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Filmmaker at the Crossroads of the Arts the Ecstatic

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Filmmaker at the Crossroads of the Arts the Ecstatic THE ECSTATIC EYE FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS EXHIBITION 28.09.19 > 24.02.20 centrepompidou-metz.fr #Eisenstein PRESS KIT , 1927. RGALI, 1923/1/217, f.1 © Russian State Archives of Literature and Art of Literature Archives State © Russian 1923/1/217, f.1 , 1927. RGALI, Octobre Eisenstein montant montant Eisenstein THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................5 2. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN ......................................................................7 3. EXHIBITION ITINERARY ....................................................................9 4. FIVE QUESTIONS TO THE EXHIBITION CURATORS .........................22 5. LIST OF ARTISTS ...........................................................................24 6. CATALOGUE ...................................................................................25 7. RELATED EVENTS ..........................................................................26 8. YOUNG VISITORS ..........................................................................28 9. EXHIBITION PARTNERS ..................................................................29 10. IMAGES AVAILABLE TO THE PRESS ..............................................32 THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS Sergueï Eisenstein, Ivan le Terrible, 1945 © FSF 4 THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS 1. INTRODUCTION THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS From September 28, 2019 to February 24, 2020 GRANDE NEF Sergueï Eisenstein, the mythical film director who The exhibition The Ecstatic Eye. Sergueï Eisenstein, made the glory of Russian and Soviet cinema is filmmaker at the crossroads of the arts therefore really more than a film director. Cultivating the art intends to enable the discovery or the rediscovery of montage and of rhythm to the point of inventing for French and European audiences of a major a new visual language in the middle of the 1920’s, name of the seventh art and of world culture, a man Eisenstein always put himself at the crossroads considered as the Russian “Leonardo da Vinci”, of the arts. A man of the theatre, artist, theorist, and who was the first to present himself as a film collector and insatiable reader, he never ceased to director dressed in artists’ clothing. We are therefore enrich the history of art throughout his career. insisting on Eisenstein's the doer, the amateur, the collectionner, the commentator and the image editor, Centre Pompidou-Metz is offering a retrospective of a visionnary Eisenstein, always eager to experiment his work in relation to the influence of this universal in a radical manner and to have a deep and durable heritage. We will cover the great films which made impact on the spectator. By drawing on the vast him famous (The Strike, 1925 ; The Battleship range of references that Eisenstein uses in his Potemkine, 1925 ; October, 1928 ; The General Line, work, this confrontation between fixed images and 1929 ; ¡ Que Viva Mexico ! , 1932 ; Alexander Nevsky, images in motion can unveil in an exemplary way 1938 and Ivan the Terrible, 1944-46), but also his the manner in which a creator produces his images, theatrical experiments, his drawings delving into his at a time when the question of artistic genesis had prolific imagination, or his unfinished projects. The become central : showing how Eisenstein prepared exhibition goes back over the artistic inspirations himself in his work, using chefs d’œuvres from and visionnary approach of the film director, to the history of world art and works by foreign and the productions with strong ties to the history of Russian contemporaries but also and above all Russia but also to his numerous voyages in Europe, the artistic heritage preceding the arrival of the to Mexico and to the United States, to his preferred cinema, painting as well as sculpture, engraving, reading and his encounters. drawing, and architecture. The exhibition will also insist upon Eisenstein interest and yearning If, during his lifetime, Eisenstein was an artist that for popular cultures in an abolition of hierarchies the whole world snatched up and whose work and which is representative of his associative logic. philosophy deeply moved minds, today, this aura has considerably worn off owing to his cinematagraphic Eisenstein, the theorist, reread the history of art work no longer being systematically shown via by the light of the cinema. Indeed, the cinema does the cinema clubs. Likewise, the complexity and not so much represent for him a technical medium, the reach of Eisenstein accomplishments have but more the most elaborate response to primordial for a longtime been underestimated because of human needs. In this respect, the cinema enables idealogical interpretations reducing his work only him to rethink the whole of the history of art and within the context of Communist USSR and to his world culture, which is translated in the exhibition relationship with Stalin. by a gallery of paintings and of sculptures that he 5 THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS analyses in cinematographic terms and of which In addition, whilst taking inspiration from the certain can also, later on, be interpreted through contemporary constructivist aesthetic of the artist, the prism of the cinema. The Eisensteinian history the layout and the hanging will follow fundamental of art is therefore deliberately anachronistic and principles of Eisenstein’s philosophy and practice, disorganised, open to non-western cultures. such as conflict-montage, collision-montage, ectasy, enabling the establishment of explosive With this exhibition, Centre Pompidou-Metz is and unexpected relationships between the images proposing a rediscovery of the seventh art, through beyond hierarchies and classifications. one of the most important figures of its history. For the exhibition, the curators Ada Ackerman and Curators : Philippe-Alain Michaud and the set designer Jean- Ada Ackerman, Exhibition curator and Head of Julien Simonnot will explore specific exhibition Research at the CNRS/THALIM, art historian, conditions which will allow the organisation of and Eisenstein specialist. the confrontation of, fixed works and moving images Philippe-Alain Michaud, Exhibition curator and and to present films in a form which is not reducible curator at the Centre Pompidou, Musée national to a cinema theatre : monumental projections and d’art moderne, Head of the Experimental cinema analytical approaches with the help of slow-motion, Department loop extracts and frozen images. André Kertész, Sergueï Eisenstein, 1929 Épreuve gélatino-argentique, 24,3 x 18,1 cm Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne © RMN-Grand Palais © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP 6 THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS 2. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN Sergueï Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born in Riga in in staging attended by Grigori Alexandrov, acrobat Latvia in January 1898, almost at the same time as and actor at the Prolekult Theatre who would the cinema. His father Mikhail Ossipovich Eisenstein become his closest collaborator. At the end of the (1867 – 1920), came from a Jewish family converted year he was sent down from the Military Academy. to Orthodoxy, was an architectural engineer : he left important Art nouveau creations in the Latvian capital. His mother, Ioulia Ivanovna Konetskaia, In 1922, he met the founders of the FEKS, the came from a background of rich Russian merchants. Factory of the Eccentic Actors, Grigori Kozintsev, Sergueï grew up in a cultivated and cosmopolitan Leonid Trauberg, Gueorgui Krijitski and Sergueï atmosphere speaking fluently, apart from Russian, Youtkevich with whom he wrote the pantomime French, English, and German. La Jarretière de Colombine. The previous year, he followed the lessons of Vsevolod Meyerhold whose In 1906, Sergueï travelled with his parents to Europe biomechanical theories would have a decisive and saw his first film in Paris : Les 400 Farces du influence on his conception of an actors’ way of diable by Georges Méliès. In 1909, his parents acting. “He was divine, incomparable…I was going divorced and his mother moved to Petrograd (today to adore him for he rest of my life” Eisenstein would Saint-Petersburg) : Eisenstein remained with his write twenty-five years later in his Memoires, father in Riga, but regularly visited his mother. He which did not prevent the artist from leaving his made a definitive move to join her in 1915. workshop, at the end of 1922. In 1923, with Sergueï In 1917, the Revolution broke out in Petrograd. It Tretiakov, he mounted the very avant-gardist was in a climate of insurrection that Eisenstein staging of Enough stupidity in every wise man, attended the first performance of the Masked Ball, after the classical play by Alexander Ostrovsky, a play by Lermontov, staged by Meyerhold, with sets in which he experiments with the attractions1 to and costumes by Golovine. This experience was to which he devoted an important article in the review be a determining factor for his future artistic career LEF, the review of the artistic left Front , run by as a stage director and film director. Drawing from Vladimir Maiakovski and Ossip Brik. It is also in a very early age, he published political charicatures Enough stupidity
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