February 12, 1948
OBITUARY
Sergei Eisenstein Is Dead In Moscow
By REUTERS
MOSCOW, Feb. 11 -- Sergei Eisenstein, famous Russian film director and producer, died last night.
Developed Fusion of Arts
Sergei M. Eisenstein had been widely acclaimed as one of the world's foremost movie directors. He was responsible for such outstanding examples of the cinema art as "Potemkin" and "Alexander Nevsky," and he was said to have successfully
brought about in the motion picture a true fusion of all the arts.
That many of his pictures were patently propaganda works was true, but to students of the movie art this appeared not so much to matter as the fact that he developed new techniques, devised camera approaches and sought always to bring out the potential
of a still developing form. That he forgot--or overlooked--to bring the Marxist message to one of his films two years ago brought him that fatal kiss of all--the accusation from the authoritative
Soviet magazine, Culture and Life, that his productions had been short on the prescribed Soviet requirement of art and interpretation of history.
One of his most striking contributions was the development of the montage and a new method of cutting and mounting film after "shooting" was over to produce a rapid panoramic progression of images that forcefully projected some idea. "A
work of art understood dynamically is just the process of arranging images and feelings in the mind of the spectator," he wrote.
He once tried Hollywood. The visit was not a success and ended without his ever having been assigned a single picture. He did, however, go to Mexico, where he collaborated in the writing and directing of "Thunder Over Mexico," which was released
here in a heavily edited version.
Other pictures which had wide showing here were "Ten Days That Shook the World," "General Line" and "The Silver Lining."
Work on "Ivan the Terrible"
It was the second part of a trilogy on "Ivan the Terrible" that halted the director in mid-work in 1946. Having failed to portray what an official paper called "contemporary realism" the film expert coincidentally developed a heart
attack.
A few months later he was reported to have regretted that he had "permitted a distortion of historical facts, which made our film bad and ideologically defective." Apart from what forces were brought upon him at home he remained to professional
and lay filmgoers here a man of great intellectual vigor and unremitting faith in films as an art form.
He was born in 1898, was trained as a civil engineer and architect. During the revolution he built trenches for the Bolsheviki. He was only 26 when he directed "Potemkin," which has been hailed as his greatest picture. It described the revolt
of the sailors on the armored ship Potemkin during the abortive revolt of 1905.
The first part of "Ivan the Terrible" was exhibited in New York a year ago. Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, called it the product of one of the really great artist in the (film) medium and praised it as a story of "awesome
and monumental impressiveness in which the senses are saturated with medieval majesty."
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