by Douglas Messerli
Nina Agadzhanova and
Sergei Eisenstein (screenplay, with intertitles by Nikolai Aseyev and Sergei
Tretyakoy), Sergei Eisenstein (director) Бронено́сец «Потёмкин» Bronenosets
Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin) / 1925
How does such a volume
on queer cinema deal with figures such as the great Russian film director
theorist Sergei Eisenstein, long rumored to be homosexual—although he
assertively denied it, arguing that he may have had intellectual interests in
bisexuality or even be asexual, he is not attracted to men—but who obviously
had no way of showing that, given the Stalin regime, in his films. Of course
very few noted directors of the time would have been willing to admit to
homosexuality, and even fewer could have represented that in their films. The
situation, after all, was not so very different in the US, France, England, and
elsewhere, except perhaps for pre-Nazi
Yet certain of Cukor’s films and many of
Whale’s works most certainly do give us hints. And especially in Whale’s case
we see evidence coded into the films. Eisenstein arguably could never have done
that. Even his revolutionary heroes such as those in Battleship Potemkin
were brought into question given his use of montage and other formalist
techniques.
And his most openly praised Soviet works
such as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible I could not alter
the memory of his greatest Soviet failure, Bezhin Meadow, commissioned
by a Communist youth group and shot from 1935 to 1937 until the entire project
was closed down. That film—based on the life of Pavlik Morozov, a young Russian
boy who became a political martyr following his death in 1932, after he
denounced his father to Soviet government authorities and subsequently died at
the hands of his family—may have seemed to be the perfect project Eisenstein
could have undertaken to bring him back into being an official approval, but
its failures, its reliance on religious symbolism and the blurring of
historical events, saw government interference coming from the highest levels,
perhaps from Joseph Stalin himself. The Central Executive Committee of the
Communist Party rejected several early versions of the film, decrying the
director’s confusion of the class struggle with the battle between good and
evil. Even the director likened the murder of the boy Stepov to Abraham’s
sacrifice of Isaac.
But the reaction was also likely part
of a larger project to rid Soviet society of all avant-garde or innovative art,
and the film’s financial overruns, the fact that Eisenstein had chosen unknowns
to play the film’s “types,” and numerous other excuses forced the de facto head
of all Soviet cinema, Boris Shumyatsky to shut down the film’s production,
particularly since Eisenstein had come down with smallpox followed by
influenza. The director had no choice but to himself recant his work as an
error, pledging he would "rid myself of the last anarchistic traits of
individualism in my outlook and creative method." In a tract that declared
Bezhin Meadow a failure, he wrote "What caused catastrophe to overtake the
picture I had worked on for two years? What was the mistaken viewpoint which,
despite honesty of feelings and devotion to work, brought the production to a
perversion of reality, making it politically insubstantial and consequently
inartistic?"
During the bombing of World War II, the unfinished
and unreleased film reels were destroyed in a bombing
Accordingly, LGBTQ critics tend basically
to either ignore Eisenstein or represent him as yet another figure who was
silenced from making any significant contribution to queer cinema.
Miraculously, in the 1960s film
connoisseurs learned that Pera Attasheva, Eisenstein’s wife, had saved splices
of the film taken from every major scene on the editing table for Bezhin
Meadow, and in 1964 it was reconstructed by Russian film director Sergei
Yutkevich and Eisenstein scholar Naum Kleiman, the fragments being set to music
by Sergei Prokofiev. New intertitles were created from the script, and a new
spoken introduction was added, resulting in something like a 36-minute slide
show—all of which revealed stunningly beautiful images that suggest it had been
a kind of hidden masterwork.
It also perhaps revealed what few have
discussed as further reasons why Eisenstein’s project was closed down and which
might point to Eisenstein’s own coding of his gay sexuality.
But before I swim into these shallow
waters, I perhaps should first like to approach the great Soviet filmmaker from
the perspective of Nestor Almendros’s 1991 essay about the
director in Film Comment.
First all Almendros reminds us that,
despite Eisenstein’s continuous denials, he is more than probable that he was
gay, even though may have begun to physically express his sexuality only on his
European tours with his collaborator Grigori Aleksandrov and his
cinematographer Eduard Tisse to Berlin, London, Paris, and Zürich beginning in
1928 when he was under fire for his film October: Ten Days That Shook the
World. One can only imagine their adventures—a bit like those of Ernst
Lubitsch’s Ninotchka—in the Weimar Republic and Paris where they were sent to
learn about the talkies and to present themselves as Soviet cinematic
ambassadors to the West. Certainly like the Soviet representatives in the
Lubitsch comedy, they must have truly uncovered the delights of those cities,
and in the US trip that followed actually got into some trouble. Almendros
describes some of the lesser known aspects of Eisenstein’s Hollywood visit:
“Yet Eisenstein seems to
have yielded to his irrepressible desires while abroad, in more relaxed
societies and away from the eyes of the NKVD, while visiting Berlin, Paris, and
Hollywood. Sometimes he even indulged in humor about his ‘secret’: having been
invited by the California studios to check out a new 70mm system, Grandeur,
that enlarged the screen sideways, he complained to his British friend and
fellow traveler Ivor Montagu that ‘a wide screen would deny access to all the
aggressive male shapes like trees and factory chimneys.’* And Josef von
Sternberg recalled, in his autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry, that
Eisenstein ‘always had pencil and paper in front of him…the sketches he made in
my presence were probably destroyed, for they could have been shown only in a
very understanding circle. Had he lived longer he might have given them to
Professor Kinsey.’”
Although several directorial projects were
bandied about in Hollywood, as always most of them went nowhere, including what
might have been a fascinating film based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American
Tragedy. Knowing Dreiser’s work, Eisenstein quickly developed a script for
the film, but Paramount, already being attacked by the virulent anti-communist
campaign waged by Major Pease, the president of the Hollywood Technical
Director’s Institute, disliked what the Russian director had created. And by
“mutual consent,” Paramount and Eisenstein voided their contract and treated
the Eisenstein group with a return ticket to Moscow at Paramount’s expense.
Eisenstein’s new “friend” Charlie Chaplin,
however, suggested that the director contact the US socialist writer Upton
Sinclair for help. Knowing Sinclair’s work in the USSR, Eisenstein met with the
writer and the two quickly became friends, Sinclair securing an extension of
Eisenstein’s travels, while suggesting that Eisenstein, Aleksandrov, and Tisse
visit Mexico, even creating a “Mexican Trust Fund,” supported mainly by
Sinclair’s wife May, that would allow Eisenstein to make a film in Mexico. The
project, consisting of several related films, titled ¡Que viva México!,
was doomed almost before it started.
In Mexico, the director met with Frida
Kahlo and Diego Rivera among others. But as Almendros recounts, “he soon got
into trouble.” Sinclair’s brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough, whom the American
author had sent to accompany Eisenstein to Mexico, wrote back that he was distressed
over the fact that the Russian director was spending a great deal of time with
young Mexican boys. Some of his amorous adventures in Mexico are fictionally
portrayed in Peter Greenaway’s 2015 film Eisenstein in Guanajuato.
But the real shock came when Kimbrough
discovered a cache of Eisenstein’s drawings of the youths, all depicted with
enormous penises.
Receiving Kimbrough’s report, the prudish
Sinclair closed down the Russian’s filmmaking project, confiscated and cut up
the several films Eisenstein was shooting, and cabled the facts of what he had
found to the Soviet authorities.
Even more devastating for Eisenstein, was
what happened afterwards, as he returned to the US for his voyage home. British
arts critic Ronald Bergan summarizes:
“It was in the sketches
that Eisenstein drew in Mexico in 1931 that his often regressive phallophilia
reached its peak. During the shooting of the unfinished Que viva México!,
Eisenstein found time to make many of his finest erotic drawings. The drawings
as well as photos of nude males were found in the trunks and boxes Eisenstein
sent to Hollywood from Mexico and were seized by US Customs agents, causing a
scandal. It was also from Mexico that he sent his English friend Ivan Montague
the well-known photograph of himself perched on a gigantic bulbous cactus
plant, which seemingly protrudes from between his legs, with the words, ‘Speaks
for itself and makes people jealous.’"
Almendros’ essay suggests, however, that
none of this confirmation of Eisenstein’s sexuality should come as a surprise
if you simply view his movies. He begins his notable essay by relating the
memorable incident when Eisenstein met the model Kiki in Paris:
“While Sergei Eisenstein
was in Paris, the notorious artist’s-model Kiki de Montparnasse gave him a copy
of a book of her memoirs with the dedication: ‘Moi aussi j’aime les gros
bateaux et les matelots’ (‘I too love big ships and sailors.’) Kiki was no
dummy, and might have owed her great popularity not only to her good looks but
to her wit. That “clin d’oeil” to the Soviet film director proved that she had
a better insight into Battleship Potemkin, otherwise considered an
austere film, than most of her contemporary critics and scholars with their
Marxist analysis.
The cinematographer and many other
critics who followed his lead have now reread Eisenstein’s 1925 film, decoding
what was all along right before our eyes to observe. Almendros begins with the
obvious, the lack of women except in maternal roles in nearly all of
Eisenstein’s films:
“Potemkin (1925), the director’s most honored work, has
been considered a revolutionary film not only because of its subject—a revolt
on a ship—but for its treatment, for the fireworks of its editing technique,
for the profound feeling of realism in cinematography and acting, and because,
as often noted, it departed in its structure from conventional ‘bourgeois’
drama—the eternal love affair between a man and a woman. Great war movies of
the times, such as King Vidor’s The Big Parade, and innovative Westerns,
such as John Ford’s The Iron Horse, could not do without the sentimental
love story. Its absence from Potemkin was attributed solely to Sergei
Mihailovich Eisenstein’s pristine concentration on the social forces governing
society according to Marx. Yet there is evidence to support another hypothesis:
The absence of a conventional love affair in the film could well result from
the fact that there was very little space for women in the world of the great
master of Riga. Not only Potemkin but his other films—Strike, October,
The General Line, even to a great extent his later sound films Alexander
Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible—reflect this.
Perhaps
romance is truly out of place in certain genres. Truffaut used to tell me**
that the love story was the weakest, often unnecessary part of Westerns. In
such pedagogical films as Potemkin, the description of all the social
forces in place, excluding all others, could result in a gain in intensity and
clarity. Sexuality as an added theme would only cloud the main issues.
The
trouble in sustaining the theory that Potemkin as an asexual film is
precisely that it is very sexual. Or should I say, homosexual.”
“Eisenstein’s camera lingers on the rough, splendidly built men, in
a series of shots that anticipate the sensuality of Mapplethorpe,” the leader
of the revolt, Vakulinchuk, also naked to the waist—a moment before he has been
fully dressed—“flashing his broad torso while he demands the beginning of
action.” He points out the important moment of the film when “the cannons are
raised to fire, a sort of visual ballet of multiple slow and pulsating
erections can be easily discerned.”
Bergan, extending on comments about Almendros’ essay, recalls the
momentary shot of a young man tearing open his shirt to reveal his bare chest
and the glimpse of two sailors obviously kissing as the cannons rise.
Looking back on my review from 2014 titles “The Distracted Gaze,” long
before I had read the Almendros essay even I had realized that Eisenstein’s
camera treated the sailors and their ship
somewhat as lovers, and that the ship and its
keepers had, in fact, become one. The polishing of the ship’s parts were the
same as rubbing up against their own bodies. As I wrote in my early essay on Battleship Potemkin:
“Everyone, of course, has spoken of
Eisenstein’s montage, the rhythm of sequential cuts by which he constructs his
films, and, particularly in this work, the great director is clearly determined
to shift images every few seconds, creating a sense of reality very much like
the real-life duration of
Certainly I recall how homoerotic the images were, and am surprised that
I didn’t mention that fact, perhaps being too overwhelmed, like so many others,
with the film’s political message that I didn’t dare to tread on more corporeal
matters. But seeing it again I am also overwhelmed by the number of images
during what the film subtitles the sailors’ “night of anxiety” when we see not
only groups of sailors sleeping together—not something they even dared in the
homoerotic first scene, separated out into their hammocks—and approaching one
another in what appear to be hugs or preludes to a kiss, scenes not pointed to
in Almendros’ and other critics’ more recent comments.
Eisenstein and his collaborators returned
home as demanded, but as Almendros observes, obedience did not seem to have
been sufficient. The director was “ostracized for five years, and not allowed
to make another film...until he got married to his assistant and friend Pera
Atacheva. (It seems they never lived together, despite the total devotion Pera
always had for Eisenstein before and after his death).”
*As critic Ronald Bergan
writes in The Guardian Eisenstein was a self-confessed phallic
obsessive. And in a lecture he delivered in 1930 to the very group which Major
Pease headed, the Hollywood Technical Director’s Institute, Eisenstein himself
declared, “It is my desire to intone the hymn of the male, the strong, the
virile, active, vertical composition! I am not anxious to enter the dark
phallic and sexual ancestry of the vertical shape as a symbol of growth,
strength or power. It would be too easy and possibly too offensive for many a
sensitive listener! But I do want to point out that the movement towards the
vertical perception launched our hirsute ancestors on their way to a higher
level."
**The Spanish-born,
Cuban exiled cinematographer worked on several of Truffaut’s films, those of
Éric Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder, as well as filming Days of Heaven, Kramer
vs. Kramer, and Sophie’s Choice. He died of AIDS- related
complications in 1992.
Los Angeles, February
22, 2022
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (February 2022).
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