Sergei Eisenstein: autobiography, personal life, filmography. Photo by Eisenstein Sergey Mikhailovich

The name of Sergei Eisenstein is known throughout the world as the name of one of the founders of the art of cinema, as well as a great master of the Russian avant-garde. His immortal masterpieces are still used in the institutes of cinematography as teaching aids for editing and directing.

The director's heritage

In 2025, the 100th anniversary of the masterpiece of world cinematography, the film "The Battleship Potemkin" will be celebrated. " Sergei Mikhailovich was only 27 years old when he removed this tape. Few know what year Sergei Eisenstein was born, and after all he lived only fifty years (from 1898 to 1948). It should be noted that the time was spent on the most difficult and tragic periods in the history of our country.

Sergei Eisenstein, whose filmography has about twenty-five films, and a good half of them about Mexico, left behind a unique legacy not only in the form of films. This is also textbooks and manuals for students of cinematography. The complete works of the director consists of eleven volumes. From them you can find interesting information about the time in which Sergei Eisenstein lived and worked. The autobiography is supplemented with letters, working notes, essays and articles.

World directors about Eisenstein

The famous director Michael Romm in his memoirs writes that he studied his profession on the film Eisenstein "Battleship Potemkin." He was a listener of the director's courses and had the opportunity to work in the installation workshop of Mosfilm. Mikhail Ilich once again reviewed the famous "Battleship Potemkin" forty times, thoroughly analyzed and studied the mise-en-scenes, soundtrack, dialogues of characters and dismantled the system of editing personnel.

Alfred Hitchcock considered himself a disciple and follower of our great director. He did not hide that in his works he used the methods invented by Sergei Mikhailovich. His famous "Saspiens", that is, dramatic pauses, tensioning, creating an atmosphere of anxiety is a consequence of the use of Eisenstein's techniques, such as: naturalistic details and sharpening of attention on individual details, various angles, suddenly reducing or enlarging the object, slowing and acceleration Time by means of rhythmic editing of frames, sound effects, blackout and so on ..

Family and parents

Sergei Eisenstein, whose personal life in adulthood is a mystery with seven seals, as many of his famous colleagues and teachers of his own family did not create. I have not got a wife or children. He blamed his parents for not giving him the right education in this matter. Sergei Eisenstein, whose photo is shown below, is sealed next to his mother and father at two or three years of age.

After a serious scandal, which occurred in 1909, the family life of parents turned into a constant series of scandals and violent clarification of relations. Little Seryozha was forced to listen to his mother and father, who regularly opened his eyes to each other. Mama told Sergei that his father was a thief and a scoundrel, and his father, in turn, reported that his mother was a corrupt woman. In the end, in 1912, when Sergei was 11 years old, his parents divorced and divorced. By decision of the Holy Synod, the boy remained with his father.

Marriage of parents can be considered inane. Mother, Julia Ivanovna Konetskaya, came from a wealthy family. Her father, a representative of the poor urban estate, came to St. Petersburg from Tikhvin. There he began to work on a contract, accumulated a small capital and married the daughter of a rich merchant. Soon he opened his own business - "Nevsky Barge Shipping Company".

The father of the future director, Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, had Swedish-Jewish roots. Becoming the husband of Julia Ivanovna Konetskoy, he moved her to Riga, where their only son Sergei was born.

The appearance of the central part of Riga is largely connected with the activities of Mikhail Eisenstein. Occupying the post of chief architect of the city, he built more than fifty beautiful buildings in the Art Nouveau style. They still decorate the capital of Latvia. Mikhail Osipovich was noted for his great diligence and good business qualities. He made a successful career, having risen to the rank of a valid state councilor. And this gave his children the right to hereditary nobility.

Talents of Sergey Mikhailovich

From an early age, his father, Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, taught his son to read. He gave him an excellent education. English, German and French Sergei Eisenstein was in possession of almost perfection. The boy early learned to ride, play music on the piano, take pictures. This fashionable hobby has not bypassed the clever child, with the big interest comprehending various sciences and reaching to new opening. In addition, he painted well.

Numerous comics and cartoons, sometimes quite frivolous content, made by him in adulthood, served as an occasion for organizing extremely interesting exhibitions. The first was held in 1957 in Moscow. Later, his humorous sketches, cartoons, sketches of costumes and scenery for performances, mise-en-scenes for films, drawings on biblical and literary subjects, as well as picturesque works made during his travels through Europe and America, traveled all over the European continent and the Americas. After all, only two films - "Alexander Nevsky" and "Ivan the Terrible" - Sergei Eisenstein made more than 600 drawings.

The father of Sergei Eisenstein dreamed of seeing his son as an architect. For this reason, in 1915, Sergei entered the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineers. By this time, his parents had already parted, and his father lived in Berlin with his new wife.

Teachers

His spiritual father Eisenstein Sergey Mikhailovich considered the great theater director Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold. He adored and adored him. It is believed that genius and villainy in one person do not get along, but Meyerhold his life has repeatedly denied this statement. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, a biography - the topic of our review, writes about his teacher in theatrical direction: Vsevolod Emilievich possessed a unique ability to teach without giving students any useful knowledge. Eisenstein remembers that all the director's secrets of Meyerhold, he saw and comprehended immediately, as soon as he came to him for a rehearsal of the play.

Hardly having noticed attributes of talent in any of the pupils, Meyerhold under one or another pretext immediately got rid of a potential rival. Acted Vsevolod Emilevich usually through women. So he did with Eisenstein.

If Meyerhold did not want to share his knowledge with the students, then director Sergei Eisenstein, on the contrary, spent his entire life and talent on the creation of universal laws of cinematography, which he described with full frankness in his works on the art of cinema. The table books of the cinematographers of the whole world were his "The Art of the Mise-en-Scene", "Mizankadr", "Editing", "Method" and "Particular Nature".

The theory of cinema

Without becoming an architect, as his father wanted, Eisenstein Sergey Mikhailovich, nevertheless, left behind an interesting schematic drawing of the house, which he defined as the "Theory of Cinema". This plan can be considered universal. It not only makes it convenient to make movies, it is also ideal for developing plans for the development of motion picture art in general.

The foundation on which the whole construction holds is the method of dialectics, that is, conversation, interaction, conflict and concerted cooperation. The following plate is placed on the method - the expressiveness of the person. By this definition we mean those ways by which a person expresses his emotions in a society.

Above, on the plate "expressiveness of man", there are four columns - pathos, mizankadr, mise en scene and comic. These columns, more precisely, factors, in combination, through installation, create the necessary image that affects the sensory thinking of a person. All this together is a philosophy of art, in our case, a movie. Further work on the film assumes an in-depth study of sociology and technology. This is absolutely necessary, since the tasks facing the cinema are constantly expanding, the technique is being improved, the coverage of the audience is increasing, and the quality standards are rising. The flag with the inscription "The method of cinema" crowns the construction.

Conflict as the driving force of art

The word "conflict" - as the base on which art stands - is absent in the scheme of the building of the theory of cinema. However, Sergei Eisenstein was convinced that the conflict is the driving force behind all processes that have both a creative and destructive orientation. His conviction is based on his own children's experience, when he, quite an unthinking child, was involved in grandiose scenes and scandals that occurred between parents. Depending on the unfolding mise-en-scene, he, for lack of other characters, was involved with the papa with his mother, then as a witness of the viciousness of another, then as an arbitrator, who decides which of them is right and who is to blame, then as the culprit of their unhappy life, The executor of small commissions in minutes of offended silence of spouses. He was a ball flying from one of them to another. Such a life in a constant conflict could not but rest on Sergey Mikhailovich's outlook. Conflict has become a natural, we might say, nutritional environment for him.

Analyzing his past, Sergei Eisenstein writes that on his childish conscience there was not one destructive act peculiar to ordinary children. He did not break the toys, he did not break the clock, in order to see what was inside, did not offend cats and dogs, did not lie and did not act capriciously. In short, he was an ideal child. Sergei Eisenstein, the director's autobiography to that testimony, embodied all the unrealistic pranks in his films in his childhood. It is the lack of the opportunity to develop naturally and to explore life as it happens to all normal children, manifested itself in it in adulthood. Hence the bloody scenes of shootings, murders, etc., etc. All these aggressive ways of influencing the audience, their psyche, Eisenstein called attractions.

A mystical coincidence or a fateful decision?

Sergei Eisenstein, whose biography indicates that he was an absolutely rational person, contains facts of mystical events, to which he attached great importance.

Studying in the second year of the Institute of Civil Engineers, he was dragged into the vortex of the revolutionary movement. In February 1918, Eisenstein volunteered for the Red Army and went to the front. For two years he was engaged in military construction, participated in amateur performances as an actor and director, and painted train carriages with agitation slogans.

In 1920, a government decree issued, allowing students to return to higher education and resume the educational process. Sergei Mikhailovich by this time felt a taste for theatrical life and was not eager to again engage in architecture and construction, as required by the parents. He was offered to continue his studies at the Academy of the General Staff, in order to become a translator of the Japanese language. The proposal was so tempting that Eisenstein thought about it. By this time, the capital from Petrograd was moved to Moscow, where life was developing rapidly - and theatrical, in particular. In the fateful night, when he finally decided to break with the architecture, at the same time as the beginning of his new life, a sudden heart attack stopped the life of his father - Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein.

From that moment, a successful and rapid career of the world-famous film director Sergei Eisenstein began.

Thanks to Peter Greenaway

In 2015, the screen went to Peter Greenaway's film "Eisenstein in Guanajuato." This picture caused an ambiguous attitude of Russian distributors, but Greenaway asserts that the fact that there has not been a single film about a remarkable director until now is a big omission. People should know what kind of person was the great Sergei Eisenstein. Biography, the director's personal life and his work in the cinema require study and research. He is not at all intent on defaming a genius. On the contrary, he wants to show how the worldview of a talented person has changed after a journey through countries not constrained by the totalitarian regime. After all, it's no secret that after a three-year study of the way of life and customs of the inhabitants of Europe, the United States and Latin America, Sergei Mikhailovich radically changed his view of the goals and objectives of Soviet cinema. In the plans of Greenway - the second film about our outstanding compatriot, "Eisenstein's handshake." This time, Greenway wants to show the life of a great director before traveling outside the USSR.

Perestroika of the world outlook

Eisenstein, at the very beginning of his big tour somewhere in Europe, bought Freser's ten-volume "Golden Branch". It was from this book that he drew information about world religions from ancient times to modern times. The idea of a deity, as a cereal, dying and resurrected, caused in him the idea of the cyclicality of everything in the material world.

Ten days in Mexico opened him a new look at public relations in general and on the cinema in particular. He saw that in practically a small territory almost all historical social structures can coexist peacefully - primitive communal, feudal, capitalistic and even socialist.

I want to note that in Mexico, still more than 70 years, Eisenstein is considered to be the number one director. This is not surprising, because he had been there to plot 80,000 meters of film. This is the customs of local residents, their way of life, national traditions, landscape beauty, natural disasters and a lot of interesting details and information from the life of Hispanics.

Because of the difficulties with copyright, we do not have the opportunity to see all this material, but it's a pity. In the United States, based on Eisenstein's materials, Paramount assembled several films that received tremendous success. Details about the sad epic with films can be found in the magazine "Soviet Screen" for 1974, the author - R. Yurenev.

Returning home, Sergei Mikhailovich, together with the scriptwriter (and in the recent past Chekist) Alexander Rzheshevsky began work on another film. This time about collectivization - "Bezhin meadow". The story was based on the story of Pavlik Morozov, who, according to the version invented by Eisenstein himself, perishes at the hands of his own father. In the first version, peasants ravaged the church to build a club in it. In the second - the peasants are trying to save the church from a fire. The film was banned for ideological reasons, and the film was washed away. There are a few pictures with frames from the movie. They are struck by the power of psychological influence on the viewer.

The director's fate was hanging by a thread. He miraculously escaped arrest, was suspended from teaching at the VGIK, but somehow was justified and had the opportunity to work further, now on the patriotic film "Alexander Nevsky".

"He lived, thought, was fond of," - young Sergey Mikhailovich wanted to see such an epitaph in his tombstone.

At the end of his life, after a heart attack in 1946, Eisenstein, having analyzed his fate, wrote that he seemed to have always looked for only one thing - a way of uniting and reconciling the conflicting parties. Those opposites that drive all processes in the world. A trip to Mexico showed him that the union is impossible, however - Sergei Mikhailovich clearly saw it - they are quite realistic in teaching peaceful coexistence.