Eisenstein's House
“Cinema comes to life where the collision between different cinematic measures of movement and vibration begins.”
Sergei Eisenstein
Virtual Reality
Eisenstein‘s small flat in a building owned by the film studio Mosfilm was more than just a place to live. Here he prepared his film productions and lectures for the Film Institute. The apartment itself resembles an installation by Eisenstein: it was a laboratory of art and science. Here he wrote, painted and investigated the laws of art, the psychology of creation and perception. The Eisenstein apartment was a place of living history. His collections contained objects from diverse cultures and historical periods. For the first time, our virtual reconstruction grants access to this unique space. Visually it combines realism and abstraction. Each object tells a story and leads us into Eisenstein’s world. The apartment becomes a portrait of Eisenstein’s mind.
3D Sound
Eisenstein’s montage theory and experiments with sound film convey
his courageous and free way of thinking.For his film “The General Line” he had created a system of sounds in film. One of its elements is the use of the world’s first electronic instrument – the Theremin. Eisenstein’s love of experiments and his idea of sound montage inspired our sound research. Most probably, Eisenstein meant to use the Theremin for a scene in the end of “The General Line”. We have developed a Virtual Theremin. Playing it you will be able to accompany this scene.
Infovis
The life of Sergei Eisenstein can be considered along the many film projects he pursued, the various people he met and worked with, and the places he visited seldom or often. The Infovis experience provides overviews and insights in three distinct views: Spiral, Network and Timelines. Each view provides the audience with a different perspective on Eisenstein’s life highlighting some aspects from the vast universe of his professional and personal events.
Objects and their stories
A selection of objects from Sergei Eisenstein’s apartment.
Each one is connected to an aspect of his life.
The object’s stories reflect his personal, artistic and intellectual world.
About the project
This project grew out of a series of wonderful encounters – with Naum and Vera Kleiman, Katrin Springer, Anna Luise Kiss, in 2020 with our remarkable team and, many times over, with Sergei Eisenstein.
In December 2009, I met Naum Kleiman and visited Eisenstein’s flat for the first time. Back then I wrote down my impressions: In the centre of Moscow, between McDonald’s and a monstrous skyscraper whose façade glows with rainbow-coloured lights, a dark gateway leads to grey apartment buildings. There is no sign on the door pointing the way. It is an address only known to insiders: the flat of one of the founding fathers of cinema. There is a shabby stairwell. On the second floor, Naum Kleiman opens the door. From one second to the next, I’m thrown back to the year 1935. Books, notes, and sketches for Eisenstein’s films, pictures, Mexican rugs and Japanese theatre masks cover the walls from the ceiling to the floor. The table is set between Bauhaus chairs. It seems as if Sergei Eisenstein is about to walk out of the kitchen. Over the past 40 years, filmmakers from all over the world have written entries in the guestbook: Douglas Sirk and Claude Chabrol, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff.
We sat on Eisenstein’s chairs and drank tea, and the outside world receded into the distance. We talked late into the night about film, society, Russia and, it seemed, about a cultural history spanning the entire globe.” This encounter resulted in Film Cinema: A Public Affair, which I made together with Katrin Springer as the producer. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2015. We feared that the Eisenstein flat might be closed down, just like the Moscow Film Museum. I had shot a lot of material there which I hadn’t used, and I wondered how I might best take advantage of it. Katrin and I developed an idea that seemed completely crazy back then: to recreate the flat in VR using my film footage and to link it to a website about Sergei Eisenstein. But initially, we lacked funding and partners for the project. In 2018, Eisenstein’s flat really did close down. A universe disappeared.
Our meeting with Anna Luise Kiss unexpectedly opened a new door: The Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF joined us as a partner. This is how the concept for the Collisions research project was created. Thanks to funding from EFRE, we were able to start work in May 2020.
It was strange that this project began during the extreme conditions of the pandemic. Suddenly, for many of us the outside world receded into the distance. That is why we are all the happier that our project provides a way for people all over the world, hopefully in the near future, to visit Eisenstein’s flat virtually. A wide variety of discoveries await them there: about film, society, Russia and, perhaps, a cultural history spanning the entire globe.
Tatiana Brandrup
When I started studying at the VGIK Film Institute in 1956, the only film of Eisenstein’s I knew was Alexander Nevski. I had watched it when I was still at school, as it was shown every year and was on permanent release. But I can’t say that it was my favourite movie. We saw it as a historical film. In the summer of 1958, between my second and third years of study, I saw the second part of the film Ivan the Terrible. This part had been banned by Stalin in 1946. It was only in 1958 during Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ that it was approved for general release. It impressed me very much. None of the usual cinematography rules were evident in the film, and some things seemed flawed. But still, I just couldn’t believe that this film had been made under Stalin. After the screening, I sat outside on the bench and felt something like having had my first kiss. I don’t know what I could compare it to – but it was a feeling of utter rapture. I bought another ticket and watched the film for a second time. That was in Kishinev in August during my holidays.
In September I returned to film school and told my teachers that I didn’t just want to write a paper, but make a film with my fellow camera students – a film based on drawings and memories about how Eisenstein shot Ivan the Terrible. The head of the film history library, Ms Gita Averbuch, asked me: “Why don’t you approach Eisenstein’s widow?” I didn’t know about his widow or that it was possible to approach her. I was very surprised. The librarian called her while I was standing there. She said: “Pera, there is a student here who is interested in Eisenstein. Can he visit you?” She replied that we could visit her on Saturday. A fellow student of mine at the VGIK was Eduard Timlin from Kiev. He was studying to be a cameraman. The camera students were given tasks (known as ‘études’), such as setting up lighting to take photos of pictures and drawings.
My heart was pounding when we arrived. I thought: “This is the widow of the famous director” and expected to meet a ‘grande dame’. A little old woman, Pera Atascheva-Fogelman, opened the door. At the time, she seemed very old to me. She was actually only 58 but was very ill. That’s why she had aged fast. Her flat was tiny and crammed full of things. She asked if we were hungry and invited us to eat with her – she had made meat with plums. That was it! We sat down to eat and Pera asked: “So, you want to see some drawings? Please go over to the shelves and there, on the second shelf, there are some sketches for Ivan. The drawings are in the blue file – the film sets for Ivan the Terrible.” When we looked at these drawings, my hands began to tremble.
Then she began to tell us that she was preparing some writings by Eisenstein for publication. She told us about a book he had written that was still unpublished called Non-Indifferent Nature which contained many important chapters on Ivan, for example, and on audiovisual counterpoint. On our second visit, Pera gave me the manuscript and I started reading. Even back then I understood that I would never leave that place. She could only see very poorly because of her diabetes and needed urgent help. But she could read Eisenstein’s handwriting very well. It was particularly important that her English was very good, and she understood French and some German, because Eisenstein wrote his books, articles and notes in four languages. Together we began to organise his handwritten manuscripts. The book Montage slowly materialised before our eyes. And The Method too — no one knew that it existed. The different parts came together in our hands. It meant that a completely different Eisenstein emerged, one we had not encountered in film school because even our teachers did not know this side of him. During my third and fourth years of study, whenever I had time, I visited Pera Atascheva.
Pera was very fond of my friend Eduard and called him “Edik” and sometimes “Parubok” (“guy” in Ukrainian). She immediately grasped how talented he was. He later became a leading documentary cameraman in Kiev. Eduard organised all the drawings and photographed some of them. I helped Pera with the handwritten notes. Pera’s old friends helped us too by typing up the written notes. In 1961, we were all working on a six-volume collection of Eisenstein’s writings, including older film historians supervised by Sergei Yutkevitsch, a director and friend of Eisenstein’s. One of the younger crowd of the academic collective who wrote the comments was Leonid Kozlov, who was a little older than us. He had a background in philology. So Pera was surrounded by a group of young people who began to help her.
Is Eisenstein still relevant today?
A special feature of every major breakthrough in art is that it is understood in stages. The artist’s contemporaries usually only comprehend a part of it. This is even more true when an artist suddenly becomes successful, such as Goethe with his book The Sorrows of Young Werther. After that, everyone expected him to write a similar novel, and Elective Affinities was poorly received. Faust I had a positive response, but part two did not appeal to a wider audience. One could say that every great artist becomes their own worst enemy because their successful work stands in the way and prevents them from developing. They want to move on to something new, but people expect a repetition of their previous success. This was the case with Beethoven, Chekhov and it was the same for every great painter and writer. After Tolstoy’s War and Peace, people wanted him to write another book just like it. This is the norm — the situation where contemporaries cannot see the bigger picture, but only the part that relates to them. But the artist looks ahead.
Sometimes, however, it’s the circumstances that are to blame. For example, Shakespeare was forgotten for 300 years. Then he was rediscovered by the Romantics. His works were not performed back in the 17th century. Voltaire thought that Shakespeare was unbearable and vulgar – and that came from the great philosopher Voltaire, not some minor critic. The English playwright was ‘too wild and brutal’ for the tastes of the Enlightenment. When the Romantics sang Hamlet‘s praises, Tolstoy declared that Shakespeare’s tragedies rang hollow and were implausible. In fact, it was not until the 20th century that Shakespeare became a classic, universally recognised playwright. What happened to Bach? He was forgotten for almost 200 years. What would have happened if Mendelssohn hadn’t gone to the market to buy fish and took it home wrapped in sheet music? This happened to be the score of the St. John’s Passion. Bach’s children were more popular than their father, who worked on his motets and passions at the St. Thomas Church. The children, on the other hand, wrote wonderful music for princes – the kind to play in the background during lunch. And then came Mozart, who wrote music that sounded as if it came from Paradise. Who cared about Bach when there was Mozart? And then after Mozart came Beethoven. Suddenly people discovered that behind Beethoven, there was Bach. This happened all the time. It happened to Dante, Andrei Rublev and El Greco – to all great artists. They go through an era of recognition or rejection, or sometimes partial recognition. This is particularly dangerous. “Yes, yes. It was good for its time but now it’s old-fashioned”. “Unfashionable”. This word is very popular in this context. There are general laws and specific ones. Specific ones include: Shakespeare was quite successful. He was performed and translated. But alongside Shakespeare, there was Ben Jonson, for example. They were friends and rivals. But Ben Jonson was overshadowed by Shakespeare.
When a great artist comes along, a catastrophe, like an earthquake, takes place. It destroys those standing close. If you have Goethe, who needs Hölderlin? That’s the awful situation. The problem in the art world is that these kinds of assessments are very popular. It leads to a dreadful hierarchy. No matter how wonderful Pushkin is, there were also other great writers besides him such as Lermontov, Baratynsky or Tyutchev, among others. The landscape of art is like a mountain range. For the Mont Blanc to exist, you need the Alps. If the Mont Blanc was located on a French plain, it would be ugly. But as part of a range of mountains, it’s the highest peak. As cultural historians, we must understand that we need to see the mountain range. The hierarchy does not mean that Mont Blanc is the best mountain. It’s simply the highest. The Jungfrau peak, for example, is a wonderful mountain, but it’s not higher than Mont Blanc. This reflects the true history of art – one that excludes hierarchy. Power stakes have always supported hierarchies. There has always been a front row of official artists. And there were masters in the ‘second row’, who were considered flawed. Very often, the reasons for this are purely political. Mandelstam, for example, was considered “wrong” because he was against Stalin. He was also considered an enemy because censorship existed. As for Eisenstein: after his success with Potemkin, he was widely accused of being a formalist, of not understanding the audience, or of making this or that mistake. His writing was not published.
And now I will turn to Eisenstein and talk concretely about him. Besides the fact that times and fashions change and Eisenstein did not comply with trends, he already seemed old-fashioned in the 1930s. It was not that he had been forgotten: he was told all along that he was wrong. In the 1940s, he was deliberately pushed aside because a new film ‘god’ came along, whose name was Gerasimov – a mediocre director of melodramas and social dramas. And then came the young stars, like Tarkovsky, who was indebted to Eisenstein in many ways. This generation associated Eisenstein with the Bolshevik revolution, which they rejected. In 1960s’ USSR, he was placed in a different context — not in his own context of the 1920s, but the context of official political currents and trends.
People did not understand that Potemkin was not a call to revolution, but a call to end violence. It is a film about the need to stop violence on both sides. Eisenstein made the film as a call to end the violence of autocracy and to signal the end of the civil war. In other words, he had one image in the 1920s and was given the opposite image in the 1960s. He was not forgotten for 100 years, like Bach. But he definitely receded into the background for 40 years. He was not “up-to-date.” Not many people were interested in studying him. But fortunately, it was during this period that Eisenstein’s theoretical writings began to be published. And, at the same time, the ban on Ivan II was lifted. So in addition to his image as a revolutionary artist, he was cast as a victim of Stalin. He was both a symbol of revolution and a victim of Stalinism. The success of Ivan the Terrible saved him throughout those years. Not because people liked the film that much – although it left a strong impression on them. But it was heavily criticised: it contained too much symbolism, the actors rolled their eyes, and in real life, things hadn’t been as brutal. Ivan the Terriblehad had positive sides.
Eisenstein was seen as an ambivalent figure. His writings were read not only by film historians, but also by semioticians, philologists, and psychologists. And suddenly it became clear that Eisenstein not only belonged to the area of cinema. Oddly enough, Eisenstein’s renaissance is partly due to these disciplines. He underwent his first renaissance in the 1950s and early 1960s because Part Two of Ivan the Terrible was released and his theories were published. But no one really watched Battleship Potemkin. It was like a monument. Now and then it was shown on television. People half-watched it, or not at all. It wasn’t until 1975 that the original version of the film was restored. And it was accompanied by Shostakovich’s score in the USSR, and by Meisel’s in Germany. For all those years, no one had seen an original good copy of the film. It was disfigured by Soviet and German censorship. And on the one hand, October was a political mistake from the point of view of the authorities, and conformist from the point of view of Soviet dissidents. In fact, it was neither but Eisenstein was caught in the crossfire. No one seemed to need him. It was not until shortly before perestroika that Eisenstein’s importance began to grow, but not in Russia’s film circles. Unfortunately, the landscape of Russian cinema is fatherless. For many years, young filmmakers knew nothing of Vertov and Kuleshev, Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Barnett. At best, they knew of European directors, or at worst, only those from Hollywood. Many of them made “second-hand” Hollywood films.
Now, slowly, the situation is changing here too. The youngest generation, who work with digital film, sees Eisenstein’s ideas in a different light. It has suddenly found renewed interest in film theory and is beginning to quote his films and read books. This inspires hope.
When I was little, my parents and I lived together in one room. We only had one bookshelf and my bed was right next to it. When I was about four years old, I picked out a book. On the cover was a strange drawing of a man in an odd pose; I was very surprised that it was possible to draw like that. That was my first encounter with Eisenstein, although I didn’t even know the drawing was by him. In 1971, six volumes of the director’s Collected Works stood on our shelves. Every volume was a different colour and had a different drawing on the cover, but the name Eisenstein was on all the spines.
I watched his films on TV when I was a child. I remember Alexander Nevski, especially one particular close-up. I remembered it differently from the way Eisenstein actually shot it – it was an image of bare feet stomping across the earth. Later, I understood that this is the moment when the duke calls the peasants. The peasants come from the earth. I remembered it as an emotional moment. The music, along with the close-up of the earth, gave me the impression that the earth dwarfs the sky and that the sky is only a background for the stomping feet.
Eisenstein searched for archetypal images that touched people’s subconscious. But in fact, these archaic images affect our consciousness too. Children, for example, feel the drama or humour of an image without necessarily understanding its context. When I was an adult, I interpreted Eisenstein differently because my generation liberated themselves from ideology. When I watched all of his films aged 22, we laughed many times during October – precisely in the moments when you were supposed to laugh. We understood for the first time that this was not a school presentation about the revolution, but a bitter tragic comedy.
Eisenstein and his contemporaries also saw tragic aspects of the consequences of the October Revolution: he wrote the second part of his script about Russia’s civil war, but it was impossible to film at the time. And the glorious myth of the revolution came later, partly based on films – but these were shot in the 1930s. We, as Soviet viewers, were initially blinded by ideology and saw October in this context. Later, we returned to a better understanding of him when we, the perestroika generation, could see him clearly. And now the generation born in the first two decades of this century sees Eisenstein differently again. A hundred years have passed and it seems to me that they now accept him more as one of their own.
We are now discovering Eisenstein’s flat as a place where he felt protected from a world in which he felt alien. He created a world for himself there that gave him a sense of home. His native land was the culture of the world. That’s where he felt at home. It wasn’t an ivory tower. It was the whole world, at the heart of Stalinist Russia.
Written by Vera Rumyantseva, Curator of the Eisenstein-Archive
The Eisenstein-Apartment was the starting point for the Cinema Museum.
Pera Atasheva, the widow of Sergei Eisenstein, consigned all of Sergei Eisenstein’s belongings to the Soviet State before her death in 1965, in order to establish an Eisenstein-Museum. Part of this were archive material, personal belongings and books. During her lifetime she had already given a great amount of the huge archive – manuscripts, drawings, photos and documents – into the hands of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (TsGALI, today RGALI). The library, furniture and personal belongings all stayed in the apartment of Pera Atasheva on Smolenskaya Street. The apartment itself was consigned to the Soviet Association of Cinematographers by Moscow authorities after her death. The association founded a managing commission for the heritage of Sergei Eisenstein, which was led by the director Sergei Yutkevitch, as well as a museums commission to develop a concept for a film museum and the construction for a cinema centre.
In the following decades the Eisenstein apartment came to be a place for many-faceted activities. Eisenstein’s works were prepared for publication and exhibition concepts were developed for various museums all around the world. Filmmakers of all generations, as well as researchers from distinct disciplines and students from all art movements met here, prominent visitor’s found their way to Moscow.
Some possessions and books were lost during the house moving – 1948 from Eisenstein’s apartment on Potylicha Street into the prerevolutionary Moscow house of Pera Atacheva on Gogel Boulevard and 1962 into their apartment on Smolenskaya Street. Nevertheless, the majority of the asset did survive. Co-workers and friends of Sergei Eisenstein certified that the widow succeeded in maintaining the spirit of the master’s house. The apartment as a whole has become a cultural heritage of exceptional importance for Russia and the whole world. It is unique in terms of authenticity and its power of expression. The major part of the collection is the library. It contains more than 4000 books in five different languages with handwritten comments by Eisenstein. Among them are precious first editions as well as rare editions in Russia, books with personal dedications, original material and sources for movies, theoretical research works and lectures from Sergei Eisenstein. No less important for the understanding of his work and the personality of the director is his art collection: Paintings and drawings, works by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Kitagawa Utamaro, Fernand Leger, Gouache-placards of the Kabuki theatre, lithographies by Honoré Daumier and woodcuttings from José Guadalupe Posada, masks and small sculptures from Mexico, China, Africa, Indonesia, India, Russian wood sculptures, Russian folk paintings and ceramics. Eisenstein’s famous montage technique, which he became famous for, expresses itself in his interior architecture. Here different epochs and stiles meet: black-orange Bauhaus furniture stands next to an embroidered armchair from the early 19th century as well as Chippendale chairs, French silk embroidery in Rococo style and Georgian folklore embroidery, Mexican rugs and hand-woven Ukrainian and Russian belts. Here the “fine delicate sense for the whole world” finds its expression as Fjodor Dostoevsky defines it as an existential feature of the Russian culture in his lecture about Alexander Pushkin in 1880.
From Eisenstein’s earlier periods of life in Riga and St. Petersburg dishware, the round oak table with five chairs, a vitrine and the chandelier have survived. The contemporary part of the library consists of publications on Eisenstein as well as various editions of his oeuvre.
The current political situation has created a global call for boycotting Russian culture. The reasons for this are understandable.
However: In the Soviet Union (as well as in Russia) there were always individuals who used culture to resist tyranny and violence. Sergei Eisenstein was one of them. This was the reason that those in power in the Soviet Union and Russia did not take any action to preserve his heritage. In spite of worldwide protests in 2018 the Eisenstein apartment was disassembled by cultural bureaucrats. Eisenstein’s apartment had been, for decades, of enormous importance for Russian civil society – because of its lively atmosphere of cultural exchange and diversity.
A boycott of Eisenstein’s works in the West would fulfill exactly the goals which Russian cultural policy is aiming for.
It would ignore the immense power of an artist to create political resistance through art.
And, by the way: Eisenstein was from Riga. His Jewish father’s family came from Ukraine.
One aspect of my interest in Sergei Eisenstein is his work as an artist living in a totalitarian regime. I am moved by his curiosity and openness to world culture, which was in complete opposition to the system that surrounded him. My grandmother came from Russia, my grandfather from Ukraine. I grew up in the West in a world divided by the Iron Curtain, into two polarized systems: Communism and capitalism, East and West, dictatorship and freedom. A third perspective seemed impossible.
Sergei Eisenstein had to move between these opposing poles. Sometimes he was forced to make painful compromises and accede to the authorities. Nevertheless, he created a realm for himself – in his art, his theoretical work and in his apartment. To me, this sense of self-empowerment is inspiring. It shows that in a system that appears to be dual, a third possibility may exist after all. In the light of current political polarization today, this is more important than ever.
Critics of Sergei Eisenstein accuse him of being a director of manipulative propaganda films for Stalin. I maintain that this is a perspective based on an incomplete picture of his work and biography.
Eisenstein’s relevance today as a Soviet artist is not limited to being one of the founding fathers of the European avantgarde. His understanding of cultural diversity is especially timely in today’s world. The global tendency to homogenize culture not only undermines cultural elements that are unexpected and unusual – it creates fertile soil for xenophobia, nationalism and war. In contradistinction, Eisenstein’s approach to world culture sets an example of a respectful understanding of different cultures and their potential to inspire one another. In Eisenstein’s universe we encounter great minds from Europe, North and South America, and Asia. His artistic vision was related to, for example, the work of the star of the Peking Opera, Mei Lan Fang, Irish writer James Joyce, Mexican painter Jose Orozco, and Afro-American actor Paul Robeson. Eisenstein was not only one of the pioneers who promoted cinema to the level of art. He was also an artist and a scholar. He, who was famous as an avantgarde artist, looked for guidance in the great classical traditions. He studied ancient tragedy and architecture, medieval theater and the painting of the Renaissance, poetry and prose of Romanticism and Symbolism. He was inspired by El Greco and Callot, Bach and Goethe, Pushkin and Mussorgsky, Daumier and Zola. The fact that Eisenstein was called the “Leonardo da Vinci of cinema” addressed not only the great diversity of his talents – film director and artist, scholar and teacher, writer and choreographer. It also related to the elaborate sense of harmony in his films.
Many are unaware that Soviet aesthetics of that time – Eisenstein’s films, Alexander Rodchenko’s photographs, or the art of El Lissitzky and other constructivists – still influence the media all over the world today. Image compositions in Hollywood films, YouTube and advertising clips, among others, are based on cinematic elements which Eisenstein invented – and, of course, his montage technique. The development and visualization of social visons beyond borders is still one of the central challenges to art today. The beginning 20th century, too, was an era in search of a utopia.
It is this atmosphere of beginnings and new horizons that we want to create access to.
“BROTHERS”
This is the famous quote from Sergei Eisenstein‘s 1925 silent film „Battleship Potemkin“: A sailor convinces the boat‘s crew not to shoot their own crew members, whom the captain wants to have shot as an act of intimidation.
The film is an appeal against violence and for humanity. In view of current events, the new relevance of Battleship Potemkin is deeply concerning. Sergei Eisenstein represents a Russian tradition that began with Pushkin: To strengthen civil society through art.
With our research project we wish to contribute to this process on an international level.
Partners
The project Kollisionen is a cooperation of the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF Potsdam with the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and and is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) within the framework of the StaF funding program.
