Shorter Notices
Sergei M. Eisenstein. By Marie Seton. (Bodley Head. 35s.) AFTER the Russian Revolution, Eisenstein started to make films and edit them with the idea that the joined lengths of shot should be "in collision" instead of being links in a chain of story-telling. Here were two opportunities for the journalists and com- mentators—films from the new Soviet Russia and the new theory of montage: such excellent "copy" made Eisenstein an
ephemeral world celebrity. Initially, mon- tage achieved a tremendous visual stimulus;
but repetition revealed the formula; and Eisenstein outlived his sensational success. Yet behind yesterday's publicity there is the story of a man, and Miss Seton has told this story with astonishing detail and care in over 500 pages.
Sergei Eisenstein's bourgeois parents were strained in their relations; the child felt a need for emotional security. He grew into a young student who imagined himself a caricature with too large head and too .short legs. Then his studies were inter- rupted by the Revolution, and the "clown" joined in the fight against the old regime for the sake of being taken seriously as a "comrade." He revenged himself on his parents' world—the world that had betrayed the child. After the fighting, Eisenstein wanted to return to the university; but instead he worked for the Proletkult Theatre as a way of getting a permit for a room in overcrowded Moscow. He had a talent for costume-design, and he was still in sympathy with the currently fashionable wish to smash the old forms. Shock tactics in the theatre were particularly suited to this ideology and to audiences who could not be held by subtleties. Moreover, • curtains and intervals belonged to the days when the audience itself was a second show —a fashion show; but now a continuous performance had to be kept in animation. Any trick, from the circus or music-hall, was introduced into a play to give the audience a jolt; and Eisenstein learnt his technique of conditioning by shock, an approach to the collision-montage of his films. Ironically, it was this technique for the new peasant audiences which dazzled the intellectuals. Later, ' when Eisenstein found he could not progress from shock tactics to human content, he turned to increasingly pretentious theories, out-theo- rising all the commentators of the little magazines. First, one feels, his theories were meant to explain his own inflated acclaim to himself; and then they seem to have become part of a desperate attempt to save all that he had tried to destroy in his youthful revolt. He wanted, he said, to store memories of all the bourgeois arts in films, and he even tried to keep alive the continuity of religious rites which he had mocked. Long before his death in 1948, the theorist Wad fallen from Authority's favour.
Miss Seton makes it all oddly moving. The sadistic outbursts which took the form of jokes, the indifference to the unex- pectedly responsible criticism from superiors and other ungracious aspects are explained by the tragedy of the anomalous and frustrated personal life. As a close friend of Eisenstein, the author does not always give the stress the reader may feel, but she does give the facts' from which the stress
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