Birds fly to some saints: Francis of Assissi. Beasts run to some legendary figures: Orpheus. Pigeons cluster around the old men of St Mark’s Square in Venice. A lion followed Androcles wherever he went. Books cluster around me. They fly to me, run to me, cling to me.
It has taken me longer than Eisenstein did to get here. I’m standing at Eisenstein’s grave in the Novodevichy cemetery, the Père Lachaise of Moscow, on a biting cold April day. There are a few wilted flowers lying across it, unlike the fresh wreaths I saw yesterday on Stalin’s grave beside the Kremlin wall. Pera Attasheva, who died in July 1965, is buried here beside her husband.
Some of the smaller gravestones are covered entirely by a snow shroud. I find it strange to be in a predominantly atheist cemetery where crosses and other symbols of religion are rare. Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the tradition of having either a bust of the deceased on the tomb or a likeness sketched on the stone, from which one can gain some impression of what the person was like when alive. It is rather like walking through a gallery or a museum and looking at sculptures and portraits of famous, not-so-famous and unknown people. Many here were obviously government officials, but the attempt to make them look important has given them the appearance of stony pomposity. Yet there is a surgeon peeling off his gloves, an orchestra conductor conducting, a painter painting …
Carved onto a large, black granite stone, vaguely shaped like the prow of a ship {Potemkin?), is a picture of a youngish serious-looking Eisenstein in profile. It is disappointing in that it has failed to capture any of his personality as seen in photographs, films and self-portraits, or as described by others. René Clair once called Eisenstein ‘a smiling lion, loaded with hair, and always laughing.’ That is how he should have appeared on his tomb. Across the bottom in bold block Cyrillic letters, is one word: EISENSTEIN. There is no epitaph, though Eisenstein had suggested ‘I lived, I contemplated, I admired.’
I don’t think I would have found Eisenstein’s grave very easily, if at all, in this vast cemetery, had Naum Kleiman not guided me here. I probably would not have recognised the face, though I could read the name in Russian.
The icy wind cuts into my cheeks. An hour ago I was drinking boiling hot tea in apartment 160, Smolenskaya Ulitsa, known for want of a better expression, as the Eisenstein Museum. The dictionary gives the definition of a museum as ‘a repository for the preservation and exhibition of objects illustrating human or natural history, especially the arts and sciences.’ I suppose, then, that this small two-roomed flat conforms to the definition – though there is no old woman sitting at the entrance suspiciously watching the visitors, nor is there room for a party of bored schoolchildren or noisy tourists. There is hardly capacity for any kind of party. In addition to the living room, the apartment consists of a pokey entrance hall (lined with bookshelves and pictures), a basic kitchen, a lavatory, a bathroom whose tub is filled with knick-knacks, and a study strewn with piles of books, manuscripts and magazines relating to Eisenstein’s work.
However, it is to the living room that pilgrims come to pay homage, or academics and biographers scavenge for information on their subject. The four walls (I don’t recall a window) are covered with bookshelves jammed with Eisenstein’s books. Pera had all his books, pictures and objets d’arts transported to her flat in Smolenskaya. There, with Kleiman’s assistance, she kept as closely as possible to Eisenstein’s own arrangement in his larger apartment in Potylikha, where he died.
Looking at the books, I have the sensation of sharing the effect they had on their owner, who wrote, ‘I slowly go past the books; it is a road through the whole of my life … Currents flow from the small cells of grey matter of the brain, through the cranium and the sides of bookcases, through the walls of bookcases and into the hearts of the books … in response to the flow of thoughts they hurl themselves at my head … I feel like a latter-day St Sebastian, pierced by arrows flying from the shelves. And the small sphere of bone, containing splinters of reflections like Leibnitz’s reflecting monad, seems no longer a cranium but the outer walls of the room, and the layer of books covering the surfaces of its walls are like stratifications extending inside my own head.’
So there I sat in Eisenstein’s brain, a warm and cosy space, taking tea at a round table, encircled by his choice of books. Mostly in their original languages, they are arranged with both interior and exterior logic, indicating different strata of significance. Some, like the photos, drawings and paintings, are connected with friends, others with his work, and still others with his ‘unborn children’, the films that never got made: copies of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Blaise Cendras’ L’Or (Sutter’s Gold), Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, among the forlorn reminders of might-have-beens. There are a couple of shelves on American humour containing books by O. Henry (the Complete Stories), Mark Twain, and James Thurber (Men, Women and Dogs), another on the theatre (Henry Irving, Gordon Craig). There is a shelf of works about men whom Eisenstein called ‘The Great Abnormals’ – Genghis Khan, Nero, Tamburlaine, Guy Fawkes, and the Emperor Claudius (Robert Graves’ I Claudius and Claudius the God).
There are also more cryptic sequences of books. It was Eisenstein’s wry comment on different attitudes to art, life and religion to place Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares, considered the Bible of the theatre, beside the real Bible. Next to it are Poulain’s Back to Ecstasy and Loyola by Degraisse d’Horizon, the former on the excesses of religion, and the latter the more practical theologian whose ‘Spiritual Exercises’, a system of rules, prayers and self-examination, echo Stanislavsky’s similar approach to acting, while Diderot’s The Paradox on Actors establishes a more rational context. Finally, a book on the migration of birds seems to put the aforementioned in perspective, making a claim for nature above the artificial. And did he not, perhaps, envy those birds that could fly away from the Soviet Union?
Scattered around, wherever space allows, are further reminders of Eisenstein’s life. There are pictures of Chaplin, Paul Robeson, Meyerhold, the French mime Deburau, and his contemporary the Romantic actor Frédéric Lemaître; a photo of a handsome unknown young Mexican soldier; the director Joris Ivens; the ‘typage’ photo of the three Daughters of the American Revolution (part of his research for An American Tragedy), Chinese and African masks, and a mask that resembles that worn by the coquettish Fyodor during the wild dance in Ivan the Terrible Part II; a Buddha (like the one in October), a Mexican rug, and the wicker-work Mexican horseman and horse given to him by Ernst Toller.
I was also able to see the dedication (Car moi aussi j’aime les gros bateaux et les matelots) that the dancer Kiki of Montparnasse made to Eisenstein in her memoirs in Le Boeuf sur le Toit – she had drawn a roof on the top of the T of Toit. And I handled the copy of Les Enfants terribles signed ‘To the person who astounded me by showing me what I had touched with the fingers of a blind man. To Eisenstein, his friend Jean Cocteau.’ And there was the photo inscribed ‘To Eisenstein from Einstein.’
As I paged through the first edition of L’Or, a piece of paper fell out. On it was a limerick which someone had written out for Eisenstein in America, which obviously appealed to his schoolboy’s smutty sense of humour:
There was a young girl called Miss Boyd
whom no prick could ever avoid.
But her cunt was unpleasant
as the nest of a pheasant
so crept out every damn spermatoid.
I also came across a pornographic drawing he did in Alma Ata in 1942 of a young man, sporting a huge penis wrapped around Queen Elizabeth I. In the same place at the same period, he drew Tsar Ivan on one side of a page and, on the reverse, a caricature of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, the antithesis of the fanatical priests in Eisenstein’s films. Another sketch found in a book was of a grotesquely fat woman with five legs whose face resembles Pera’s. Make of it what you will. In contrast, there is a photo of the pleasant, rather chubby, smiling face of Pera on the wall. Suffering from diabetes and partially blind, Pera was in and out of hospital and bedridden for much of her last years, but continued to laugh and to take an interest in anything that concerned ‘The Old Man’.
One of the most magnificent volumes in the room is a tome of reproductions of the paintings and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Curiously, when Andrei Tarkovsky was making Mirror in 1974, and wanted to photograph Leonardo’s A Young Lady with a Juniper for the film, he insisted that it should come from Eisenstein’s book and no other. Curious, because Tarkovsky always claimed to find Eisenstein’s work anathema. In Sculpting in Time, he wrote, ‘I am radically opposed to the way Eisenstein used the frame to codify intellectual formulae … Eisenstein’s montage dictum contradicted the very basis of the unique process whereby a film affects an audience. It deprives the person watching of that prerogative of film, which has to do with what distinguishes its impact on his consciousness from that of literature and philosophy, namely the opportunity to live through what is happening on the screen as if it were his own life.’1
Naum Kleiman, who is understandably protective of Eisenstein’s reputation, believes Tarkovsky, whose Andrei Roublev owed a great deal to Ivan the Terrible, was afraid of Eisenstein’s influence, and reacted against him as a son against a father. Kleiman says he watched Tarkovsky during the screening of the reconstruction of Bezhin Meadow, and could see he was obviously extremely moved by it despite himself.
When André Bazin, the co-founder of the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, formulated a theory of cinema in opposition to Eisenstein’s theory of montage in the early 1950s, critics came down on one side or another. Bazin considered that the realistic nature of the film image was best evolved through plan-séquences, extended shots edited in the camera rather than in the cutting room. One method which assisted this technique was deep focus, which enabled a scene to be shot with both foreground and background in full view. For Bazin, this represented ‘true continuity’ and ‘objective reality’, leaving the interpretation of a particular scene to the spectator rather than to the director’s viewpoint through editing.
But this is a largely bygone battle. Nowadays, it is difficult to think of Eisenstein in the narrow terms delineated by Bazin and his followers. They also failed to take into account that Eisenstein virtually abandoned the so-called ‘intellectual montage’ after The General Line in 1929. Neither of his two further completed films, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, can be analysed in the earlier manner, mainly because the use of synchronised dialogue limited the possibilities of dynamic montage. Although he rejected the replacement of montage by long takes, by the mid-1930s Eisenstein was already moving towards montage as an active method of narrative, rather than the juxtaposition of images that comment on the narrative rather than advance it. There is nothing stylistically in either Alexander Nevsky or Ivan the Terrible that would have been unacceptable in a Hollywood movie, whereas The Battleship Potemkin and October were far too avant-garde for the commercial cinema to have tolerated.
Behind much of the criticism of Eisenstein’s films, there was also, in the words of French critic Noël Burch, ‘the myth, for so long universally accepted in the West, of the cinema’s “naturalistic” vocation. But the young Eisenstein who wanted the cinema to reveal its artifices, and who consequently pushed them to their ethical and aesthetic extremes, helped to lay the foundations for all the constructions which are now [1986] permitting the cinema to rediscover its reality.’2
Eisenstein would have been delighted by the range of international film people who have grazed in this apartment. Robert Wise was so animated that he broke the chair he was sitting on. Derek Jarman filmed the room for his short, Imagining October, and Francis Coppola sat silently taking in the atmosphere while his children ate watermelon. Coppola claimed that it was seeing October at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1956 which made him decide to become a film-maker.
Among the disparate names in the visitors’ book of film luminaries from all over the world are Sacha Vierny, Alain Resnais’ and Peter Greenaway’s cinematographer, who wrote that Eisenstein was ‘mes racines’ (‘my roots’); Robert Redford, who noted that his being there was to ‘return to the reason we started’; Bo Widerberg, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Masaki Kobayashi, Nanni Loy, Mrinal Sen, Krzysztof Zanussi, John Boorman, King Vidor, Wim Wenders, Elem Klimov, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Terry Gilliam, Lindsay Anderson, Phil Kaufman, Claude Lelouch, Claude Chabrol … all made this journey into Eisenstein’s brain.
Sometimes Kleiman plays a game with his guests. He asks them to name any particular interest of theirs and bets they will find some allusion to it in the room. On one occasion, Jean Rouch, the French ethnologist and documentary film-maker, accepting the challenge, said, with pity for Kleiman, that he was actually researching the Revolt of the Slaves of Haiti at the end of the 18th century. Rouch almost fainted when Kleiman proudly pointed to a row of books on the very subject, explaining that Eisenstein had wanted to make a film about it starring Paul Robeson.
Feeling at home, I could have curled up like a cat on one of the chairs and remained there for the rest of my stay in Moscow, but I knew my journey had to end soon – and I knew where it had to end. After putting on our coats, fur hats, gloves and scarves, Kleiman and I went out into the street and began our long walk towards the Novodevichy cemetery.
En route, Kleiman helped me to read the different layers of this often enigmatic city, mostly through examples of architecture from many of Moscow’s epochs, which recalled one of Eisenstein’s plans to film four centuries of Moscow’s history. We saw stylish art nouveau houses, not so different from those of Eisenstein père in Riga; grandiose Stalinist Gothic; a small church undergoing restoration after being abandoned for years; the rustic-type house where Gogol had written Dead Souls (greatly admired by Eisenstein), and the Novodevichy (New Maiden’s) Monastery, a superbly preserved ensemble of 16th and 17th-century Russian architecture, much of it contemporary with Ivan the Terrible’s reign.
The Novodevichy cemetery was only opened to the general public in 1987. Kleiman did not lead me directly to the grave, he took me on a tour of the supporting actors in my biography. All around Eisenstein were the tombs of those he had known in life: Gorky, Mayakovsky, Stanislavsky, Dovzhenko, Vertov, Prokofiev, Alexandrov (the object of Eisenstein’s unrequited passion), Yutkevitch and Romm, the latter sketched on the stone with a cigarette in his hand. I felt I could hear the chattering of all these old colleagues around me, though it might have been the wailing wind.
Karl Marx wrote, ‘The bourgeoisie created the world in its own image. Comrades, we must destroy that image.’ Eisenstein, in his writings and films, led the storming of the palaces of bourgeois culture, only to find himself continually trampled underfoot in the manner of his beloved Charlie the Tramp. But the eccentric polymath with the Eraserhead hair, mischievous simian features, big head and stocky body, always retained his irreverent sense of humour, and his dream of creating ‘an unheard-of form of cinema which inculcates the Revolution into the general history of culture, creating a synthesis of science, art and militant class consciousness.’
Now, appropriately, standing before Eisenstein’s grave, I have arrived at where he ended his journey.
I remain silent.