayed with him in the hospital, defying quarantine rules at the risk of her own health. She always called him ‘The Old Man’ and he called her ‘Pera Soldadera’, after the women soldiers of Mexico’s revolutionary army, because of what he saw as her toughness. In the milieu of the cinema, she was greatly respected and loved, and friends often reproached Eisenstein for his frequently cool treatment of her. Although Eisenstein incomprehensibly fails to mention her once in his published memoirs (she is referred to intermittently in the diaries), Pera was his guardian angel, and probably the most important person in his life and beyond.
Actually, at the time of the marriage, they were less close than they had been two years previously, but it happened to coincide with the strengthening of the laws against homosexuality. It was convenient for Eisenstein to marry and Pera wanted to protect him from the rumours, but she also hoped that marriage might cement their relationship. However, their union failed to silence the rumours about his sexuality, although they became less overt. While, in the 1920s, Eisenstein had never made a secret of his attraction to Grisha Alexandrov, and they were seen everywhere together, a similar liaison would have been dangerous in the climate of the 1930s.
Anal and genital contact between consenting males became a criminal offence in the Soviet Union on December 17, 1933. On April 1, 1934, a punishment of up to five years imprisonment was instituted. On May 23 of the same year, Maxim Gorky published an article declaiming that homosexuality was the result of pernicious influences from the Western bourgeoisie and German Fascism. ‘Destroy homosexuality, and Fascism will disappear,’ he wrote. There was a rumour that Gorky’s adopted son had been seduced by a man, and that Gorky’s personal petition to Stalin led to the subsequent prohibition. Another of Stalin’s favourite authors, Alexei Tolstoy, was anti-homosexual, and anti-Semitic.
From January 1934, homosexuals were arrested en masse in the main cities. They were called opushchennye, literally downcast, but in slang meaning those who have been beaten up and pissed upon. Homosexual rape was rife in the prison camps, and there were numerous suicides. (It was not until January 1994 that Russian law permitted homosexual acts in private between adults over the age of sixteen.)
When André Malraux came to the Soviet Union for the Writer’s Congress in September 1934, there were discussions about the filming of La Condition Humaine, and Malraux joined Eisenstein in the Crimea where they developed a screen treatment. In fact, they signed a contract with Mezhrabpomfilm studio. One scene developed from the novel showed a number of Chinese children laughing in close-up. What are they laughing at? ‘A man has fallen on to a bed. Seemingly drunk. And a small Chinese woman is slapping him on the face with unremitting energy. The children are seized by uncontrollable laughter. Although the man is their father. And the small Chinese woman is their mother. And the big man is not drunk at all. And the small woman is not hitting him in the face for drunkenness. The man is dead. And she is hitting the corpse in the face just because he has died, and abandoned her, and these small children laughing so melodiously, to starve to death.’ For Eisenstein it was a scene that illustrated the way Chaplin saw life: ‘To see the most terrifying, the most pitiful, the most tragic phenomena through the eyes of a laughing child.’24
Malraux had awakened an old dream of Eisenstein’s to make a film about China. It was a project never far from his thoughts, continually nourished as it was by his reading and the Chinese music in his record collection. His passion was fired most significantly when he met the famous Chinese actor Mei Lan-fan, who was in Moscow with his troupe later that year. Lan-fan derived his worldwide reputation from the playing of dan, the female characters in Peking Opera, elevating the female role to the position previously held by the laosbeng or elderly male role. (Eisenstein had first heard of Mei Lan-fan from Charlie Chaplin.)
At the same time Bertolt Brecht, who had been invited to Moscow by Erwin Piscator to attend the Fifth International Decade of Revolutionary Art, also met Lan-fan. It was this meeting that eventually led to the writing of his play The Good Woman of Setzuan, and the concept of the ‘alienation effect’, which he first delineated in an essay entitled ‘Estrangement-effect in Chinese Acting’. In a letter to his wife Helene Weigel, Brecht wrote, ‘I’ve seen the Chinese actor Mei Lan-fan with his troupe. He plays girls’ parts and is really splendid.’25
Eisenstein, too, was as influenced by the Chinese actor, which can be seen most directly in the wild dance at the Tsar’s banquet in Ivan the Terrible Part II. In an essay titled ‘To the Magician of the Pear Orchard’, Eisenstein described the symbolic traditions of Chinese theatre as contrasted with Socialist Realism, a style to which Eisenstein was forced to pay lip service.
‘Our [author’s italics] position is quite different. Our artistic aim is realism and realism of the very highest form and development. Socialist Realism. The question arises, can we learn from an art that is symbolic, and seemingly incompatible with our premise of an intellectual system?’ Answering in the affirmative, he concluded, ‘The experience of Chinese culture and art on this remarkable level must give us plenty of material for study and for the enrichment of our artistic methodology which has been decided and resolved in completely different ways and means.’26
Eisenstein arranged a film session at the Newsreel Studio (now the Kiev station) to shoot Mei Lan-Fan and his troupe performing one of their plays, Duel at Rainbow Pass. They filmed all night, but the next day Shumyatsky informed Eisenstein that he was not to proceed with the film. Eisenstein was too ashamed to tell Mei Lan-Fan the truth, so he explained that he did not have the time to complete it, and made the only copy from the positive of what had been shot (the negative was never cut) and gave it to the Chinese actor. Sadly, though photographs exist of Eisenstein talking to Mei Lan-Fan and watching a rehearsal, the film, like The Storming of Sarraz, seems to have been lost forever. There were rumours that Mei Lan-Fan’s son had it, but it might have been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. However, a few shots from it did turn up in a newsreel about Mei Lan-Fan’s visit to Moscow.
The range of Eisenstein’s cultural interests continues to astonish. Parallel with his absorption in Chinese culture, he was planning a film on the slave revolt against French rule in Haiti in 1791, and its leaders Toussaint L’Ouverture, Henri Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines (the last two of whom became emperors of the island).
In 1932, Eisenstein had signed a contract with Soyuzkino for a film based on the novel The Black Consul by Anatoli K. Vinogradov. While he was still at Paramount, he had bought a cheap reprint of John W. Vandercook’s Black Majesty for one dollar at the Hollywood book store he frequented. It was about Henri Christophe, whom he saw as a Shakespearean hero because of the breach between the emperor and the Haitian revolutionary masses; ‘the transformation of a leader into a despot’. (Something Eisenstein was to have direct experience of on his return to the Soviet Union, and which was the subject of Ivan the Terrible.) The idea was never put to Paramount, and only came up as a wild possibility for independent finance when he and his colleagues were clutching at straws after they had been sacked by the studio. ‘Quite obviously it did not appeal to those in America who could have financed the film,’ remarked Ivor Montagu.27
In Mexico the theme had returned to his imagination, as a series of sketches made at the time attest. For days and nights on end he elaborated the scenes, reading, sketching and making notes. The theme stayed with him when he returned to Moscow, and he talked over the project with Boris Shumyatsky, who allowed him to feel encouraged.
Eisenstein envisaged the film as a vehicle for the great black actor-singer Paul Robeson, with whom he corresponded. (Sources differ as to which of the three leaders Eisenstein suggested Robeson should play.) Meanwhile, he devoted several working lectures to The Black Consul at the Institute. For a number of days, Eisenstein encouraged his students to imagine how they would film a conspiracy by the French command to kill Dessalines. As quoted by his student Vladimir Nizhny, Eisenstein told his class, ‘When I was in America I wanted to make a film of this rising in Haiti, but it was impossible: nowadays Haiti is virtually a colony of the USA …’
Eisenstein showed the class photographs of Robeson, saying how sorry he was that ‘they can only inadequately convey the rich temperament of this splendid actor’ and recommended the students to ‘imagine Dessalines looking just like this, with just such a physique and marvellous face.’28
Robeson’s only film yet released was The Emperor Jones (1933), based on the Eugene O’Neill play in which he had made such an impact on stage in 1921. One of the rare Hollywood movies of that particular period to star a black performer, the title role bore certain similarities to that which Eisenstein was proposing – Brutus Jones escapes from a chain gang to a Caribbean island where he sets himself up as its megalomaniac ruler.
Eisenstein daydreamed of having colour sequences in The Black Consul. ‘I hope that it may be a theme in which white and black take on the full-blooded forms of human beings, a theme that has long excited me, the theme of the racial problem, in which the “whites” clash with the “blacks”, and where the “black” will be played by that incomparable master of the screen, Paul Robeson.’29
Ever optimistic, despite the failure of Shumyatsky to sanction his two previous projects, Eisenstein sent Paul Robeson a letter inviting him to the USSR as a guest of the Administration for Films to discuss making a picture on the Haitian revolution.
‘I never had an opportunity to meet you and I was allways [sic] sorry of it, because you are one of the personalities I allways [sic] liked without knowing them personally …. I am enthusiastic to see you here. As soon as you’ll be in this country we will have an opportunity to talk (at last!!) and we will see if finally we will get to do something together.’30
In December 1934, Robeson, his wife Eslanda (‘Essie’), and Marie Seton, the English writer, arrived in Moscow from London. Seton had met Eisenstein in 1932, when she carried some books to him in Moscow from Maurice Dobb, the Marxist economist, and had acted as a go-between for Eisenstein with Robeson. They were met at the Moscow station by Eisenstein, Tisse, Alexander Afinigonov, the head of VOKS and his mulatto American wife Genia, and several black Americans living in the USSR.
Eisenstein and Robeson took to each other immediately. During his two weeks in Russia, Robeson saw Eisenstein almost every day. There were even rumours going around that Robeson was bisexual and was having an affair with his Russian host. There was no truth to the gossip, but Eisenstein was enchanted by this ‘black Mayakovsky’ as he nicknamed Robeson. To Robeson The General Line was ‘easily the finest film I’ve ever seen.’
Eisenstein arranged introductions, accompanied the Robesons on visits, took them on a tour of the Film Institute where he introduced Robeson to selected students. Essie reported that Eisenstein was ‘marvellous company. He is young and great fun, with brains and a sense of humour.’31
Far into the night, Eisenstein and Robeson discussed subjects such as the so-called primitive people of Central Asia – the Yakuts, Tadzhiks and Kirghiz. Eisenstein said he disliked the unfair implications of inferiority which the term primitive conveyed – which was why he explained the Soviets preferred the phrase ‘national minorities’. Robeson, who expressed his admiration for Communism, said that he felt like ‘a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a negro but a human being.’32 Still waiting for Shumyatsky’s decision on the project, Robeson left in January 1935, expressing his wish to return for the filming.
Eisenstein had hardly said his farewells to the Robesons when he was called to account at the All-Union Creative Conference of Cinematographic Workers, under the slogan ‘For A Great Cinema Art’, which was held in Moscow from January 8–13, 1935. Eisenstein, who had not completed a film since 1929, was under considerable pressure to prove his credentials. The conference, attended by the leading Soviet directors, cameramen, scenarists, actors and film executives, was held against a background of five years of sterility and failure. Morale was low, nerves were frayed, tempers short. Since it was out of the question to discuss frankly the political roots of the problem, scapegoats had to be found. Just as Soviet engineers were punished when the bureaucracy’s high-pressure methods and impossible production quotas caused breakdowns in industry, so Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Pudovkin were publicly humiliated. The current success of Chapayev gave all the sharper an edge to the attack. At the conference, the three directors made sure to pay it homage.
Eisenstein: The intellectual cinema … is too vulgar to consider. The General Line was an intellectual film … Chapayev is the answer to the very deep solving of Party problems in art.
Dovzhenko: Chapayev is tied up with the future of the cinema.
Pudovkin: In Chapayev we see how a real class character is made.’
Pudovkin’s last film, The Deserter, had been sharply criticised two years previously, and he had been working for several years on The Happiest, a film about the rivalry of two Soviet aviators in setting a round-the-world speed record. It was never made. After his serious injury in the car accident that killed Nathan Zharki, and a long convalescence, he made no films for three years, after which he turned to a conventional narrative form. Dovzhenko had not made a film since Ivan three years before, but was about to go off to Siberia to make Aerograd for Mosfilm.
‘I don’t think that the Soviet cinema is only made up of heroes like Eisenstein and Dovzhenko,’ said Sergei Yutkevich, declaring he spoke ‘for the great army of cinema workers.’ He liked American films ‘because they appeal to a great public, for in the best meaning of the word, cinema is a popular art.’ In conclusion, he made a ‘friendly criticism’ of Eisenstein, ‘spoken as a practical man’, for theorising too much and producing too little. Turning to Eisenstein, he quoted a letter from George Sand to Flaubert. ‘You read, study, work more than I, more than a great many others. You have gained an education such as I will never have. You are a hundred times richer than all of us. You are rich but you complain like a beggar. “Give to a beggar, whose mattress is stuffed with gold, but who wants to feed on beautifully turned phrases and choice vocabulary.” But you are a fool who roots around in his straw and eats his gold. Eat the ideas and emotions found in your head, in your heart; the words and phrases, the form which you are so full of, will themselves appear as a result of digestion …’ Eisenstein merely smiled in response.
Trauberg also called on his old master to stop theorising and get down to work. He criticised October for the ‘stupid poetry’ of its palaces and statues. ‘Chapayev is a hero, but he is not above the heads of the audience. He is their brother. But in October the people were very high up.’
Sergei Vasiliev expressed the fear that Eisenstein’s theoretical work might lead to ‘isolation from practical work.’ Dovzhenko attacked Eisenstein for his erudition. ‘If I knew as much as he does I would literally die. (Laughter and applause.) I’m sorry you’re laughing. I’m afraid … I’m convinced that in more ways than one his erudition is killing him. No, I should have said disorganising him … Sergei Mikhailovich, if you fail to make a film within twelve months at the latest, I beg you never to make one at all. We will have no need of it and neither will you …’
Only Lev Kuleshov spoke in Eisenstein’s defence. ‘You have talked about him here with very warm, tearful smiles as if he were a corpse which you are burying ahead of time. I must say to him, to one who is very much alive, and to one whom I love and value greatly: Dear Sergei Mikhailovich, no one ever bursts from too much knowledge but from too much envy. That is all I have to say.’33
Kuleshov had, by that time, become a victim of Stalinism, his emphasis on internationalism having made him unpopular. Kuleshov’s last film was made in 1934 and he was not to direct another for six years, but by then the spark had gone from his work.
Attempting to keep the peace was the Kremlin’s liaison officer for cinema, Sergei S. Dinamov, then editor of International Literature, and a literary critic who specialised in American literature. A humourless, zealous young functionary, he doled out a certain amount of diplomatic praise for the older generation, among them Eisenstein, then two weeks short of his thirty-seventh birthday. He then proceeded to give ‘ideological directives’ to the assembled cinema workers. Some of his main points were:
1) Beauty is to be reinstated.
2) The cinema must be ‘optimistic’.
3) One of the chief elements in Soviet film style is its true reflection of life.
4) There must be more emotion. ‘Without love and hate there can be no art. One cannot separate thought from passion … What is wrong with Eisenstein’s theory is that he separated thought from feeling.’
5) There must be more heroes. ‘I once gave an address at the Academy of Aviation. One of the commandants asked me a question, “When will our artists show us the best people of the country?” I answered, “When the artists themselves are the best people in the country.’”
6) The individual must replace the mass as hero. ‘Learn from Shakespeare, in whose works the epoch becomes the man, the events of an epoch the acts of a man.’
7) There must be more passion. ‘One must not be afraid of being passionate, for, after all, true Party art is truly passionate art.’
8) The film must be built around the professional actor. ‘The film without a hero was only an experiment. We need actors with great passions. Without actors, we can do nothing. We cannot base our cinema on typage.” 9 The important thing now is to think about the style of the Soviet cinema.
(Dinamov was to be imprisoned and shot in 1939.)
The first of Eisenstein’s two speeches in his own defence was extraordinarily wide-ranging and erudite, seeming more so in that much of the discussion going on around him was too insular and arcane to be of wider interest today.
‘You know my speech-making is a poor affair and I talk badly. I had hoped to get away with just a few words in this speech but, as our preparatory conference and indeed Sergei Sergeyevich [Dinamov] showed, I shall have to speak of a whole range of matters which I should have thought had long since sunk into oblivion, but which will continue to trouble people from time to time and even to insinuate themselves into discussions long after they have, properly speaking, ceased to exist.’
He promised ‘to re-examine some of the positions I once held,’ explaining, rather sententiously, that his films with their typage, mass heroes and formalistic tendencies, were necessary developments towards the cinema of the day. As for ‘intellectual cinema’, it was misunderstood. ‘When we spoke of intellectual cinema, we meant first and foremost a construction that might convey an idea to the audience and at the same time perform the particular function of emotionalising the thought process.” Eisenstein then went on to cover Shakespeare, Gogol, James Fenimore Cooper, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Hegel, the philosophy of the Indians of Brazil and the language of the Bushmen to define the nature of art and classicism, and how cinema should be a synthesis of the other arts. He concluded: ‘I think we are now entering a most remarkable period: our cinema’s era of classicism – the best period, in the highest sense of the word … When spring comes, I shall plunge into production work as vigorously as I conduct my academic work, so that I shall have my place in this embryonic classicism and make my contribution to it as well.’ (Applause.)34
On January 11, 1935, two days before the end of the conference, the climax of the fifteenth anniversary celebrations, a presentation of honours was held at the Bolshoi Theatre, and those who expected Eisenstein’s name to be announced had to wait a long time. The Order of Lenin, the highest of the honours, was presented to Shumyatsky, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Kozintsev, Trauberg, Ermler and the Vasilievs. Two of Shumyatsky’s assistants were among those who received the second award, the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, and Alexandrov and Vertov were given the Order of the Red Star, one degree lower. The Award of People’s Artist was then announced, and still there was no mention of Eisenstein. His turn came even later and lower, when with Tisse and Kuleshov, he received the minor Award of Honoured Art Worker. It was a formal statement of his position in the Soviet film industry in 1935. It was clear which way the tide had turned.
On the night of the awards, when Eisenstein made his entrance, Shumyatsky rose to greet him, and said, ‘Sergei Mikhailovich, let us kiss.’ They embraced and kissed three times. Then Shumyatsky said, ‘Sergei Mikhailovich, I hope that this was not the kiss of Judas.’ Eisenstein replied, ‘Not at all. It was the kiss of two Judases.’35
The next day Eisenstein, again apologising for being no public speaker, gave his closing address.
‘Comrades, the first, highest class of society is now the proletarian class. (Applause) … Comrade Yutkevich has co-opted George Sand as his assistant; I wonder which girl I should take as an accomplice. (Laughter) … I think that I must make a picture, and I will make pictures, but I feel that this must be worked on in parallel with equally intensive theoretical work and theoretical research. (Voice from the floor: “Well said!”) I want to say something about this to Sergei Vasiliev … When you talk to me about my Chinese robe with its hieroglyphs, which I’m supposed to wear as I sit in my study, you make one mistake: there are no hieroglyphs. Nor do I gaze at a statuette in abstract meditation when I am sitting in my study. I work at the problems that will confront the up-and-coming generation of film-makers. I am a director and teacher. There may be cases where I have acted without realising that I might break someone’s heart. Comrades, my heart has not been broken, and it has not been broken because no heart that beats for the Bolshevik cause can be broken.’ (Prolonged applause, standing ovations.) …36
On January 12, Eisenstein wrote in Pravda: ‘A series of remarkable films is coming onto the screens and they are greeted with lively excitement by the many millions of Soviet cinemagoers. Informed by a great sense of purpose, our cinema has won over the proletariat of the entire world and hearts and minds even beyond our border. And today, when those who work in cinema are so favoured by the attentions of Stalin, our Party, our government and the whole country, we can sense that it is only thanks to the vital link with all of them that our cinema can say that on its fifteenth birthday cinema has really become the most important of the arts as Lenin ordained.’37
Following the conference, from February 21 to March 1, 1935, a film festival was held in Moscow, the first international film festival in Eastern Europe. Its chief purpose was to stimulate sales of Soviet films abroad, which had fallen off since the advent of Socialist Realism. Hollywood sent King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread and Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra, and France, René Clair’s The Last Millionaire.
The major prize given by the jury, comprising Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Pudovkin, was awarded to Leningrad’s Lenfilm Studios. The jury greatly appreciated Chapayev, Kozintsev and Trauberg’s The Youth of Maxim, and Ermler’s Peasants. An honorary prize was given to The Song of the Fisherman by Chu-sheng, which took up the cause of the Yangtse fisherman.
After the Festival, Shumyatsky led a delegation of film officials to Hollywood, where they spent six weeks learning how to make movies ‘in the American style’. Shumyatsky returned home with grandiose plans for a mass-entertainment industry on the American scale, compartmentalising output into standard genres.
The month before the 1935 cinema conference, on December 1, 1934, a young Communist named Nikolaiev had assassinated Sergei Kirov, one of Stalin’s chief lieutenants. A rising young star in the Party apparatus, Andrei Zhdanov, was promptly sent to replace Kirov, and in the early months of 1935 whole trainloads of ‘Kirov murderers’ were deported to Siberia, though it was likely that Stalin himself instigated Kirov’s murder. There were those in the Central Committee who wanted Kirov to replace Stalin as General Secretary. Against the background of further arrests for alleged Trotskyism, from the middle of 1935 to the middle of 1936, Stalin made many public appearances, smiling at little children and bestowing awards. He declared, ‘Life is gayer, comrades, now that Socialism has been achieved in Russia!’ As the hero of Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke seditiously suggests, ‘Optimism is the opium of the people.’