Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict

Ronald Bergan shows that although Eisenstein was committed to the Bolshevik cause and contributed to its development, his films must, in no way, simply be dismissed as propaganda. Eisenstein pioneering visual techniques, explorations in montage and lyrical representations have earned him an indisputable position as among film makers. The culminating scenes in `Strike!', for instance, are built on an alternating sequence of shots that show soldiers chasing and shooting the strikers while a butcher is slitting the throat of farm animals in the slaughterhouse. This allegorical interpretation of the Czar as a butcher wa not fully understood by a large portion of the viewing public, as Eisenstein himself witnessed when the film was shown in the rural areas throughout the country. Indeed, many farmers were unable to grasp the metaphor of the slaughtered beasts as an association of the Czar as a criminal, a butcher, a murderer of innocents because for farmers the killing of an animal did not constitute a crime.The rally to arms in `Alexander Nevsky' culminated in the battle on ice scene (which runs for almost a third of the film). The scene, which Eisenstein duly prepared with the aid of sketches, appears as if inspired by the paintings of the Italian renaissance artist P. Uccello, as both show the violent clash of armor, horses, arrows, spears and iron.