User Reviews

Spoilers herein.

Eisenstein helped invent film. His primary contribution was in the art of editing. Any film-oriented bio should focus on that.

What this does instead is take the images from all his films, mix them around. Change a few drastically, and edit them according to the whim of someone else. It is as if you took bits and pieces from all of Picasso's work and arranged them on a canvas and announced that it provided some sort of insight. Its a scandal.

Lets say more about this. Eisenstein started with a notion (later called montage) with many short images in sequence. The dynamic at work was to establish a rhythm with the shots that sometimes left your eye and became captured in the action on screen. This would be punctuated by long, slow segments that appeared to invisibly carry the complex music. It is the rhythm that mattered and especially how the motion on the screen matched or contradicted the motion between `screens.'

Later as he matured, the snap, snap, snap anxiety of the early work was discarded as he invested more heavily in understanding and incorporating the internal rhythms of characters. The `Ivan' films drew you into the layer of the shifting eye, and beyond that into the motions of the world, but now also into the seeing mind of the characters. The editing was of all three at once, conflating these and playing them off each other -- the viewer was thus cleverly transformed into the mind of Ivan and cronies.

How in the world could anyone so completely misunderstand this and trample all over this man's art? And because his art helped invent how we dream, this effort defaces our own minds.

Shame.