1st Edition

The Cinema of Eisenstein

By David Bordwell Copyright 2005
    344 Pages 326 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    342 Pages
    by Routledge

    The Cinema of Eisenstein is David Bordwell's comprehensive analysis of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, arguably the key figure in the entire history of film. The director of such classics as Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible, October, Strike, and Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein theorized montage, presented Soviet realism to the world, and mastered the concept of film epic. Comprehensive, authoritative, and illustrated throughout, this classic work deserves to be on the shelf of every serious student of cinema.

    Preface 2005 -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- 1. A Life in Cinema -- From Theatre to Cinema -- The Silent Films -- Europe, Hollywood, and Mexico -- Projects and Problems -- Triumph and Decline -- The Particularities of Method -- 2. Monumental Heroics: The Silent Films -- Toward Plotless Cinema -- Strike -- Potemkin -- October -- Old and New -- A Note on Versions of Eisensteins Silent Films -- 3. Seizing the Spectator: Film Theory in the Silent Era -- Between Theory and Practice -- Agitation as Excitation -- Montage in Theatre and Film -- Film Language and Intellectual Cinema -- Film Formas Dialectics The Eclectic Modernist -- 4. Practical Aesthetics: Pedagogy -- Structure and Style: The Episode -- Structure and Style: From Episode to Work -- Assaulting the Eye -- 5. Cinema as Synthesis: Film Theory,-1948 -- From Agitprop Formalism to Socialist Realism -- Conceptions of Psychological Activity -- Film Form: Organic Unity -- Montage: The Musical Analogy Revisited -- PathosandEcstasy -- A Mature Poetics -- 6. History and Tragedy: The Late Films -- Alexander Nevsky -- Ivan the Terrible -- 7. The Making and Remaking of Segei Eisenstein -- Legend in Life -- The Assimilation into Orthodoxy -- The Exemplary Modernist -- Eisenstein Our Contemporary -- Chronology -- Filmography -- Further Reading -- Bibliography -- PhotoCredits -- Index.

    Biography

    David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has written several books on film theory, history, and criticism, including On the History of Film Style (Harvard, 1997) and The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (with Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, Routledge/Columbia, 1985).