Educational Media Reviews Online

It's hard to imagine a film more significant, more fascinating, and more exasperating all at the same time than Eisenstein: The Master's House, a documentary film about the great Soviet director Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein. Significant, because the film recounts in broad outline the life and works of perhaps the most influential, the most seminal filmmaker in the history of the cinema -- the creator, at the beginning of his career, of The Battleship Potempkin and, toward the end, of Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II. What student of the subject has not seen endless times and heard endless discussions about the Odessa steps sequence from Potempkin as an example of film montage at its most masterful?

Fascinating, because the filmmakers have assembled from various sources precious, rare stills and film footage to tell their story. Included are images of Eisenstein's mother and father, childhood photographs of the master at play, and, perhaps most moving of all, footage of the mature Eisenstein in various impromptu situations. So we are able to observe the director playing tourist in Berlin and Paris; in Hollywood meeting Hollywood greats -- Chaplin, Disney, etc.; behind the camera filming in Mexico; speaking sympathetically about America to a Russian audience during World War II; standing somberly before the open coffin of the great Soviet Jewish actor, Shlomo Michoels, murdered on Stalin's orders (the narration telling us that Eisenstein, who himself often ran afoul of the paranoid dictator, said to a friend at the time, "I'm next"); directing a play; in multiple takes, acting himself in a documentary film. Indeed, to see the tragic master breaking out in infectious laughter after two of the takes is itself worth the price of admission. We are also treated to a selection of Eisenstein's brilliant graphics -- storyboards, stage and movie sets, and darkly surrealist drawings for his unfinished Mexican film. The Eisenstein story in its entirety, though, follows a tragic arc, as his romantic aesthetic finds little favor with the Soviet overseers, who insist on a crudely propagandistic socialist realism as the only acceptable modus. And, though he escaped execution and exile -- some say narrowly -- he literally worked himself to death, dying in 1948 at age fifty and looking on his deathbed more like seventy.

Why then exasperating? Because, though the film is interestingly structured -- dividing as it does the narrative into sections titled after various Eisenstein dwellings, locales, and experiences (Papa's House, Mama's House, the Teacher's House, The Master's House, Grand Hotel, etc.) -- we are subjected to a voice over narrator (German- speaking, English subtitles) whose tone and words, more often than not, might best be described as inappropriately mock ironic. What's more, though we do see memorable footage of every sort, including footage from the Eisenstein masterpieces, the film is also fleshed out by gratuitous, unreferenced footage coming from all kinds of sources. As a consequence we do not know whether we are watching the real thing, some re-enactment of the real thing, feature footage from Eisenstein's films or from some other director (Fritz Lang? von Sternberg? is that Harold Lloyd we're seeing? why Harold Lloyd at this point in the film?), or whatever. (At one point the narrative is supported by scenes of what look like insects playing house in an insect-sized drawing room and having a domestic squabble -- the unusual images are never credited.) The upshot of all this is, to say the least, disconcerting in a film that for all its absorbing content is a truly indispensable work, to be minimally included in any film library, but that is also, alas, somewhat flawed in its seemingly misdirected ambitiousness.

Highly recommended