Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Coming Attractions

Abstract

1. This brief and summary account, occasioned by a centenary celebration, of some aspects of recent Eisenstein reception in both East and West will offer something of a cautionary tale, as might be inferred from its title. Attractions are, in any case, here understood not in a specifically Eisensteinian sense, but as in the terminology of American film marketing and its deployment of the trailer, the announcement of future programming. One cannot, of course, ignore the status of Eisenstein as a privileged site of post-Soviet iconoclasm, but I shall go on to consider a rather more recent and exotic effort at reintegration within the shifting canon of cultural production and its theorization in the West. My epigraph for these reflections is that adopted for the celebration, ten years ago, of the ninetieth anniversary of Eisenstein's birth. I begin, however, with some recall of the earlier stages of the iconoclastic movement that was then gathering strength within the period of glasnost', a movement directed, as we know, at many aspects of what one might well term the Culture of Revolution. This current was, however, particularly aggressive in its assault upon the resonantly innovative Soviet cinema of a privileged decade, upon the heroic era of film history of roughly 1924-33. One recalls, as an especially salient example, the Festival of Totalitarian Film, organized by the film historian Maya Turovskaya in 1989 as a kind of side show to Moscow's Biennial Film Festival of the early glasnost' era. And, like others, no doubt, over time I had compiled my own little anthology of antiEisenstein texts that antedate glasnost'by some years.1 I offer now, however, an account by the late Nestor Almendros, cameraman and man of the Left, of his meeting during the early days of glasnost' with a group of Soviet filmmakers who