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:

Bezhin Meadow
(Sergei Eisenstein, 1937, 31 min, Soviet Union, Russian w/ English subtites, B&W, 35mm)

-- Introduced by Literature PhD candidate Abraham Geil!

Experimenting with new visual techniques and, for the first time, with sound, Eisenstein aimed for new artistic heights with the ambitious Bezhin Meadow, his return to Soviet filmmaking after the debacle of his unfinished Que Viva Mexico! project in America. Instead, Bezhin Meadow too remained unfinished: two years into production, the project was halted by the Soviet authorities, and Eisenstein was forced to make a humiliating public admission of his political and artistic mistakes. Bezhin Meadow relates a tale, supposedly based on fact, of deadly father-son conflict during the collectivization of Soviet farms. Eisenstein's original footage is believed destroyed. In the 1960s, clippings from the film, saved from the editing table by Eisenstein's wife, were discovered and used to fashion this short photo-montage reconstruction, which follows the original shooting script and is set to music by Prokofiev.

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

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.