The Big Screen (15 page)

There were meetings, and Sinclair helped get extensions on the Russian visas. A contract was made, with Sinclair's wife, Craig, acting for her husband. She would advance $25,000 for a four-month shoot in Mexico. The Sinclairs would control U.S. distribution, but the film would be free for use in the Soviet Union. Sergei was set to get 10 percent of any profits after the investment had been recovered. The movie-to-be was described in the contract: “a picture according to his own ideas of what a Mexican picture should be, and in full faith in Eisenstein's artistic integrity, and in consideration of his promise that the picture will be non-political, and worthy of his reputation and genius.”

But if the film was to be “non-political,” where could its genius go? Into picturesque travelogue? Eisenstein and Tisse were in Mexico by December 5, 1930. They went to a bullfight; they observed earthquakes. They were arrested for having the wrong papers. They aroused suspicions among peasants who believed the camera could see through women's clothes. And gradually Eisenstein's eye became captivated by the sights of Mexico. A script emerged and it is clearly a list of things seen:

As you might imagine, the shooting expanded with every fresh piece of exotica they saw. Eisenstein would not quit Mexico until February 1932! He fired cables back to the Sinclairs asking for more money. He sent bits of footage that they found striking but incoherent. In the end, over $90,000 went into the project. As Sinclair grew more anxious, he wrote to Stalin, asking for advice. The answer came back, grim and misspelled (in November 1931):

Eisenstein tried to return to the United States, but by April 1932 he and Tisse were on the boat back to Russia. Upton Sinclair looked at the footage and asked Sol Lesser to attempt to edit it. Lesser had just acquired the screen rights to the Tarzan character, but he did what he could to achieve
Thunder over Mexico
, a film cut from the Russians' material, but organized without their input. It opened in Los Angeles in March 1933, picketed by local Communists who claimed Sinclair was interfering with the purity of Eisenstein's work. In 1940 the scholar Marie Seton re-cut it as
Que Viva Mexico!
, but Eisenstein would never deliver his own vision of the material.

Nearly every shot in
Que Viva Mexico!
is a knockout, yet the film is no more than an assembly of sumptuous, lurid, and often cruel still photographs. Does it say anything useful about Mexico? Well, yes, but it also testifies to visitors being attracted by the sunshine, the dust, and the savage iconography of an unfamiliar culture. Years later Eisenstein admitted it was a catastrophe.

The Soviet Union lived up to his gloomiest expectations. Any revolutionary enthusiasm had passed. An All-Union State Institute of Cinematography had been placed over all production, and its boss was Boris Shumyatsky, who would become a stifling influence in Eisenstein's life. The Party was by then afraid of films, so it controlled everything and ensured a drastic reduction in the number of Soviet films being made. In the years from 1935 to 1937, Soviet Union production dropped into the forties, and then to twenty-four films a year. Couple that with the restrictions on foreign movies coming into the country and you can see how, in this most severe period, “entertainment” was hardly recognized. Lenin's notion of film's importance had been reduced almost completely to propaganda.

Eisenstein was in disgrace as terror mounted in Moscow. Projects were considered—notably a documentary on the history of Moscow—but nothing materialized. So he taught and wrote more articles, though it was evident now that he was not free to leave the country. Then, in late 1935, he was allowed to develop a script for
Bezhin Meadow
(taken from Turgenev) with Isaac Babel as a cowriter. Shumyatsky allowed this picture to proceed. Shooting started in 1936. But in the spring of 1937 it was stopped, and Eisenstein felt the necessity to publish an article admitting “The Errors of
Bezhin Meadow
.” A year later Shumyatsky himself was put before a firing squad.

The intrigue was dense and paranoid, but in 1937–38 Eisenstein was permitted to develop what would become
Alexander Nevsky
, a spectacular historical epic, beautifully shot, with a score by Prokofiev, yet almost without thematic interest. It was a picture that summoned a spirit of Russian patriotism and military solidarity, and it opened in November 1938. The Party approved of it. The public liked it. It is a statuesque, inspirational, but heavy-handed version of something like the Errol Flynn
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(1936), and as historically preposterous, but without the romanticism that made Flynn and his director, Raoul Walsh, such a team. In 1939, Eisenstein was awarded the Order of Lenin.

He seemed to be rehabilitated. But the purges were endless. In 1940, both Meyerhold, Eisenstein's former mentor, and Isaac Babel were shot. More than 680,000 people were tortured and killed. There was a film project on the Ferghana Canal, in Uzbekistan, but that was interrupted so that Eisenstein could hurry back to Moscow to direct
Die Walküre
at the Bolshoi Theatre as a concession to the cynical, short-lived pact with Germany signed in 1939.

Once the Soviet Union joined the war with Germany, in October 1941, the Moscow film studios were moved to Alma-Ata, beyond Tashkent, near the China border. It was there in 1943 that Eisenstein began to shoot
Ivan the Terrible
, his first concerted film with actors, and with Nikolai Cherkasov (his Nevsky) as Tsar Ivan IV. The patriotic need of the moment seemed to liberate the venture, and for Eisenstein there was clear progress. Here, at last, he was making a developed story about a few people, albeit lofty figures very crudely caricatured. Was he trying to take on some vestiges of dramatic realism?

But this was only the first part of
Ivan
. In 1945–46 he shot
Part II
, with its gaudy color sequences. It was only after he had cut that film that he suffered a serious heart attack, in February 1946. But then, as he recovered, he learned that the Party was uneasy with
Part II
and suspicious that the looming figure of Ivan had been used to make a baleful portrait of Stalin. So
Part II
was never released in Sergei's lifetime. He died on February 11, 1948, only a few days past fifty. His last months had been spent in hiatus, resting as best he could and writing the autobiography that would be called
Immoral Memories
.

With “Immoral” he didn't seek to trade on the regular meaning of that word, though there are stories that his homosexual life was unrestrained, like his taste for pornography. What he meant was that his memoirs “will not moralize. They will not set themselves any moral aims nor preach any sermons. They will not prove anything. Not explain anything. Not teach anything.”

That sounds surprising coming from a man who could be so didactic and doctrinaire. Was there a complete confusion in Eisenstein or was he changing? Why be unduly frightened by complete confusion? He insisted that he did not understand himself very well, but “life had passed at a gallop, without a backward glance, in constant transit, leaving one train to chase after another. My attention riveted all the time to the second hand.”

If only all his films had been as open and momentary. His memoir is less a book than notes toward a book, full of life and his anguish at the thought of quitting life, and it may be the first essential book written by a filmmaker. Today, Eisenstein doesn't mean as much as he meant in the years just after his death. His influence is hard to find. But the model of an untidy life, and his pioneering of the director as helpless outcast—those things survive, along with his smile and that corona of hair. We love the man.

“Leaving one train to chase after another!” Surely when Sergei went from New York to Los Angeles he took the Twentieth Century Limited, that brimming metaphor for smart America in the Depression. And surely Eisenstein was enough of a constructivist still to love trains, the sounds of the wheels and the thrill of such rapid alteration. Didn't he enjoy the people on the ship who had wagered on knots? On a train, you can bet on how closely the schedule will be met, or how many impassive Indians you'll see on the range watching the train go by, or settle into a three-day poker game with the blinds down. On a train, life becomes the dream of tracking shots.

Transportation is a minor key to the movies. Do you recall the
Europa
, the German liner that carried Eisenstein across the Atlantic? Here it comes again, as ready to serve state cinema as glamorous careers, as ready to be a vehicle of destiny as a ship of fools. In 1938 another film person took the same
Europa
across the sea, with three prints of her latest movie, a small entourage, and seventeen pieces of luggage. She was booked as “Lotte Richter,” but her real name was Leni Riefenstahl, and we are not supposed to love her.

Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin in 1902. There would be rumors that on her mother's side there was Jewish blood—Hitler officially denied it, but Goebbels (who never liked her) encouraged the dirty thought. Devoted to her parents, she was regarded as solitary and a dreamer. She wrote poetry, about nature more than human nature, and she was ambitious to be a dancer. There was something odd in her eyes (it never left her), but she was somewhere between pretty and handsome, and she had a good body, which she was prepared to display (topless) in some early film roles, notably
Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit
(1925), which translates as
Ways to Strength and Beauty
. It was a film meant to endorse health, exercise, and anything else you had in mind. A knee injury curtailed her dreams of dance, but she was still excited to be an athletic figure on the screen. And so she met Dr. Arnold Fanck, a man against the grain of German cinema in the 1920s in that he made open-air mountain films thrilling to the spirit and purity of the heights, and often finding a beautiful maiden up the mountain.

Fanck discovered Leni, trained her, made a star of her, and took her as his lover. Leni never flinched from any request. Thus, by 1931, she had appeared in
The Holy Mountain
(1926),
The Great Leap
(1927),
The White Hell of Pitz Palu
(1929),
Storms over Mont Blanc
(1930), and
The White Rapture
(1931). But she wanted more, and she studied Dr. Fanck more closely than he appreciated. She saw that he was making films about the mountain, whereas she would concentrate on the girl. Despite Fanck's objections, and enlisting men as significant as Béla Balázs and Carl Mayer (from
Sunrise
) to do the writing for her, she proceeded to star in and direct
The Blue Light
(1932), where she plays Junta, a mountain girl who knows the secret of the light on top of the mountain. Is this meteorology, physics, or magic? Or might it be revelation? It is one more film about light and the grace wherever it falls.

The Blue Light
premiered on March 24, 1932, in Berlin, at the prestigious Ufa-Palast am Zoo. Many people went to see it, including Hitler, who took it upon himself to meet Riefenstahl and tell her that as and when he came to power (not long now), “You must make my films.” Maybe he said that to a lot of pretty women (as well as to Lang), but the competition among female directors was not great.

Hitler meant what he promised. Once he was chancellor, he proposed a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and told Goebbels that Riefenstahl was to direct the film of it. Her biographer Steven Bach established that Goebbels never passed that message on: he was jealous of his own authority and may have been disconcerted by the idea of a woman director. So Leni heard of the decision only at the last minute, leaving the hour-long
Sieg des Glaubens
(
Victory of the Faith
, 1933) to suffer from haste. “In the end,” writes Bach, “
Victory of Faith
was more than a sketch but less than a portrait. Still, it was something new, a tentative joining of fiction and reality techniques in a trial run whose importance lay less in what it accomplished than in what it anticipated.” Hitler was so pleased he gave Leni a Mercedes convertible.