Screen/Society--Eisenstein 35mm Retrospective--"Alexander Nevsky" (rare 35mm screening of the classic film!)

Monday, February 13, 2012 - 2:00pm to 3:45pm
Screen/Society--Eisenstein 35mm Retrospective--"Alexander Nevsky" (rare 35mm screening of the classic film!)

AMI presents a 35mm Film Retrospective in the month of February, dedicated to the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and his Revolutionary Aesthetics.

Film Screening:

Alexander Nevsky
(Sergei Eisenstein, 1938, 112 min, Soviet Union, Russian with English subtitles, Black and White, 35mm)

-- Introduced by Prof. Markos Hadjioannou, Program in Literature!
 

Eisenstein’s first completed sound film is one of the cinema’s great epics, an operatic historical pageant of astonishing visual grandeur, set to a stirring original score by Prokofiev. In beleaguered 13th-century Russia, the valiant, volatile Prince Nevsky of Novgorod (Nikolai Cherkassov) is chosen to lead his countrymen into battle against invading Teutons. Eisenstein's spectacular film culminates in a monumental, much-celebrated Battle on the Ice, featuring a cast of thousands. The work was made at a time of increasing tension between the Soviet Union and Germany; its fiercely-adorned, geometrically-arrayed Teutonic raiders were clearly intended as thinly-disguised Nazis. Eisenstein called Alexander Nevsky “a fugue on the theme of patriotism,” and was awarded the Order of Lenin for the work early in 1939. The film was quietly withdrawn from distribution after Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact later that same year.

“One of the greatest achievements of Soviet and world cinema ... As magnificent today as it must have been in 1938.” -- James Monaco

-- Made possible by generous support from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation.

Watch the Trailer

About Sergei Eisenstein:

One of the cinema’s paramount creative geniuses, both as a director and as a theorist, Sergei Eisenstein was a seminal figure in the development of cinema as a distinct art form with its own unique grammar and language. Some hold him to be the most important and influential individual in the history of the medium, and his writings have been translated into over 20 languages. Principally and fundamentally, it was Eisenstein’s revolutionary notion, so powerfully and thrillingly expressed in his own intensely beautiful, intensely dynamic films, that the essence of cinema is montage: that meaning in cinema — ideas, emotions, rhythm, tone — is created through the juxtaposition, the collision, the editing together, of images.

Eisenstein completed but seven feature films in his career (his filmography also includes a handful of shorts and two notable unfinished works), before dying too young: of a heart attack, shortly after his 50th birthday.

This retrospective offers the rare opportunity to see a handpicked selection of Eisenstein’s works, so often circulated on inferior 16mm copies, in proper 35mm prints. Included are four of Eisenstein’s seven completed features, as well as a reconstruction of Eisenstein’s legendary “lost masterpiece,” Bezhin Meadow (1937).

Cost: Free and Open to the Public!

Sponsors: The Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), the Duke University Center for International Studies (DUCIS), and the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies. Made possible by generous support from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation.

Bryan Center Griffith Film Theater