Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
and aimed at the direct excitation of the spectator, emerged again and again. In The Strike,
the workers' struggle with a foreman to blow a steam whistle becomes a calisthenic
exercise. In The Old and the New ( 1929), a woman's despairing act of flinging down a
plough transforms itself into a fierce gesture of defiance. The two-part Ivan the Terrible
( 1944, 1946) acquires its majestic pace through an instant-by-instant modulation of the
actor's movement.
Cinema was not only the next step in the development of theatre; Eisenstein considered
cinema the synthesis of all the arts. He found in the cinematic technique of montage
analogies to the juxtapositions of images in verse, to the inner monologue of Joyce's
Ulysses, to the rich 'intercutting' of action and dialogue in Dickens and Tolstoy. In The
Battleship Potemkin ( 1925) a sailor furiously smashes a plate he is washing; the
fragmentation of the action parallels him to Myron's Discus-Thrower. Eisenstein posited a
'polyphonic' montage in cinema that would interweave pictorial motifs. And the arrival of
sound technology led him to posit a 'vertical' montage between image and sound which
would create the inner unity achieved in Wagnerian music drama.
Expressive movement and montage, the cornerstones of Eisehstein's aesthetic, could find
fulfilment in cinema as in no other art. He argues that in Alexander Nevsky ( 1938)
vertical montage brings out the emotional dynamic latent in both image and musical
score, intensifying the suspenseful anticipation of Alexander's troops awaiting the
Teutonic Knights' attack. Earlier in his career, he had suggested that The
Wiseman's'montage of attractions', its assembly of perceptual 'shocks', could rouse the
audience to emotion and, eventually, reflection. Making October ( 1928), he speculated
that, like haiku poetry and Joycean stream of consciousness, the juxtapositions of shots
can create purely conceptual associations. October's most famous passage of 'intellectual
montage', the little disquisition on God and Country, uses images and titles to demonstrate
the mystification surrounding religion and patriotism. Montage, Eisenstein believed,
would allow him to make a film of Marx's Capital.
Throughout the silent era Eisenstein assumed that his aesthetic experimentation could be
harmonized with the propaganda dictates of the State. Each of his silent films begins with
an epigraph from Lenin, and each depicts a key moment in the myth of Bolshevik
ascension: the pre-revolutionary struggles ( The Strike), the 1905 revolution (Potemkin),
the Bolshevik coup ( October), and contemporary agricultural policy ( The Old and the
New). The world-wide success of Potemkin won sympathy and respect for the regime;
who could not be moved by Eisenstein's shocking portrayal of the tsarist troops
massacring innocents on the Odessa Steps? After a stay in Hollywood in 1930 and an
attempt to make an independent film in Mexico ( 1930-2), Eisenstein returned to a Soviet
Union in the grip of Stalin. The film industry was in the process of repudiating the
montage experiments of the silent era, and soon a conception of 'Socialist Realism'
became official policy. Eisenstein's teaching at the State Film Academy allowed him to
explore ways of reconciling his own interests with the new standards, but his efforts to put
his ideas into practice in Bezhin Meadow ( 1935-7) ran into opposition and the film was
halted.
He had more success with Nevsky, which coincided with Stalin's Russophilia and served
as timely propaganda against German invasion. Eisenstein won the Order of Lenin. The
first part of Ivan the Terrible also enhanced his stature. Stalin had encouraged a
'progressive' reading of certain tsars, and Eisenstein portrayed his hero as a decisive ruler
bent on unifying Russia.But the second part of the projected Ivan trilogy fell afoul of
policy-makers. Ivan, hesitating to kill his enemies, was now judged too 'Hamlet-like', and
the film was banned by the Central Committee. It is likely that this action was part of a
general reassertion of Party control of the arts, which had enjoyed considerable latitude
during the war. The attack on Ivan Part Two led Eisenstein, already in poor health, to
greater isolation. He died in 1948, under a cloud of criticism which would not be lifted for
a decade. Ironically, his films and writings were far more visible in the west than in the
USSR, and, although his reputation has undergone periodic reappraisals, he has remained
the most celebrated and influential representative of Soviet film culture.DAVID
BORDWELLSELECT FILMOGRAPHY Stachka (The Strike) ( 1925); Bronenosets
'Potemkin' (The Battleship Potemkin) ( 1925); Oktyabr (October / Ten Days that Shook
the World) ( 1928); Staroe i novoe (The Old and the New); Generalnaya Liniya ('The
general line') ( 1929). Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) ( 1935-7); Alexander Nevsky ( 1938);
Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) Part I ( 1944); Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) Part II
( 1946)
A scene from Bezhin Meadow ( 1935-7). The film itself is lost, and all that survive are a
couple of frames of each shot
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bordwell, David ( 1993), The Cinema of Eisenstein.
Eisenstein, Sergei ( 1949). Film Form: Essays in Film Theory.
--- ( 1992), Towards a Theory of Montage.
--- ( 1988), Writings, 1922-34.
Leyda, Jay, and Voynow, Zina (eds.) ( 1982), Eisenstein at Work.
Nizhny, Vladimir ( 1962), Lessons with Eisenstein.
Seton, Marie ( 1952), Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography
Yiddish Cinema in Europe
MAREK AND MALGORZATA HENDRYKOWSKI
No panorama of early European cinema can be complete without mention of the unique
phenomenon of the transnational Yiddish cinema, which flourished in eastern and central
Europe throughout the silent period and into the 1930s. This Yiddish cinema derived from
the extra-territorial tradition of European Jewish culture and literature rooted in the
Yiddish language. Yiddish is a language of exceptional expressiveness, highly developed
idiom, and rich vocabulary, which by the turn of the century had become the mother
tongue of over 10 million Jews, living mostly in central and eastern Europe but also as
part of the Jewish diaspora in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere in the
New World.
THE YIDDISH CULTURAL TRADITION
Throughout eastern and central Europe Yiddish had a full-fledged literature, comparable
with other European national literatures. Alongside élite works aspiring to the rank of
canonical literature, more popular prose was also printed in instalments in cheap pamphlet
form. Leading representatives of Yiddish literature at the turn of the century include
Avrom Goldfadn, father of the Jewish theatre, Yankev Gordin, An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvil
Rapoport), Yitskhok Leyb Perets, Sholem Ash, Yoysef Opatoshu (Yoysef Meyer
Opatovski), and Sholem Aleykhem (Sholem Rabinowicz), and it was often to the works
of these authors that the nascent Yiddish cinema turned for inspiration in the 1910s and
1920s.
Yiddish cinema has its roots in Jewish drama and theatre of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, stemming from the tradition of the Purim-Shpil and incorporating
elements of the so-called 'shundroman' or popular fiction. It was in 1892 that the actress
Ester Rokhl Kaminska, 'the Jewish Eleonora Duse', first appeared in the Eldorado theatre
in Warsaw. By 1911 three Jewish theatres were open in that city: Kaminski's Literary
Troupe at the Dynasy, the Elizeum, and the Orion, while the famous Vilner troupe was
started in Vilna (now Vilnius) by Mordkhe Mazo in 1916. In 1918, on the other side of the
Atlantic, Yankev (Jacob) Ben-Ami, together with Moris Shvarts, founded the even more
famous Yiddish Arts Theatre in New York.
The Yiddish theatrical repertory consisted of biblical tales, eastern European legends, and
Jewish folk customs. Scenes generating a religious aura were often interwoven with
dances and songs. Their changing atmosphere betrayed a permanent sense of dread, and
combined drama and tragedy with tearful, melodramatic scenes and a devastating wit that
triggered off contagious laughter. The performances owed their unique character and
expressiveness to their (sometimes satirical) borrowing from Hasidic tradition, and
Yiddish theatrical plays and films cannot be fully understood without reference to eastern
European Hasidism, with its own specific brand of mysticism and philosophy, and
recurrent interest in themes of individual Romantic rebellion of the individual and the
conflict of tradition and assimilation.
SILENT FILM
From the outset Yiddish films enjoyed considerable popularity not only with Jewish
audiences but among spectators of other nationalities in search of the exotic. They were
made in Poland, Russia, Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. In Russia they
were produced by the S. Mintus Company in Riga ( Latvia), the Mizrakh and Mirograf
Company in Odessa, and by the Kharitonov, Khanzhonkov, and Pathé production
companies in Moscow, and elsewhere. But the majority originated from Poland, whose
Jews, characterized by a particularly strong feeling of their own national identity,
accounted for some 10 per cent of the population. In the early years of this century, more
than 80 per cent of the more than 400,000strong Jewish population of Warsaw spoke and
read Yiddish.
In Poland the main centre of Yiddish film production was Warsaw, where the first
production company, Sila, was founded by Mordkhe (Mordka) Towbin. Among the films
produced by Sila before the outbreak of the First World War were four adapted from plays
by leading Yiddish playwright Yankev (Jacob) Gordin, starting in 1911 with Der vilder
Foter (The Cruel Father) with Herman Sieracki in the title-role and Zina Goldshteyn in
the role of the daughter. Sila also engaged the services of members of the theatrical
Kaminski family. Avrom Yitskhok Kaminski directed Destitute Murder ( 1911) and the
mystical drama God, Man and Devil ( 1912), while Mirele Efros ( 1912), directed by
Andrzej Marek (Marek Arnshteyn or Orenshteyn), starred both Ester Rokhl Kaminska
and Ida Kaminska, who made her début in the role of the boy Shloymele.
In 1913 a dynamic new Yiddish film enterprise called Kosmofilm was founded in Warsaw
by Shmuel Ginzberg and Henryk Finkelstein. In 1913-14 Kosmofilm produced screenings
of further plays by Gordin: Der Umbakanter (Love and Death or A Stranger), Gots Shtrof
(God's Punishment), Dem Khagzns Tokhter (The Cantor's Daughter), and Di Shkhite, and
a new version of Di Shtifmuter (The Stepmother), already filmed by Sila a couple of
years earlier. The last film to be made by Kosmofilm with captions in Yiddish before the
German invasion of Warsaw on 5 August 1915 was Di farshtoysene Tokhter (The
Repudiated Daughter), based on the play by Avrom Goldfadn, with the participation of
Ester Rokhl Kaminska.
Jewish themes also attracted the attention of filmmakers in Germany before and during
the First World War. Shylock von Krakau (Kol Nidre, 1913) was based on the novella by
Felix Salten, directed by Carl Wilhelm, and designed by Hermann Warm, with the well-
known actor Rudolf Schildkraut in the title-role, and Der gelbe Schein (The Yellow
Ticket, 1918) was filmed for Ufa in occupied Warsaw by Victor Janson, with Polish
actress Pola Negri in the main role.
Indigenous production revived after the war. Three outstanding Yiddish films made in
Poland in the 1920s were: Tkies Kaf (The Oath, 1924), directed by Zygmunt Turkow; Der
Lamedvovnik (One of the Thirty-six, 1925) by Henryk Szaro; and In Poylishe Velder (In
Polish Woods, 1929), directed by Jonas Turkow, an adaptation of Yoysef Opatoshu's
bestselling novel of the same title, with both Polish and Jewish actors playing the roles.
Like The Oath, this film addressed the fundamental question of Jewish assimilation in
nineteenth-century Poland and participation alongside the Poles in the January Uprising
of 1863 against Russia. Yiddish films continued to be made in the USSR. Yidishe Glikn
(Jewish Luck, 1925), by Alexander Granovski, was based on the famous Menakhem-
Mendl story-cycle by Sholem Aleykhem, and was made with the participation of actors
from the Habima Theatre and the great Soviet Yiddish actor Shloyme Mikhoels.