“Telling of a factory workers’ strike in Czarist Russia in 1912 and its brutal suppression, STRIKE, in its brilliant mixture of agit-prop techniques and comic-grotesque stylization, reveals the influence of the explosively rich contemporary theater in which Eisenstein was involved. In surprise associations—intercutting shots of the secret police with animals or a massacre scene with an abattoir—Eisenstein is at once playful and ferocious. Important for introducing Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, STRIKE is filled with memorable scenes, such as the forbidden meeting in the stockyards, that give the flavor of the underground (myth and reality) in pre-revolutionary Russia.”—Pacific Film Archive. “Cinematic metaphors and images of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste; it is a deluge of real things and surroundings.”—Jay Leyda (105 mins.)

“One of the immortal classics of world cinema, THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN was a perfect vehicle for the young, brilliant, and restless Eisenstein to experiment with his theories about montage, the creation of new ideas and filmic realities through the creative juxtaposition of images. Based on the famous revolt by the crew of a Russian warship in Odessa in 1905, the film celebrates the courage of the rebels and those on land who supported them, and it also depicts, in the extraordinary and oft-quoted Odessa steps sequence, the raw brutality of the Czarist regime. Well received in the U.S.S.R. when first released, the film was among the first Soviet films shown in Western Europe, where it created an enormous sensation—the most powerful evidence yet of a new, revolutionary art emerging from what claimed to be a new, revolutionary society.”—Film Society of Lincoln Center (80 mins.)

“Made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, OCTOBER (known in its shorter version as TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD) has taken on newsreel status, with its famously excerptable images of the storming of the Winter Palace, said to be more spectacular and better attended than the actual event. Release was held up while Eisenstein was forced to excise footage of Trotsky who was himself being excised from Party life. But to see it now is to re-experience the shock of the experimental with which it was met on its initial release. Eisenstein’s theories of intellectual montage turned the objects and figures of recent history into metaphorical elements. Raymond Durgnat wrote, on the film’s reissue in London, ‘It’s like music in that its physical presence affects one kinesthetically and sets one’s pulses, and mind, racing. It’s both mysterious and overwhelming.’”—Pacific Film Archive (135 mins.)

Based on a Soviet political morality tale, the story pits a farmer against his patriotic son in a battle with the government. Began as a commissioned production in 1935, a series of illnesses and conflicts with Soviet officials over the film’s social and political correctness resulted in the halting of the project. The footage thought to have been destroyed by World War II bombings, BREZHIN MEADOW exists today only in this photo-montage outline based on partially constructed prints found in the 1960s. (31 mins.)

FOLLOWED BY

TIME IN THE SUN
DIRECTOR: SERGEI EISENSTEIN
U.S.S.R., 1939
In 1931, Eisenstein went to Mexico to film an epic study of the Mexican people, the title of which was to have been QUE VIVA MEXICO. The theme was the living history of Mexico and its “eternal circle” of death and birth—from ancient Mexico before the arrival of the Conquistadores, to the arrival of Cortez and the Spanish settlers, the ancient matriarchy of Tehuantepec, brutality in feudal Mexico, the Revolution, and the traditional Festival of All Saints Day. Funded by American journalist Upton Sinclair, Eisenstein never finished the famously producer-plagued project but managed to shoot vast footage that Sinclair later fashioned into THUNDER OVER MEXICO with a vision far from Eisenstein’s. In the late 1930s, British journalist Marie Seaton, Eisenstein’s biographer, gained access to the footage and reconstructed it, in her view, closer to Eisenstein’s original intention. Her TIME IN THE SUN brings one of the most famous Hollywood director/producer battles to the screen, if not to its ultimate conclusion. (60 mins.)

TRAILER | REVIEW

“Another collaboration with ‘that magician Sergei Prokofiev,’ as Eisenstein called him, IVAN has a strange magic bordering on sorcery. Filmed in the remote Alma-Ata studios under difficult wartime conditions, it is set in sixteenth-century Moscow where the newly crowned Czar Ivan attempts to thwart both the boyars (the feudal nobility) and the hold of the Church and create a unified Russia. Set mostly in cave-like cathedral interiors with frescoed walls, the film itself is like a fresco come to life in painterly long-shot and tortured close-up. Eisenstein appears to take the costume pageantry and palace scuttlebutt as Hollywood might—that is, to the point of absurdity—but with a different objective in mind; as critic George Sadoul notes, ‘He forced his actors into the shapes demanded by his visual compositions and ... the rhythm, design, and emotional structure of the sequence.’ Part I follows Ivan from his coronation to the victory against the Mongols at Kazan, the murder of his wife Anastasia, and his voluntary exile to Alexandrov to await his people’s summons.”—Pacific Film Archive (96 mins.)

Evgenii V. Bershtein, Associate Professor of Russian at Reed College, will introduce the film.

FOLLOWED BY

IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART II
DIRECTOR: SERGEI EISENSTEIN
U.S.S.R., 1958
“The second part of Eisenstein’s unfinished trilogy is mainly concerned with Ivan’s return to the throne and his ruthless opposition to the schemes of the boyars to keep Russia divided among its princes and foreign interests. Stalin took a particular dislike to the portrayal of the czar’s secret police and the film was banned. Part II contains a lovely flashback to Ivan’s childhood; a meditation on the loneliness of the czar; the marvelous set-piece setting up the usurper Vladimir for assassination; and a Brechtian operatic interlude that is Eisenstein’s one and only experiment in the two-color process.”—Pacific Film Archive (90 mins.)

TRAILER | REVIEW

Eisenstein argued that his film would be “heroic in spirit, militant in content, and popular in its style,” and it received praise from Stalin when first screened before being pulled from distribution after the signing of the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. His first sound film, ALEXANDER NEVSKY features not just a score by Prokofiev but a formal collaboration—a form of cinematic opera based on Eisenstein’s theories of contrapuntal dynamics. Though set in 1241, on the eve of World War II it had the authority of a contemporary documentary: its forceful portrayal of a nationalist hero who lives among the fishermen of a peaceful village courageously confronting machinelike and heavily armored foreign invaders points to the imminent danger of an invasion of Russia by Fascist Germany. The iconic “Battle on the Ice” scene, set against lyrical moments, emphasize how life is interrupted by violence, however patriotic the call. (111 mins.)