The Books of My Life: Sergei Eisenstein (Bulgakowa)

Born in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1898, Sergey Yesenstein, son of a Jewish father and a well off St. Petersberg mother, became, during his lifetime, one of the most famous and celebrated directors of the new technology and art of cinema. Over the course of his life Yesenstein would be feted by the Soviet film industry and state, German film culture, and even Hollywood, including Walt Disney, thanks to films like The Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1928), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1945) and the cinematic technique of montage. At the same time, Yesenstein would be attacked by the Soviet state for his avant garde "formalism", in both his films and in his many writings on culture, art, and film theory and practise, and criticised by others for his cinematic experimentation, something some found too far removed from the socialist realism mandated in Soviet art by the Soviet powers that be after the late 1920s. Yesenstein would also, like Orson Welles after him, find himself sometimes unable to finish many of the films he began and some of the writings he began, many on the cinema, for a variety of economic, political, and cultural reasons.

Oksana Bulgakowa's outstanding biography of Yesenstein, Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography (San Francisco: PotemkinPress, 1998, 2001) is everything an excellent biography should be. Bulgakowa does an excellent job of putting the life of Yesenstein into broader political, economic, and cultural contexts. She explores how Yesenstein was impacted by political decisions made by Soviet bureaucrats, by the economic conditions of his times, and by the cultural movements of his era which he came into contact and was influenced by, including Formalism, Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism, Mysticism, Occultism, Freudianism, psychological theory, linguistic theory and practise, and studies of comparative religion, all things that put Yesenstein sometimes at odds with the Soviet state and its leaders. Bulgakowa nicely explores the origins and making of Yesenstein's films. She nicely summarises, explains, and puts into context Yesenstein's many writings on culture, art, and cinema. I highly recommend Bulgakowa's book for anyone interested in modernity, the birth of cinema, film as an art, and Soviet history and culture. For those interested in Yesenstein, this is a must read.