Sergei Eisenstein | Бежин луг, Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) / 1937

a living picture book of boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isaak Babel, Sergei Eisenstein, and Aleksandr Rzheshevsky (screenplay, based on a story by Ivan Turgenev), Sergei Eisenstein (director) Бежин луг, Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) / 1937

 

The film finally awarded Eisenstein after his return from Mexico and the long five-year ostracization, as we have already discussed in my essay on Battleship Potemkin was Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow).

     In this instance we have only fragments of the film, yet here too we can easily perceive that despite the film’s story, central to those who hired Eisenstein, the director himself focused time and again upon the young boys’ beauty in opposition to their fathers and the other elders who would destroy their own youth in revenge for familial betrayal. Just a few clips make it clear how Eisenstein’s camera was focused, quite brilliantly, upon homoerotic images of the young boys he hired from the peasant farmers on location, something so obvious here that I recognized it even before reading Nestor Almendros’ revelatory 1991 essay, particularly since the political tale is so diluted within the fragments available.

    In the first frames of the film Eisenstein already sets up the opposition between the old order—the kulaks (the prosperous landed peasants under Czarist rule) and the church priest who, as one of the “young pioneers” puts it, would all like to return to the past of the Czars—and the Soviet newborns by outlining the deathly battle between the 11-year old Stepok (Vitya Kartashov) and his brutal and psychotic father (Boris Zakhaya) who before the film has begun beaten the boy’s mother to death because, Stepok explains, “she understood me.” In short, if his father belongs to the old order, out to destroy the new, Stepok begins the movie as an outsider, something akin in Eisenstein’s more mythological rather than party-line version of what today we might describe as a queer individual in the sense that he has broken away from the traditional, familial society. Surely that is not the message the Communist youth group and leaders intended, but it was clearly etched out in Eisenstein’s intent. The following pictures beautifully represent the opposition that is sustained throughout the film, even if the “young pioneers” soon after take over the church, oust the kulaks, and take control of the fields and horses.

    At first, the boys are also presented as figures who are kept out: out of the bar, the church, and the society of elders; but gradually as they come to take on greater and greater communal responsibilities they become accepted, welcomed into the larger farm-sharing society in which they exist. Yet the images of the early part of the film truly reveal their “outsiderness,” which is some respects is continued throughout the film simply because Eisenstein determines to place them in scenes in which they function and depend primarily upon one another.

     Before and even during the major events of the film—the community takeover of the church, the communal struggle to put out the fire set by the kulak saboteurs of the corn depot, the kulaks’ arrestment, the boys’ night with horses, and the final struggle with the escaped saboteurs during which Steptok’s father kills his son—the director almost turns his film into the huge picture book akin the 232-page work by Georges and Ronald C. Nelson found among Michael Jackson’s Neverland book collection in the 1993 police raid for suspected pedophilia, The Boy: A Photographic Essay.

      As I mentioned, Eisenstein also presents pictures of young peasant girls, mostly of the plump side, and even creates a scene depicting a heterosexual teenage romance; but for the most part, the stills we have left, other than beautiful nature scenes, are lovely photographs of young boys and men got up in various garb, some from vestments found in the church when they attempt to turn it into a club and others suggesting the wild pelts they wear, not unlike Mickey Rooney’s costume for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, during their night with the horses. To prove my point I have selected more than a dozen examples, sprinkled throughout this essay.

   We know for certain that by this time we have entered the cinematic world of someone like the later François Reichenbach of the 1950s.

     If commentators now wonder how Eisenstein escaped the censorship of the Soviet leaders for his Battleship Potemkin, we can be rather assured that particularly after his Mexican activities, they did not miss the fact the director had turned the tale of a pioneer youth hero into a study of the faces and sometimes full bodies of beautiful boys. And surely much of the mysterious shutdown of the filming of Bezhin Meadow and the director’s recanting had to do with the obvious homosexual, almost pedophilic film he was attempting to make. I think one can safely argue that they censored this film because of its homosexual content, even if they could not ever admit that was the reason and Stalin would, nonetheless, later embrace Eisenstein’s propagandistic Alexander Nevsky.

    In short, Eisenstein probably was censored for his homosexuality. But lest we immediately shed tears over that fact, it is probably useful to remember that the director also survived through his own cowardice, his refusal to admit that he was gay and his willingness to continue as a Soviet propogandist. As the critic Almendros argues,

 

“To me, the more questionable of Eisenstein’s submissions were not the humiliations he endured while pursuing subjects that censorship would (and, in many cases, ultimately would not) permit. It is more disturbing that he implicitly tolerated the worse fates of others: the banishment of his beloved teacher—“my second father,” he used to call him—the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who died in Gulag in Siberia; the murder by the NKVD of his close friend and collaborator from early theatrical days, Sergei Tretyakov; the dispatching of his onetime screenwriter Isaac Babel, and about half of Eisenstein’s students at the Moscow School, to the Gulag, where many perished....”

 

     Accordingly, we can strongly protest the director’s behavior and even accuse him, as younger Soviets have, of lying to later generations; but we cannot simply dismiss his remarkable images and filmmaking, much of which was generated through Eisenstein’s closeted and not so closeted homosexuality.

      Herbert Marshall, Eisenstein’s English ex-disciple at the Moscow Film School, compared his mentor to a Russian Matryoshka doll, the doll that within contains various other dolls of diminishing sizes: “Outside [Eisenstein] was a Soviet Russian[;] inside, according to some, he was a Christian, to others he was a Jew, to yet others a homosexual….”

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).