BACKSTORY: Sergei Eisenstein’s continuing legacy – Orwell to The Hobbit

Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein’s iconic but unfinished film Que Viva Mexico features captivating footage of the Mexican holiday called Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), when the deceased are honoured in public fiestas.

In a carnival of masked skeletons, macabre dances are performed with vampires in a state of trance, Lucifer waltzes with young maidens and the Archangel tangos with risen apparitions dressed in bowler hats and white bow ties. The children eat sugar skulls and candy marigolds, “the flowers of death” in Mexican folklore. The black and white images of the festival of the dead convey a visual current of seduction where pleasure and death intersect. Eisenstein succeeds in giving visual expression to Gustave Flaubert’s reveries in Temptation of Saint Antony, where “Death sniggers, Lust roars. They take each other by the waist and together sing.”

These images provide the “material” for the magnificent tableau of the opening scene of Sam Mendes’ latest James Bond film, Spectre, which takes place during the Day of the Dead in Mexico City. Agent 007, wearing a death mask, naturally accompanied by a ravishingly beautiful lady and on a deadly mission, successfully resists the temptation of Eros and decides that, after all, business comes before pleasure on the Day of the Dead. But on the streets, the revelries of the departed beloved are pure Eisenstein in colour.

Eisenstein was Stalin’s favourite cinematographer, and on the eve of World War II, the two agreed to make an eponymous movie about Alexander Nevsky, the revered Muscovite hero who crushed the invading Teutonic Iron Knights on the frozen Lake Peipus in 1242. In the movie’s epic Battle of the Ice scene, set to music by Prokofiev, the German knights, resembling Tolkien’s warmongers, wear bucket helmets with slits in the form of a cross for their eyes, while their leaders have even more outlandish helmets, with stag’s horns or eagle wings and claws on either side.

The clash of steel and flesh in the gigantic Battle of the Ice is brilliantly choreographed  – clearly influenced by Uccello’s Battle of San Romano – and continues to resonate in the works of many famous directors ranging from Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight to Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. But it is the special effects in the final scene of Alexander Nevsky where the thin ice on the lake gives way beneath the heavy weight of Teutonic armour under a soulless iron sky – a scene digitally replicated in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies – that we appreciate the scope of Eisenstein’s reach beyond the grave in fermenting the imagination of the greatest film makers of our time.

In the penultimate scene of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the Dwarf King Thorin confronts the evil Orc Azog on an icy lake on the edge of a frozen waterfall in the mountain lair of the Dark Forces. Azog swings his chain-bound boulder to flay the Good King but with every missed stroke landing with a devastating thud on the ice, the frosty surface beneath the monster’s feet is weakened. Eventually, the frozen lake starts cracking slowly and Azog, like the Teutonic Knights, is slowly swallowed by icy swirls.

According to his biographer, Ronald Bergan, Eisenstein was “not only the most imaginative practitioner of his art but also its principal theorist.” The appeal of his iconic films featuring the revolutionary application of the concept of “dynamic montage” endures 67 years after his death. From his celebrated movie The Battleship Potemkin with its unforgettable Odessa Steps sequence, to the Muscovite splendours of Ivan the Terrible; from his visual symphony Que Viva Mexico to Alexander Nevsky’s special effects, his films are still watched, his visual concepts are emulated and reconfigured by many gifted directors who are inspired by his imagination without borders.

Eisenstein was one of the towering Jewish minds of global cinematography. His epitaph is projected on thousands of silver screens the world over to this day.