The Oxford History of World Cinema (69 page)

and aimed at the direct excitation of the spectator, emerged again and again. In The Strike,

the workers' struggle with a foreman to blow a steam whistle becomes a calisthenic

exercise. In The Old and the New ( 1929), a woman's despairing act of flinging down a

plough transforms itself into a fierce gesture of defiance. The two-part Ivan the Terrible

( 1944, 1946) acquires its majestic pace through an instant-by-instant modulation of the

actor's movement.

Cinema was not only the next step in the development of theatre; Eisenstein considered

cinema the synthesis of all the arts. He found in the cinematic technique of montage

analogies to the juxtapositions of images in verse, to the inner monologue of Joyce's

Ulysses, to the rich 'intercutting' of action and dialogue in Dickens and Tolstoy. In The

Battleship Potemkin ( 1925) a sailor furiously smashes a plate he is washing; the

fragmentation of the action parallels him to Myron's Discus-Thrower. Eisenstein posited a

'polyphonic' montage in cinema that would interweave pictorial motifs. And the arrival of

sound technology led him to posit a 'vertical' montage between image and sound which

would create the inner unity achieved in Wagnerian music drama.

Expressive movement and montage, the cornerstones of Eisehstein's aesthetic, could find

fulfilment in cinema as in no other art. He argues that in Alexander Nevsky ( 1938)

vertical montage brings out the emotional dynamic latent in both image and musical

score, intensifying the suspenseful anticipation of Alexander's troops awaiting the

Teutonic Knights' attack. Earlier in his career, he had suggested that The

Wiseman's'montage of attractions', its assembly of perceptual 'shocks', could rouse the

audience to emotion and, eventually, reflection. Making October ( 1928), he speculated

that, like haiku poetry and Joycean stream of consciousness, the juxtapositions of shots

can create purely conceptual associations. October's most famous passage of 'intellectual

montage', the little disquisition on God and Country, uses images and titles to demonstrate

the mystification surrounding religion and patriotism. Montage, Eisenstein believed,

would allow him to make a film of Marx's Capital.

Throughout the silent era Eisenstein assumed that his aesthetic experimentation could be

harmonized with the propaganda dictates of the State. Each of his silent films begins with

an epigraph from Lenin, and each depicts a key moment in the myth of Bolshevik

ascension: the pre-revolutionary struggles ( The Strike), the 1905 revolution (Potemkin),

the Bolshevik coup ( October), and contemporary agricultural policy ( The Old and the

New). The world-wide success of Potemkin won sympathy and respect for the regime;

who could not be moved by Eisenstein's shocking portrayal of the tsarist troops

massacring innocents on the Odessa Steps? After a stay in Hollywood in 1930 and an

attempt to make an independent film in Mexico ( 1930-2), Eisenstein returned to a Soviet

Union in the grip of Stalin. The film industry was in the process of repudiating the

montage experiments of the silent era, and soon a conception of 'Socialist Realism'

became official policy. Eisenstein's teaching at the State Film Academy allowed him to

explore ways of reconciling his own interests with the new standards, but his efforts to put

his ideas into practice in Bezhin Meadow ( 1935-7) ran into opposition and the film was

halted.

He had more success with Nevsky, which coincided with Stalin's Russophilia and served

as timely propaganda against German invasion. Eisenstein won the Order of Lenin. The

first part of Ivan the Terrible also enhanced his stature. Stalin had encouraged a

'progressive' reading of certain tsars, and Eisenstein portrayed his hero as a decisive ruler

bent on unifying Russia.But the second part of the projected Ivan trilogy fell afoul of

policy-makers. Ivan, hesitating to kill his enemies, was now judged too 'Hamlet-like', and

the film was banned by the Central Committee. It is likely that this action was part of a

general reassertion of Party control of the arts, which had enjoyed considerable latitude

during the war. The attack on Ivan Part Two led Eisenstein, already in poor health, to

greater isolation. He died in 1948, under a cloud of criticism which would not be lifted for

a decade. Ironically, his films and writings were far more visible in the west than in the

USSR, and, although his reputation has undergone periodic reappraisals, he has remained

the most celebrated and influential representative of Soviet film culture.DAVID

BORDWELLSELECT FILMOGRAPHY Stachka (The Strike) ( 1925); Bronenosets

'Potemkin' (The Battleship Potemkin) ( 1925); Oktyabr (October / Ten Days that Shook

the World) ( 1928); Staroe i novoe (The Old and the New); Generalnaya Liniya ('The

general line') ( 1929). Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) ( 1935-7); Alexander Nevsky ( 1938);

Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) Part I ( 1944); Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) Part II

( 1946)

A scene from Bezhin Meadow ( 1935-7). The film itself is lost, and all that survive are a

couple of frames of each shot

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordwell, David ( 1993), The Cinema of Eisenstein.

Eisenstein, Sergei ( 1949). Film Form: Essays in Film Theory.

--- ( 1992), Towards a Theory of Montage.

--- ( 1988), Writings, 1922-34.

Leyda, Jay, and Voynow, Zina (eds.) ( 1982), Eisenstein at Work.

Nizhny, Vladimir ( 1962), Lessons with Eisenstein.

Seton, Marie ( 1952), Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography

Yiddish Cinema in Europe

MAREK AND MALGORZATA HENDRYKOWSKI

No panorama of early European cinema can be complete without mention of the unique

phenomenon of the transnational Yiddish cinema, which flourished in eastern and central

Europe throughout the silent period and into the 1930s. This Yiddish cinema derived from

the extra-territorial tradition of European Jewish culture and literature rooted in the

Yiddish language. Yiddish is a language of exceptional expressiveness, highly developed

idiom, and rich vocabulary, which by the turn of the century had become the mother

tongue of over 10 million Jews, living mostly in central and eastern Europe but also as

part of the Jewish diaspora in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere in the

New World.

THE YIDDISH CULTURAL TRADITION

Throughout eastern and central Europe Yiddish had a full-fledged literature, comparable

with other European national literatures. Alongside élite works aspiring to the rank of

canonical literature, more popular prose was also printed in instalments in cheap pamphlet

form. Leading representatives of Yiddish literature at the turn of the century include

Avrom Goldfadn, father of the Jewish theatre, Yankev Gordin, An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvil

Rapoport), Yitskhok Leyb Perets, Sholem Ash, Yoysef Opatoshu (Yoysef Meyer

Opatovski), and Sholem Aleykhem (Sholem Rabinowicz), and it was often to the works

of these authors that the nascent Yiddish cinema turned for inspiration in the 1910s and

1920s.

Yiddish cinema has its roots in Jewish drama and theatre of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, stemming from the tradition of the Purim-Shpil and incorporating

elements of the so-called 'shundroman' or popular fiction. It was in 1892 that the actress

Ester Rokhl Kaminska, 'the Jewish Eleonora Duse', first appeared in the Eldorado theatre

in Warsaw. By 1911 three Jewish theatres were open in that city: Kaminski's Literary

Troupe at the Dynasy, the Elizeum, and the Orion, while the famous Vilner troupe was

started in Vilna (now Vilnius) by Mordkhe Mazo in 1916. In 1918, on the other side of the

Atlantic, Yankev (Jacob) Ben-Ami, together with Moris Shvarts, founded the even more

famous Yiddish Arts Theatre in New York.

The Yiddish theatrical repertory consisted of biblical tales, eastern European legends, and

Jewish folk customs. Scenes generating a religious aura were often interwoven with

dances and songs. Their changing atmosphere betrayed a permanent sense of dread, and

combined drama and tragedy with tearful, melodramatic scenes and a devastating wit that

triggered off contagious laughter. The performances owed their unique character and

expressiveness to their (sometimes satirical) borrowing from Hasidic tradition, and

Yiddish theatrical plays and films cannot be fully understood without reference to eastern

European Hasidism, with its own specific brand of mysticism and philosophy, and

recurrent interest in themes of individual Romantic rebellion of the individual and the

conflict of tradition and assimilation.

SILENT FILM

From the outset Yiddish films enjoyed considerable popularity not only with Jewish

audiences but among spectators of other nationalities in search of the exotic. They were

made in Poland, Russia, Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. In Russia they

were produced by the S. Mintus Company in Riga ( Latvia), the Mizrakh and Mirograf

Company in Odessa, and by the Kharitonov, Khanzhonkov, and Pathé production

companies in Moscow, and elsewhere. But the majority originated from Poland, whose

Jews, characterized by a particularly strong feeling of their own national identity,

accounted for some 10 per cent of the population. In the early years of this century, more

than 80 per cent of the more than 400,000strong Jewish population of Warsaw spoke and

read Yiddish.

In Poland the main centre of Yiddish film production was Warsaw, where the first

production company, Sila, was founded by Mordkhe (Mordka) Towbin. Among the films

produced by Sila before the outbreak of the First World War were four adapted from plays

by leading Yiddish playwright Yankev (Jacob) Gordin, starting in 1911 with Der vilder

Foter (The Cruel Father) with Herman Sieracki in the title-role and Zina Goldshteyn in

the role of the daughter. Sila also engaged the services of members of the theatrical

Kaminski family. Avrom Yitskhok Kaminski directed Destitute Murder ( 1911) and the

mystical drama God, Man and Devil ( 1912), while Mirele Efros ( 1912), directed by

Andrzej Marek (Marek Arnshteyn or Orenshteyn), starred both Ester Rokhl Kaminska

and Ida Kaminska, who made her début in the role of the boy Shloymele.

In 1913 a dynamic new Yiddish film enterprise called Kosmofilm was founded in Warsaw

by Shmuel Ginzberg and Henryk Finkelstein. In 1913-14 Kosmofilm produced screenings

of further plays by Gordin: Der Umbakanter (Love and Death or A Stranger), Gots Shtrof

(God's Punishment), Dem Khagzns Tokhter (The Cantor's Daughter), and Di Shkhite, and

a new version of Di Shtifmuter (The Stepmother), already filmed by Sila a couple of

years earlier. The last film to be made by Kosmofilm with captions in Yiddish before the

German invasion of Warsaw on 5 August 1915 was Di farshtoysene Tokhter (The

Repudiated Daughter), based on the play by Avrom Goldfadn, with the participation of

Ester Rokhl Kaminska.

Jewish themes also attracted the attention of filmmakers in Germany before and during

the First World War. Shylock von Krakau (Kol Nidre, 1913) was based on the novella by

Felix Salten, directed by Carl Wilhelm, and designed by Hermann Warm, with the well-

known actor Rudolf Schildkraut in the title-role, and Der gelbe Schein (The Yellow

Ticket, 1918) was filmed for Ufa in occupied Warsaw by Victor Janson, with Polish

actress Pola Negri in the main role.

Indigenous production revived after the war. Three outstanding Yiddish films made in

Poland in the 1920s were: Tkies Kaf (The Oath, 1924), directed by Zygmunt Turkow; Der

Lamedvovnik (One of the Thirty-six, 1925) by Henryk Szaro; and In Poylishe Velder (In

Polish Woods, 1929), directed by Jonas Turkow, an adaptation of Yoysef Opatoshu's

bestselling novel of the same title, with both Polish and Jewish actors playing the roles.

Like The Oath, this film addressed the fundamental question of Jewish assimilation in

nineteenth-century Poland and participation alongside the Poles in the January Uprising

of 1863 against Russia. Yiddish films continued to be made in the USSR. Yidishe Glikn

(Jewish Luck, 1925), by Alexander Granovski, was based on the famous Menakhem-

Mendl story-cycle by Sholem Aleykhem, and was made with the participation of actors

from the Habima Theatre and the great Soviet Yiddish actor Shloyme Mikhoels.