Serguei Eisenstein

Filmmaker, artist, writer, professor, cinema theorist and doctor of arts, Serguei Eisenstein is one of the most revolutionary names in 20th century aesthetics. His cinematographic work and his ideas about intellectual montage created a milestone for cinema and influenced filmmakers of different cultures and generations. Scenes from the Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible continue to fascinate thousands of cinephiles around the world.

In 2023, when the director’s 125th anniversary and 75th death anniversary are remembered, the exhibition Serguei Eisenstein and the world presents to the Brazilian public the artist’s graphic and visual work, which constitutes, alongside his films and texts, a third fundamental dimension of his artistic universe. “First of all, I never learned to draw.” — with this confession, sincere and deeply ironic at the same time Serguei Eisenstein begins the chapter dedicated to his drawings in his memoirs. If, on the one hand, the director really had a limited artistic education, the drawings gathered here, considered by the artist himself as a way of transcribing his thoughts, present an autonomous graphic universe, in which he continually sought to deconstruct academic rules. From children’s notebooks, which reflect the fascination of the “Riga boy” with the work of Honoré Daumier, to the sketches made in the 1940s for the film Ivan the Terrible, drawing remained a passion for Serguei Eisenstein throughout his life. Upon his death in 1948, the artist bequeathed us more than five thousand pages that illuminate, often in an intriguing, controversial and insubordinate manner, his best-known cinematographic and theoretical works. The series of drawings shown here are also a kind of visual diary of the artist, in which Eisenstein ambitiously tried to decipher the genetic code of the creative process itself.

Creating a dialogue between the artist’s visual work and pieces from different cultures — from Asian masks, prints and sculptures to statuettes from the Olmec and Chancay civilizations —, this exhibition also weaves parallels between the Eisensteinian universe and the Renaissance spirit, urging us to (re)see each of the thousands of frames filmed by the filmmaker as a graphic object, because in the gigantic work of Serguei Eisenstein, “everything is in relation to everything and everything invades everything”.

Naum Kleiman e Luiz Gustavo Carvalho
Curatorship

Museums are living, active and dynamic institutions. By giving its audience the exhibition “Serguei Eisenstein and the World”, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum confirms this vocation.

Through a collection of drawings, sketches, photographs, caricatures, projections and objects, the exhibition presents part of the creative process of one of the most innovative and pioneering directors in the history of cinema. Serguei Eisenstein influenced great cinematographers and revolutionized the world of images with his multiple languages.

The many drawings that he left us were the initial stage in the preparation of his legendary films. To have them here now, within our sights, is a privilege.

The grandiosity of the exhibition presented by MON also proposes a dialogue with objects and images that inspired Eisenstein, as well as films later influenced by him, promoting a true immersion of the visitor into the graphic universe that reveals the complex creative process of the artist.

Confirming the transdisciplinary character of the Museum, by addressing Eisenstein’s influences, the exhibition builds a powerful dialogue with the Asian and African art collections in the permanent collection of MON, from which it borrows works that make up its repertoire.

In this way, the exhibition becomes a unique opportunity for the visitor to witness the encounter of these languages. And the Oscar Niemeyer Museum provides another transforming experience, enabling the important dialogue between the public and art. 

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
Chief Executive Officer
Museu Oscar Niemeyer

At the end of the 1910s, the revolutionary winds blowing in Russia also echoed in the young artist’s political caricatures. From 1917 onwards, the characters in constant metamorphosis that populated Riga’s notebooks began to coexist with mischievous Harlequins, sad Pierrots, graceful Colombinas and other characters from the commedia dell’arte. After the Russian Revolution, decided to interrupt his studies at the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd, Serguei Eisenstein settled in Moscow and began working with Vsevolod Meyerhold. Taking the teachings of this 20th-century theater revolutionary to the extreme, Serguei Eisenstein quickly grasps the main problem of the theater — the face-to-face encounter of two realms, even two worlds: art and reality. Influenced also by the circus universe and Elizabethan theatre, Serguei Eisenstein’s costume and set sketches portray the characters themselves, as if they were pulled out of the action on stage, and reflect the artist’s thoughts about the necessity of deconstructing the border between stage and public. 

After a seven-year interval, a period in which he became world-renowned as a filmmaker, Serguei Eisenstein returned to drawing, choosing this language to reflect on composition and representation. From mythological motifs to biblical scenes, passing again through Shakespearean tragedy, the drawings from this period, always conceived in series, reflect the radical experiments, the constructivist formulations and the experiences accumulated in the films The Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, October and The General Line. In 1937, the fear and despair that reigned throughout the country, provoked by the Great Stalinist Terror, were transformed into plastic metaphors by the artist in the series Visions of Delirium and Life leaving the body. Serguei Eisenstein, whose film The Meadow Bezhin had just been censored and destroyed, lived on the verge of being arrested as an “enemy of the people and of socialism”. His next film, far beyond being just a chance offered to Serguei Eisenstein to show his political loyalty, allowed the director to explore the semantic and emotional possibilities resulting from several combinations of images and music. These reflections guide the cycle Ideas about Music and are audio-visible in the film Alexander Nevsky, the result of a collaboration with composer Serguei Prokofiev.

Between 1930 and 1932, while filming in Mexico, Serguei Eisenstein was captivated by the diversity and beauty of pre-Columbian cultures. The folklore of Tehuantepec, the exuberance of nature close to the tropics, the architecture and monumental sculpture of the Mayans, as well as the mythology and cosmogony of the Aztecs were decisive in the choice of themes — Life, Death and Love — and in the polystylistics that permeates the film ¡Que viva México!! The influence of ancient frescoes and the pictography of cultures that inhabited the American continent are also visible in the artist’s graphic work created during this period. Later, in his theoretical works on the nature of art, Eisenstein’s interest in the cultural richness present in Latin America led him to study the beliefs and rituals of the Bororo indigenous in Brazil, the role of voodoo rhythms in the rituals of different Caribbean cultures and the imagination awakened by the ancient ceramics of Peru.

In January 1941, the production of the film Ivan the Terrible was entrusted to Serguei Eisenstein by direct order of Stalin, who believed that he had finally “tamed” the director. Eisenstein knew the Kremlin expected him to justify the regime’s bloody methods, but he didn’t: the 16th-century Tsar looked nothing like Prince Alexander Nevsky. Eisenstein only agreed to direct the film after creating the scene of Ivan’s repentance in front of the fresco of the Last Judgment in the cathedral. The trilogy about Russia’s first autocrat was supposed to be a tragedy about the destruction of the country and the tsar’s self-destruction. The footage took place during the Second World War, in Alma-Ata, under the most adverse conditions imposed by the evacuation of Soviet film studios. If the first series of the film, premiered in 1944, brought the Stalin Prize to the director, the second was banned and the third part, unfinished, had its material destroyed in 1951.

The lightness of the line that marks the sketches made for the film Alexander Nevsky is absent in the preparatory drawings for Ivan the Terrible. The characters’ physiognomies are closer to the expressiveness of the drawings from 1937-1939. The sketches also present innovations in Eisenstein’s graphic style: the contour hatches introduce a play of light and shadow, emphasize perspective in space, reveal volumes and scenic planes, give proportions of sizes and masses to architecture, objects and people. The frescoes of Russian churches and monasteries are not restricted to the decoration of interiors “in the spirit of the times”. The painted motifs are directly related to the plot, constituting a sound-visual counterpoint, which correlates with the dialogues and with Serguei Prokofiev’s music, as well as with actors’ movements and facial expressions. Transforming them into a kind of character, Serguei Eisenstein materializes the ideas and principles that interested him during his scenic projects in the 1920s — the creation of a film within a film.

Several films by Serguei Eisenstein never got off the ground, censored both by Stalinism and by the impossibility of addressing certain themes in the American film industry. In the 1930s, the novel Black Majesty, by John Vandercock, was the starting point for a script that told the story of the Independence of Haiti and had the singer and actor Paul Robeson as the protagonist. However, the theme of the Black Revolution was then considered unacceptable in Hollywood. The phrase said by Eisenstein that his next film would be about “the transformation of a revolutionary leader into a despot” also led someone to send a complaint that the director would stage the “Stalin film”. In 1931, anger erupted in the Kremlin: a telegram sent by Stalin himself demanded that Eisenstein immediately return to the Soviet Union, as he had “lost the trust of his comrades”. The film’s script and sketches became, however, the germs of the artist’s last masterpiece: Ivan the Terrible.

The combination of acting and dance, the facial expressiveness and intensity of Japanese theater fascinated the young Eisenstein. In 1919, while actively participating in the Russian Revolution, he spent his free time reading about Kabuki theater and learning Japanese. The lessons of kanjis and versification in the Japanese alphabet, as well as the passion for Japanese prints are significant influences on the director’s cinematographic work and on his montage theory, developed in the second half of the 1920s. In 1928, watching the performances of Kabuki theater in Moscow, Serguei Eisenstein found the prototype of the sound-visual counterpoint to the newly invented sound film. In 1934, Mei Lanfang and the Peking Opera revealed images of China’s ancient culture to the director, making him fascinated by the wisdom of Taoist philosophy. Interest in oriental cultures is also reflected in the artist’s latest drawings, created in Alma-Ata, during the film shooting of Ivan the Terrible.