In 1929, in Switzerland, Eisenstein supervised an educational documentary about abortion directed by Tisse, entitled Frauennot – Frauenglück. He spent the next two years touring and lecturing in Berlin, Zürich, London, and Paris. For Eisenstein, however, it was an opportunity to see landscapes and cultures outside the Soviet Union. Officially, the trip was supposed to allow the three to learn about sound motion pictures and to present themselves as Soviet artists in person to the capitalist West. In the autumn of 1928, with October still under fire in many Soviet quarters, Eisenstein left the Soviet Union for a tour of Europe, accompanied by his perennial film collaborator Grigori Aleksandrov and cinematographer Eduard Tisse. This forced him to issue public articles of self-criticism and commitments to reform his cinematic visions to conform to the increasingly specific doctrines of socialist realism. While critics outside Soviet Russia praised these works, Eisenstein's focus in the films on structural issues such as camera angles, crowd movements, and montage brought him and like-minded others such as Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko under fire from the Soviet film community. Mostly owing to this international renown, he was then able to direct October: Ten Days That Shook the World, as part of a grand tenth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution of 1917, and then The General Line (also known as Old and New). Battleship Potemkin (also 1925) was critically acclaimed worldwide. Strike (1925) was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film. His first film, Glumov's Diary (for the theatre production Wise Man), was also made in that same year with Dziga Vertov hired initially as an instructor. Eisenstein began his career as a theorist in 1923, by writing "The Montage of Attractions" for art journal LEF. He worked as a designer for Vsevolod Meyerhold. His productions there were entitled Gas Masks, Listen Moscow, and Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man. With Japanese kabuki actor Sadanji Ichikawa II, Moscow, 1928Įisenstein moved to Moscow in 1920, and began his career in theatre working for Proletkult, an experimental Soviet artistic institution which aspired to radically modify existing artistic forms and create a revolutionary working-class aesthetic. At this time, he was exposed to Kabuki theatre and studied Japanese, learning some 300 kanji characters, which he cited as an influence on his pictorial development. In 1920, Sergei was transferred to a command position in Minsk, after success providing propaganda for the October Revolution. This brought his father to Germany after the defeat of the Tsarist government, and Sergei to Petrograd, Vologda, and Dvinsk. In 1918, he left school and joined the Red Army to serve in the Russian Revolution, although his father Mikhail supported the opposite side. Education Īt the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering, Eisenstein studied architecture and engineering, the profession of his father. Among the films that influenced Eisenstein as a child was The Consequences of Feminism by the first female filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché. Eisenstein was raised as an Orthodox Christian, but became an atheist later in life. Divorce followed and Julia left the family to live in France. Her son would return at times to see his father, who joined them around 1910. Julia left Riga the same year as the 1905 Russian Revolution, taking Sergei with her to St. She was the daughter of a prosperous merchant. The mother, Julia Ivanovna Konetskaya, was from a Russian Orthodox family. The father had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. His father, the architect Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, was born in Kiev Oblast, to a Jewish merchant father, Osip, and a Swedish mother. His family moved frequently in his early years, as Eisenstein continued to do throughout his life. Sergei Eisenstein was born on 22 January 1898 in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire in the Governorate of Livonia), to a middle-class family. Young Sergei with his parents Mikhail and Julia Eisenstein
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