Sergei Eisenstein

What could have happened – what should have happened – if two giants in film history, like Greta Garbo and Sergei Michajlovič Eisenstein, could have declared their love for each other? The world's most famous actress, an honorary Russian citizen of cinema for her many performances; the world's most radical director, who could have immortalized her face in one of his famous close-ups? Sphinx Garbo did not want to be alone: she just wanted to marry the great Sergei. Perhaps she could have played Trotsky or Pancho Villa in one of his films. Perhaps their friends Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney and Josef von Sternberg would have approved their love. Maybe they could have had a child together. Maybe all this could still have happened, in a Mark Rappaport film.

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As a teenager, Sergei Eisenstein signed his drawings with "Sir Gay". Mark Rappaport sees clear signs of his sexual preferences throughout the Russian’s film oeuvre. Numerous asides illustrate how Hollywood productions likewise frequently played with nods and winks and typical motifs from gay culture.

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The true story of Mei Lanfang, China's greatest opera star; a husband and father whose world-wide fame came from the portrayal of women. His fascinating life was the basis for the feature film Farewell My Concubine.

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A documentary biography of Russia's greatest filmmaker.

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Eisenstein is celebrated either as the last Leonardo da Vinci of modernity or attacked as Faustus, Faustus who made a pact with the devil. Whichever is the case, neither friends nor foes are able to resist the powerful draw of Eisenstein's work. He was a person of complexity who was understood in very different ways, as a generous cosmopolitan and a stingy hermit, a cynic and yet a highly sensitive, vulnerable being. The film deals with a number of phases in Eisenstein's life, and tries to get away from the orthodox image of him by using new material to shed a different light on his biography.

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Eisenstein shot 50 hours of footage on location in Mexico in 1931 and 32 for what would have become ¡Que viva México!, but was not able to finish the film. Following two wildly different reconstruction attempts in 1939 (Marie Seton's 'Time in the Sun') and 1979 (Grigori Alexandrov's '¡Que viva México!') Kovalov has here compiled another hypothetical version of what Eisenstein's film might have been.

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A free film adaptation of the director's memoirs. In form, this is the "stream of consciousness" that attracted Sergei Eisenstein after getting acquainted with the experiments of James Joyce. The outer outline of the film is a long foreign trip of the director, which began in 1929, during which he recalls his past life and considers creative ideas. The film is constructed as a free alternation of reality, dreams, and fantasies. The material for it is fragments from the films of Sergei Eisenstein and his fellow contemporaries, documentary footage depicting the director and his time. The wide coverage of the faces and events reflected in the film shows the special role of Sergei Eisenstein in the culture of the twentieth century…

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The Island of the Dead is a film about the demise of the Russian Epocha Modern. The symbol of this culture was the legendary Russian film star Vera Kholodnaya, who evoked a poetic image of the young urban woman on the silver screen. Her death in 1919, shrouded in tragedy and mystery, put a symbolic end to the pre-Revolutionary period. The Island of the Dead is composed of fragments from numerous films from this period, juxtaposed with other contemporary artistic expressions such as music and painting. Kovalov shows convincingly how the fragile beauty of the Russian Epocha Modern had to make way for the pressure of Futurism, Constructivism and other 'progressive trends', and how these '-isms' were then also relegated to the melting pot to be remoulded by totalitarian norms.

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Inspired by the social changes that the Revolution brought to our country and the admiration he felt for Mexican art, the Russian filmmaker Sergei M. Eisenstein traveled to Mexico with the intention of filming a film mosaic that culminated in the most beautiful non-existent film. The details of this odyssey are exposed in this episode of the classic television series Those Who Made Our Cinema.

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A documentary exploring the childhood of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in Riga, examining how the multicultural city and his early encounters with art shaped the future pioneer of Soviet cinema.

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A reflective documentary on the life and legacy of Sergei Eisenstein, examining his films and the era in which he worked. Conceived as a companion to "Sergei Eisenstein. Foreword," the film serves as a concluding meditation on the great director’s influence.

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In August 1941, two largest Soviet film studios Mosfilm and Lenfilm were evacuated to Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. There, together with the newly founded Alma-Ata Film Studio, they were merged into TsOKS (Central United Film Studio), which became the main center of film production in the country until 1944. Now Kazakh film industry veterans who worked at the studio during these years recall the dawn of national cinema and years of work with Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Romm and others.

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“The Magic Beam” is a film essay woven together from newsreels and documentary material from different decades, fragments of hundreds of non-fiction and fiction Soviet films of the 1910s-1960s.

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Documentary made for the 60th anniversary of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein.

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On August 24, 1941, a meeting of “representatives of the Jewish people” was convened.

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In 1941, a group of the Soviet Union's most prominent Jewish writers and artists, including Solomon Mikhoels, Peretz Markish, and Sergei Eisenstein, signed an appeal to Jews throughout the world, asking them to join the Soviet people in fighting against fascism.

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The story of Russian director Sergei M. Eisenstein in Mexico trying to film his unfinished ¡Que Viva Mexico! - Da zdravstvuyet Meksika! (1979).

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A German reporter visits Hollywood and is escorted through the MGM Studio by a German nobleman, who is working there as an extra. They meet and speak to several actors, primarily Buster Keaton, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford and Heinrich George. Then they meet Adolphe Menjou, who rehearses a long scene in German. A final scene shows stars arriving at a film premiere, including Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer and Wallace Beery.

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Experimental documentary focusing on a day in the life of city workers, featuring montage sequences and repetition to emphasise the monotony of routine office work.

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A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resultant public demonstration, showing support, which brought on a police massacre.

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Filmic insert to Eisenstein's modernized, free adaptation of Ostrovskiy's 19th-century Russian stage play, "The Wise Man" ("Na vsyakogo mudretsa dovolno prostoty"). The anti-hero Glumov tries to escape exposure in the midst of acrobatics, derring-do, and farcical clowning. Several members of Eisenstein's troupe at the legendary "Proletkult" stage theatre in Moscow briefly appear in this little film.

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Never completed by famed Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, the footage for his proposed feature QUÉ VIVA MÉXICO! was financed and preserved by husband-and-wife team Mary and Upton Sinclair. A series of Filmosound travelogues were constructed later by film editors William Kruse and Egon Mauthner.

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Never completed by famed Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, the footage for his proposed feature QUÉ VIVA MÉXICO! was financed and preserved by husband-and-wife team Mary and Upton Sinclair. A series of Filmosound travelogues were constructed later by film editors William Kruse and Egon Mauthner.

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Never completed by famed Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, the footage for his proposed feature QUÉ VIVA MÉXICO! was financed and preserved by husband-and-wife team Mary and Upton Sinclair. A series of Filmosound travelogues were constructed later by film editors William Kruse and Egon Mauthner.

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Never completed by famed Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, the footage for his proposed feature QUÉ VIVA MÉXICO! was financed and preserved by husband-and-wife team Mary and Upton Sinclair. A series of Filmosound travelogues were constructed later by film editors William Kruse and Egon Mauthner.

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Never completed by famed Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, the footage for his proposed feature QUÉ VIVA MÉXICO! was financed and preserved by husband-and-wife team Mary and Upton Sinclair. A series of Filmosound travelogues were constructed later by film editors William Kruse and Egon Mauthner.

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Never completed by famed Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, the footage for his proposed feature QUÉ VIVA MÉXICO! was financed and preserved by husband-and-wife team Mary and Upton Sinclair. A series of Filmosound travelogues were constructed later by film editors William Kruse and Egon Mauthner.

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Eisenstein shot 50 hours of footage on location in Mexico in 1931 and 32 for what would have become ¡Que viva México!, but was not able to finish the film. Following two wildly different reconstruction attempts in 1939 (Marie Seton's 'Time in the Sun') and 1979 (Grigori Alexandrov's '¡Que viva México!') Kovalov has here compiled another hypothetical version of what Eisenstein's film might have been.

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Having revolutionized film editing through such masterworks of montage as Potemkin and Strike, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein emigrated West in hopes of testing the capabilities of the American film industry. Quickly ostracized from Hollywood, Eisenstein, Grigory Alexandrov, and photographer Eduard Tisse (at the urging of author Upton Sinclair) wandered south of the border, where they began filming a highly stylized documentary about the people and volatile social climate of Mexico. Unfortunately, a lack of funds prohibited the film's completion, and the famed director was unable to edit the film. In 1979, by referring to Eisenstein's extensive notes and sketches, Alexandrov assembled the most definitive version of the film; as close to Eisenstein's vision as one is ever likely to see.

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Bezhin Lug (Bezhin Meadow) was to be a Soviet film about a young farm boy whose father attempts to betray the government for political reasons by sabotaging the year's harvest, and the son's efforts to stop his own father to protect the Soviet state, culminating in the boy's murder and a social uprising. Assigned to Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, the filming followed the same path as with his previous effort, "Que Viva Mexico", into cost overrun and over-shooting of footage. Furthermore, Eisenstein's usage of forbidden experimental film techniques outraged his government superiors, who ordered the film destroyed before it was even completed. All that survives are the first and last frames of each shot, preserved by Sergei Eisenstein’s wife, Pera Atasheva. The 1967 reconstruction, by Naum Kleiman of the Eisenstein Museum and Sergei Yutkevich of Gosfilmofond, places these frames in order, approximating the original film.

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This is the second part of a projected three-part epic biopic of Russian Czar Ivan Grozny, undertaken by Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein at the behest of Josef Stalin. Production of the epic was stopped before the third part could be filmed, due to producer dissatisfaction with Eisenstein's introducing forbidden experimental filming techniques into the material, more evident in this part than the first part. As it was, this second part was banned from showings until after the deaths of both Eisenstein and Stalin, and a change of attitude by the subsequent heads of the Soviet government. In this part, as Ivan the Terrible attempts to consolidate his power by establishing a personal army, his political rivals, the Russian boyars, plot to assassinate him.

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Set during the early part of his reign, Ivan faces betrayal from the aristocracy and even his closest friends as he seeks to unite the Russian people. Sergei Eisenstein's final film, this is the first part of a three-part biopic of Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, which was never completed due to the producer's dissatisfaction with Eisenstein's attempts to use forbidden experimental filming techniques and excessive cost overruns. The second part was completed but not released for a decade after Eisenstein's death and a change of heart in the USSR government toward his work; the third part was only in its earliest stage of filming when shooting was stopped altogether.

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Archive footage from Potemkin (1925), with English dialogue dubbed in by American actors, is combined with new footage to tie together the brave stand of Odessa Russian guerrilla bands of the 1940's against German forces with the similar situation of 1905 when Odessa citizens aided in the revolt against the Czar as depicted in Eisenstein's classic Potemkin (1925).

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Two siblings are given a magic flute and a magic seed as gifts. If you plant the seed in the ground, every wish comes true. But an evil wizard wants to steal the children’s magic seed.

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They met in Moscow - a shy swineherd Glasha and shepherd Musaib. Long and difficult will be their way to love and a new meeting in this classic Soviet musical comedy.

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When German knights invade Russia, Prince Alexander Nevsky must rally his people to resist the formidable force. After the Teutonic soldiers take over an eastern Russian city, Alexander stages his stand at Novgorod, where a major battle is fought on the ice of frozen Lake Chudskoe. While Alexander leads his outnumbered troops, two of their number, Vasili and Gavrilo, begin a contest of bravery to win the hand of a local maiden.

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Romance sentimentale is a 1930 French film directed by Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei M. Eisenstein. A short, experimental, slightly poetic montage of city and abstract images.

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Footage of the aftermath of the January 14 1931 earthquake in Oaxaca, Mexico.

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Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution.

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A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resultant public demonstration, showing support, which brought on a police massacre.

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Workers in a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia go on strike and are met by violent suppression.

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Filmic insert to Eisenstein's modernized, free adaptation of Ostrovskiy's 19th-century Russian stage play, "The Wise Man" ("Na vsyakogo mudretsa dovolno prostoty"). The anti-hero Glumov tries to escape exposure in the midst of acrobatics, derring-do, and farcical clowning. Several members of Eisenstein's troupe at the legendary "Proletkult" stage theatre in Moscow briefly appear in this little film.

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