It’s quite shocking to see on a page dedicated to directors of a movie website no mention of the great Sergei Eisenstien so I shall start one here. The Russian genius has made quite a few great works of cinema. Mainly ‘Battleship Potemkin’, ‘October’ and ‘Strike’. I have yet to see his two ‘Ivan The Terrible’ films but if they are any good as ‘Alexander Nevsky’ then they should be worth buying.ÂÂ
The battle scenes in ‘Nevsky’ are second to none and Prokofiev’s music is as good as Eric Korngold’s score for ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’. Whether one is a communist or not it does not matter for Sergei’s films are stirring stuff. One of the greatest moments in cinema has to be the raising of the bridge in ‘October’. It even surpasses the ‘Odessa Steps’ sequence in ‘Battleship Potemkin’.
Sergei, as well as being a filmmaker and theorist was also a cartoonist, albeit he did quite a few obscene ones.
[size=80]Incidentally ‘associative montage’ (thought to have been pioneered by Pudovkin) was not a Russian invention. It was first used in a British film of 1917. [/size]
I’ve seen Battelship Potemkin which poses one of the best sequences in cinema history of course we all know: The Odessa Steps. Eistentein created the jump cut seauneces. I also saw Ivan the terrible which is fucking brilliiant.
Limited circulation of his movies makes him obscure in the States. Alexander Nevsky is one of my top ten films of all time. I would love to see a remake of this, shot on Russian soil with a restored soundtrack.
being a film student I hear and read about him all the time. i haven’t looked much into his stuff, but Battleship Potjemkin was impressive.
Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible are all I have to judge him on! Ivan was kinda slow and soap opera-ish! I think I caught half or so of the flick he shot in South America. Been along time!
preferred man with a movie camera to potempkin. German expressionism is much more enjoyable than any of the russian formalism stuff. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Faust are top notch.