49 Fun Facts About Sergei Eisenstein

In which city, then part of the Russian Empire, was Sergei Eisenstein born in 1898?

Riga still shows off the family name: Eisenstein's father Mikhail designed many of the Art Nouveau apartment houses that tourists now come to the city to see.

Eisenstein is considered a pioneer of which theory and practice of film editing?

Montage, as Eisenstein saw it, works by collision: he compared the clash of one shot against the next to the explosions inside an engine, each one driving the film forward.

Battleship Potemkin marked which uprising's twentieth anniversary?

The 1905 Revolution failed, and the real mutineers ended up handing over their ship in a Romanian port. Eisenstein stops the film earlier, as the fleet lets the Potemkin sail through unharmed.

What sets off the mutiny aboard the ship in Battleship Potemkin?

Maggoty meat rations. The ship's doctor inspects the crawling carcass and pronounces it perfectly fit to eat, and when the mutiny comes he is thrown overboard himself, as food for the worms.

Battleship Potemkin's most famous sequence, endlessly imitated, shows Cossacks firing on a crowd where?

On a giant staircase in Odessa, although no such massacre ever took place there. Troops did fire on crowds elsewhere in the city, and Eisenstein moved the killing to the steps.

Which gangster film pays homage to Battleship Potemkin with a pram rolling through a railway-station shoot-out?

The Untouchables restages the scene in Chicago's Union Station, where Eliot Ness stops to help a mother with her pram just as the gangsters he is waiting for walk in.

Why was Battleship Potemkin's red flag shot as a white one?

The film stock made real red look black, so a white flag was run up for the camera. Afterwards it was coloured red by hand, frame by frame.

Which city's 1958 world's fair hosted the critics' poll that named Battleship Potemkin the best film ever made?

Brussels's verdict did not last. From 1962 the best-known critics' poll put Citizen Kane first, and kept it there for five polls in a row.

In a famous three-shot sequence in Battleship Potemkin, stone statues of which animal seem to wake and rise up?

Lions. Three separate statues, one asleep, one stirring and one on its feet, are cut together so quickly that a single stone beast seems to rear up, standing for a people waking to revolt.

What was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film, released in 1925?

Strike was planned as one chapter in a seven-film history of the workers' road to power. The series was never finished, though the mutiny film he made next grew out of the same scheme.

The climax of Eisenstein's first feature cross-cuts the crushing of the workers with footage of what?

Cattle being slaughtered: by cutting from the abattoir to soldiers mowing down the factory hands, Eisenstein left the audience to draw the conclusion for itself: these men were being butchered like animals.

October took its international title, Ten Days That Shook the World, from a book by which American journalist?

John Reed watched the Bolsheviks take power and wrote the story up as an eyewitness. He died in Moscow three years later and was buried as a hero beside the Kremlin wall.

Which experimental Soviet artistic institution did Eisenstein work for when he began his career in Moscow theatre in 1920?

Proletkult took him on as an assistant scene painter. Within three years he was co-directing its Moscow theatre and had shot his first scrap of film, to be projected in the middle of one of its shows.

Which form of Japanese theatre did Eisenstein study and later credit as an influence on his films?

Kabuki was one Japanese passion; the written language was another, and it gave him an idea he never dropped: characters that fuse two pictures into one new meaning work just as a film cut does.

What did Eisenstein study in Petrograd before joining the Red Army in 1918?

Architecture and engineering was his father's trade, and the Civil War set the two against each other: Sergei built defences for the Red Army while his father backed the other side and ended up in Germany.

The unedited reels of Eisenstein's abandoned Mexican film were kept for years by which New York museum?

The Museum of Modern Art held the footage long after Eisenstein's death. Only in 1979, three decades too late for him to see it, was a version cut that followed his own outline.

Which Theodore Dreiser novel did Eisenstein script for Paramount, only for the studio to reject it?

An American Tragedy reached the screen a year later with another director and a tamer script. Dreiser, who had backed Eisenstein's version, went to court to try to stop the film, and lost.

Which American socialist author bankrolled Eisenstein's Mexican film through the 'Mexican Film Trust'?

Upton Sinclair, his wife and a few friends put up the money on the promise of a short, non-political film in three or four months. More than a year later, with the budget spent, they shut the production down.

What was the title of Eisenstein's unfinished Mexican project?

¡Que viva México! was taken out of his hands. The reels stayed in America, where others cut them into films such as Thunder Over Mexico, and Eisenstein never edited a frame of what he had shot.

Which Mexican muralist, whom Eisenstein met in Moscow in 1927, fired his wish to make a film about Mexico?

Diego Rivera, in Moscow as a guest of the Soviet state's tenth birthday, told him Battleship Potemkin reminded him of his own murals. Eisenstein later wrote that Rivera's stories planted the seed of the journey.

Eisenstein's 1929 film The General Line was made to promote which Soviet policy for the countryside?

Collectivising the farms. For once Eisenstein built a film around a single heroine, a peasant woman, where his earlier epics had made the crowd itself the hero.

Which unfinished Eisenstein film, halted by the authorities in 1937, told the story of the boy 'martyr' Pavlik Morozov?

Bezhin Meadow no longer exists as a film: the reels were lost in a wartime air raid. What can be seen today is a slideshow rebuilt in the 1960s from single frames saved from each shot.

What became of Boris Shumyatsky, the film chief who halted Eisenstein's Pavlik Morozov film?

He was arrested and shot within a year or so. The director whose film he had stopped fared better: Eisenstein was soon back behind the camera, making the film that restored his standing.

Which 1938 film, an allegory warning against Nazi Germany, was Eisenstein's first sound film?

Alexander Nevsky was pulled from cinemas in 1939, the moment Moscow signed its pact with Hitler, and rushed back onto screens two years later when Germany invaded.

Which composer wrote the scores for Eisenstein's sound films of 1938 and the 1940s?

Sergei Prokofiev and Eisenstein worked in both directions: some scenes were scored to the finished pictures, and for others the film itself was cut to fit music he had already written.

In Eisenstein's 1938 epic, which invaders does the prince defeat in the climactic Battle of the Ice?

The Teutonic Knights charge across a winter that was pure illusion: the battle was filmed in the heat of summer, with ice and snow faked from melted glass and chalk.

The Battle of the Ice that crowns Eisenstein's 1938 epic was fought in 1242 on which frozen lake?

Lake Peipus, on today's border between Estonia and Russia. The film's most famous image, the ice cracking under the invaders' weight, is Eisenstein's own: no chronicle of the battle mentions it.

Moscow's film studios were evacuated in 1941 to which city, where Eisenstein went on to shoot Ivan the Terrible?

Alma-Ata became the wartime home of Soviet cinema: the Moscow and Leningrad studios were merged there for the duration, and Eisenstein filmed his tsar's palaces thousands of kilometres from the front.

Stalin complained that Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible resembled Hamlet: which fault did he mean?

Indecision. Summoned to the Kremlin at eleven at night, Eisenstein was told that his tsar let everybody tell him what to do, when Stalin wanted an Ivan who was cruel for good reasons.

Ivan the Terrible, Part II, banned in 1946, finally reached cinemas in 1958 under which Soviet leader?

Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin two years earlier, and the film Stalin banned could at last be shown. Eisenstein never saw it released: he had died ten years before.

What happened to the footage of Ivan the Terrible, Part III?

It survives only in fragments, a few minutes in all. Eisenstein stopped filming once Part II was banned, and he died before he could take the trilogy up again.

What was the subtitle of Ivan the Terrible, Part II?

The Boyars' Plot ends in a grim joke: Ivan dresses the plotters' own candidate, his simple cousin, in the royal robes, and the assassin sent to kill the tsar stabs the wrong man.

Stalin complained that Eisenstein had made Ivan the Terrible's personal guard, the oprichniki, look like which American group?

The Ku Klux Klan. Eisenstein pointed out that the Klan wore white hoods and his guardsmen black, a defence that failed to impress the men across the table, and the film stayed banned.

Eisenstein's 1929 film The General Line was re-edited and released under which other title?

Old and New. Eisenstein had broken off to make October, and by the time he returned official attitudes had changed, so the film was recut and renamed.

Which long-time collaborator co-directed October with Eisenstein and decades later assembled his own version of the Mexican footage?

Grigori Aleksandrov also acted for him, playing the brutal first officer in Battleship Potemkin, before leaving to direct the musical comedies that made him a star director in his own right.

Eisenstein cuts from a preening politician to a mechanical peacock in October: what did he call this kind of editing?

Intellectual. The same film cuts from a baroque Christ through a parade of other gods down to a primitive idol, leaving the audience to conclude that every religion comes to the same thing.

Whose film school did Eisenstein briefly attend, sharing a fascination with editing but disagreeing that it worked by 'linkage'?

Lev Kuleshov had shown what a cut can do with a famous experiment: the same shot of an actor's blank face seemed to show hunger, grief or desire, depending on the picture spliced in after it.

Which Wagner opera did Eisenstein direct at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1940?

Die Walküre opened at the Bolshoi in 1940, in the brief interval when Moscow and Berlin were bound by a non-aggression pact. The following year the two countries were at war.

Which pioneering female filmmaker's 1906 comedy The Consequences of Feminism influenced Eisenstein as a child?

Alice Guy-Blaché's comedy turns the sexes upside down: the men sew, iron and mind the children while the women drink in cafés and chase them. Eisenstein could still describe it in his memoirs decades later.

Eisenstein planned to end his Mexican film with scenes of which annual festival?

The Day of the Dead scenes were among the few to reach cinemas, though not as he intended: another editor cut them into a short called Death Day, which Eisenstein never saw.

Which British painter returned again and again to the wounded nurse in Battleship Potemkin?

Francis Bacon worked from a film still of the nurse, and her open-mouthed scream, glasses shattered, runs through his screaming figures. He named one canvas Study for the Nurse in the film Battleship Potemkin.

Which British director made Eisenstein in Guanajuato, a 2015 film about his months in Mexico?

Peter Greenaway fills his film with the real cast of the Mexican shoot, down to the backer's brother-in-law, a banker with no film experience who was sent along to keep watch on the money.

Which British pop duo wrote a new score for Battleship Potemkin and premiered it in Trafalgar Square in 2004?

Pet Shop Boys played it live with a Dresden orchestra at an open-air screening of the film. The square was chosen on purpose, as London's traditional home of protest, to suit a film about revolt.

The battleship Potemkin was named after a prince best remembered as the lover and favourite of which Russian ruler?

Catherine the Great made Grigory Potemkin the most powerful man in her empire for seventeen years. Generations later the name of that pillar of the old order was on the ship whose crew rose against the tsar.

Which Hollywood star pointed Eisenstein toward the novelist who paid for his Mexican film?

Charlie Chaplin saw a good deal of the Russian visitors in Hollywood. When the studio let Eisenstein go, the writer he recommended stepped in, so that the director could shoot in Mexico and not go straight home.

Where in Moscow were Eisenstein's ashes buried after his death in 1948?

Novodevichy received his ashes in February 1948. A second heart attack had killed him at fifty, with permission to rework his banned film granted at last but not one new scene shot.

Which documentary pioneer was first hired as instructor on Eisenstein's 1923 debut, Glumov's Diary?

Dziga Vertov was sent by the state film office to advise the stage director on his first shoot. The few minutes of film they made later turned up inside one of Vertov's own Kino-Pravda newsreels.

Eisenstein's first theoretical essay appeared in 1923 in Lef, edited by which Futurist poet?

Vladimir Mayakovsky edited Lef. In its pages Eisenstein argued that a show need not tell its story in order: its moments should be arranged for the greatest impact on the audience.

Eisenstein's Hollywood project Sutter's Gold told of the settler on whose land which gold rush began?

California's gold rush made fortunes for others and ruined John Sutter. Prospectors overran his land and wrecked what he had built there, and he spent the rest of his life asking the government to make good his losses.