Word: eisensteins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Russian movies in the heyday of Eisenstein, Podovkin, and Dubshenko were aesthetic masterpieces. Each single shot would have made a still photograph magnificent in its own right. But the beauty of these films is so striking that it is occasionally distracting. At some point between then and now, the Russians learned to use the aesthetic genius of the early movies in a more natural way, without degenerating into the general conventionality of Soviet painting, or the sterility of most of socialist realism. A Summer to Remember includes its quota of trite sequences, but for the most part it uses inspired...
...vivid contrast to Welles the Wunderkind, the Telepix offers up Eisenstein, the past master; and by this stage in his career, Eisenstein's mastery had definitely passed. In Part I, lumbering and contrived as it is, at least one can take pleasure from the intricate visual patterns that Eisenstein creates; in Part II, all that remains is a bevy of intolerably melodramatic actors wearing ludicrous hills of fur, droning like a Russian language record played at too slow a speed, and walking with all the grace of Kate Smith in a cha cha contest. In addition to this, Eisenstein switches...
...movie opens with a perfectly framed view of Ivan's crown. The camera lingers on this rich still-life and then retreats to take in another balanced, framed shot of the cathedral of Moscow. Later on, at a wedding banquet, Eisenstein sights down the table as the whole party toasts Ivan. With Rockette-like precision all the goblets rise and stop for a moment, just long enough so that we see all twenty of them lined up evenly in two rows...
There is no denying that each frame of Ivan results from a true genius for design, but that is the trouble. The beauty of each individual shot tends to make the motion picture as a whole somewhat static. Eisenstein hovers ponderously over each of his symmetrical arrangements and seems to say in a very obtrusive voice: "See what a thing of loveliness I have constructed...
Gone are the days of Potemkin when crowds swirled down the Odessa steps in a millrace of fluidity. Like Rembrandt, Eisenstein ended his career in a vein of classicism, but unlike Rembrandt, he worked in a medium that does not prosper when it gives up movement for stasis and symmetry--even when that symmetry ascends to such sublime heights as Ivan the Terrible, Part...