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Posts tagged ‘Thomas J. Brandon’
February 15, 2011  |  An Auteurist History of Film
Sergei Eistenstein’s Bezhin Meadow and Alexander Nevsky

Alexander Nevsky. 1938. USSR. Written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein

Alexander Nevsky. 1938. USSR. Written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein

These notes accompany the screenings of Sergei Eisenstein’s </i>Bezhin Meadow and Alexander Nevsky</a> on February 16, 17, and 18 in Theater 3.</p>

Sergei Eisenstein was born in 1898 and died, at the age of 50, 63 years ago last week. By the age of 30 he was world-renowned for his theory of montage, as applied to his youthful masterpieces Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October (Ten Days That Shook the World). These films found heroics in collectives (among workers, sailors, or, in the case of his 1929 Old and New, farmers) and in stick-figure commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolutionaries. In 1930, he was invited to come to Hollywood by Paramount Pictures, and during his time there he pursued several aborted projects, including a film version of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (which was finally made in 1931 by Josef von Sternberg, vacationing from Marlene Dietrich). To delay returning to Russia, Eisenstein persuaded Upton Sinclair and his wife to finance the intended epic Que Viva Mexico!