History and art pieces in the film “Alexander Nevsky” by Sergei Eisenstein

Abstract

The heritage of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein nowadays is a serious subject for scientific research. In the last two decades the original articles and books of the great director “cleared” of Soviet censorship and abbreviations, have been published, and the study of existing and lost cinematic works of the master continues nowadays. The film “Alexander Nevsky” (1938) was shot under the conditions of the already existing order for the arrest of Eisenstein, but the final approval of the film by Stalin actually suspended the prosecution of the director. The problem of including images of Russian and world painting in the film frame in Eisenstein’s works is practically not studied – his films (unlike, for example, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky) can hardly be regarded as those ones with direct quotations of certain works of pictorial art. Despite this fact, Eisenstein, as it will be shown in this article, repeatedly resorted to various methods of including in his films certain artistic images borrowed from very specific paintings. It is “Alexander Nevsky” and Eisenstein’s last film “Ivan the Terrible” that are examples of cinematic works where such intersections of frame structures with the pieces of world art become especially noticeable when carefully examined. “Alexander Nevsky” is not only a “defense film”. The attempt to analyze this film from this point of view is a way to miss the entire historical, symbolic, and philosophical subtext of the film. “Alexander Nevsky” is a kind of an epic film, shot in the format of a fresco-film and containing numerous allusions not only to the events of Biblical and Russian history and hagiographic literature, but also to works of pictorial art. In the frames of the film (not so clearly at the first glance), the world of paintings by Vasily Vereshchagin and Nicholas Roerich, illustrations to the fairy tales of Ivan Bilibin comes to life again. The frame image also shows clear intersections with paintings by Caravaggio and El Greco – one of Eisenstein’s the most valued masters of fine art.