Word: eisenstein
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Sergei Eisenstein's much disputed film is being shown at the Fine Arts Theatre in Boston for the first time. I can not see why the critics were so partial to the director in their reviews and so annoyed with Upton Sinclair who cut two hundred thousand feet of film to a length suitable for a feature picture. After viewing the film one is convinced that the original scenario remains intact, and that the only possible reason to reprove Mr. Sinclair would be that he made the film too short...
...Director Eisenstein is, without doubt, one of the cleverest directors in the world today. He transposes landscape, faces, shadows, and even emotions to the screen without resorting to artificial lighting. His plot, however, is a thin one, and his nostalgic idealism may possibly bore one. He sketchily traces the life of a peon in the Diaz regime. The rich land owners are cruel, avaricious, and they love to assault innocent poor girls. The peon was miserable; therefore he revolted, and the Mexico of today arrived. Happiness, and an impeccable army, blooming youth, and more army. A glorious consummation...
Thunder Over Mexico (Upton Sinclair) is a feature length null picture whittled out of the gigantic 243,000-ft. opus which Director Sergei Michailovitch Eisenstein made in Mexico over two years ago. In silent form with a musical accompaniment, it investigates a minor miscarriage of social justice on a Mexican hacienda toward the end of the last century. A peon and his fiancee go to their ranch owner for permission to marry. One of the hacendado's guests rapes the girl. The peon strikes her assaulter, then tries with four friends to retrieve the girl from a tower into...
Based on the culmination of centuries' growth of the spirit of self consciousness in the Russian people with the mutiny of the crew of the armored cruiser Prince Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein's "Potemkin," now showing at the Fine Arts Theatre, is a high-strung, example of the possibilities of the silent film. Director Eisenstein's masterful use of highly dramatical material, although artistically well done in parts, is marred by his overlooking some of the fundamentals of photography. While a large part of the greatness of this film rests on the clever use of unusual and striking pictorial effects...
According to present standards, the acting is overdone; anger is portrayed by swelling of the bosom, stamping of the feet, and vigorous twirling of the moustache, which may be all right for the movies, but is strange to Harvard Square. In spite of that, however, Eisenstein's utilizing water scenes, like a mountain stream immediately after the breaking up of a log jam, the pounding of surf over a breakwater, or the moon rising through ships' rigging over the mist of motionless, oily seas, as symbolic of the feeling of the Russian peasantry, gives the picture an appeal...