THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEI EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

THE ECSTATIC EYE

centrepompidou-metz.fr #Eisenstein

EXHIBITION 28.09.19 > 24.02.20

PRESS KIT

Eisenstein montant Octobre, 1927. RGALI, 1923/1/217, f.1 © Russian State Archives of Literature and Art

FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION.................................................................................5 2. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN.......................................................................7 3. EXHIBITION ITINERARY.....................................................................9 4. FIVE QUESTIONS TO THE EXHIBITION CURATORS ..........................22 5. LIST OF ARTISTS ............................................................................24 6. CATALOGUE ....................................................................................25 7. RELATED EVENTS ...........................................................................26 8. YOUNG VISITORS ...........................................................................28 9. EXHIBITION PARTNERS...................................................................29 10. IMAGES AVAILABLE TO THE PRESS...............................................32

THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

Sergueï Eisenstein, Ivan le Terrible, 1945 © FSF

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

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INTRODUCTION THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS From September 28, 2019 to February 24, 2020 GRANDE NEF Sergueï Eisenstein, the mythical film director who made the glory of Russian and Soviet cinema is really more than a film director. Cultivating the art of montage and of rhythm to the point of inventing a new visual language in the middle of the 1920’s, Eisenstein always put himself at the crossroads of the arts. A man of the theatre, artist, theorist, collector and insatiable reader, he never ceased to enrich the history of art throughout his career.

The exhibition The Ecstatic Eye. Sergueï Eisenstein, filmmaker at the crossroads of the arts therefore intends to enable the discovery or the rediscovery for French and European audiences of a major name of the seventh art and of world culture, a man considered as the Russian “Leonardo da Vinci”, and who was the first to present himself as a film director dressed in artists’ clothing. We are therefore insisting on Eisenstein's the doer, the amateur, the collectionner, the commentator and the image editor, a visionnary Eisenstein, always eager to experiment in a radical manner and to have a deep and durable impact on the spectator. By drawing on the vast range of references that Eisenstein uses in his work, this confrontation between fixed images and images in motion can unveil in an exemplary way the manner in which a creator produces his images, at a time when the question of artistic genesis had become central : showing how Eisenstein prepared himself in his work, using chefs d’œuvres from the history of world art and works by foreign and Russian contemporaries but also and above all the artistic heritage preceding the arrival of the cinema, painting as well as sculpture, engraving, drawing, and architecture. The exhibition will also insist upon Eisenstein interest and yearning for popular cultures in an abolition of hierarchies which is representative of his associative logic.

Centre Pompidou-Metz is offering a retrospective of his work in relation to the influence of this universal heritage. We will cover the great films which made him famous (The Strike, 1925 ; The Battleship Potemkine, 1925 ; October, 1928 ; The General Line, 1929 ; ¡ Que Viva Mexico ! , 1932 ; Alexander Nevsky, 1938 and Ivan the Terrible, 1944-46), but also his theatrical experiments, his drawings delving into his prolific imagination, or his unfinished projects. The exhibition goes back over the artistic inspirations and visionnary approach of the film director, to the productions with strong ties to the history of Russia but also to his numerous voyages in Europe, to Mexico and to the United States, to his preferred reading and his encounters.

If, during his lifetime, Eisenstein was an artist that the whole world snatched up and whose work and philosophy deeply moved minds, today, this aura has considerably worn off owing to his cinematagraphic work no longer being systematically shown via the cinema clubs. Likewise, the complexity and the reach of Eisenstein accomplishments have for a longtime been underestimated because of idealogical interpretations reducing his work only within the context of Communist USSR and to his relationship with Stalin.

Eisenstein, the theorist, reread the history of art by the light of the cinema. Indeed, the cinema does not so much represent for him a technical medium, but more the most elaborate response to primordial human needs. In this respect, the cinema enables him to rethink the whole of the history of art and world culture, which is translated in the exhibition by a gallery of paintings and of sculptures that he

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

analyses in cinematographic terms and of which certain can also, later on, be interpreted through the prism of the cinema. The Eisensteinian history of art is therefore deliberately anachronistic and disorganised, open to non-western cultures.

In addition, whilst taking inspiration from the contemporary constructivist aesthetic of the artist, the layout and the hanging will follow fundamental principles of Eisenstein’s philosophy and practice, such as conflict-montage, collision-montage, ectasy, enabling the establishment of explosive and unexpected relationships between the images beyond hierarchies and classifications.

With this exhibition, Centre Pompidou-Metz is proposing a rediscovery of the seventh art, through one of the most important figures of its history.

For the exhibition, the curators Ada Ackerman and Philippe-Alain Michaud and the set designer JeanJulien Simonnot will explore specific exhibition conditions which will allow the organisation of and the confrontation of, fixed works and moving images and to present films in a form which is not reducible to a cinema theatre : monumental projections and analytical approaches with the help of slow-motion, loop extracts and frozen images.

Curators : Ada Ackerman, Exhibition curator and Head of Research at the CNRS/THALIM, art historian, Eisenstein specialist.

Philippe-Alain Michaud, Exhibition curator and curator at the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Head of the Experimental cinema Department

André Kertész, Sergueï Eisenstein, 1929 Épreuve gélatino-argentique, 24,3 x 18,1 cm Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne © RMN-Grand Palais © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

2.

SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN in staging attended by Grigori Alexandrov, acrobat and actor at the Prolekult Theatre who would become his closest collaborator. At the end of the year he was sent down from the Military Academy.

Sergueï Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born in Riga in Latvia in January 1898, almost at the same time as the cinema. His father Mikhail Ossipovich Eisenstein (1867 – 1920), came from a Jewish family converted to Orthodoxy, was an architectural engineer : he left important Art nouveau creations in the Latvian capital. His mother, Ioulia Ivanovna Konetskaia, came from a background of rich Russian merchants.

Sergueï grew up in a cultivated and cosmopolitan atmosphere speaking fluently, apart from Russian, French, English, and German.

In 1922, he met the founders of the FEKS, the Factory of the Eccentic Actors, Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Gueorgui Krijitski and Sergueï Youtkevich with whom he wrote the pantomime La Jarretière de Colombine. The previous year, he followed the lessons of Vsevolod Meyerhold whose biomechanical theories would have a decisive influence on his conception of an actors’ way of acting. “He was divine, incomparable…I was going to adore him for he rest of my life” Eisenstein would write twenty-five years later in his Memoires, which did not prevent the artist from leaving his workshop, at the end of 1922. In 1923, with Sergueï Tretiakov, he mounted the very avant-gardist staging of Enough stupidity in every wise man, after the classical play by Alexander Ostrovsky, in which he experiments with the attractions1 to which he devoted an important article in the review LEF, the review of the artistic left Front , run by Vladimir Maiakovski and Ossip Brik. It is also in Enough stupidity in every wise man that the very first film directed by Eisenstein appears, Glumov’s Diary in which the acrobatics and antics of clowns are mixed with allusions to the world of European and American detective films as well as the special effects by Méliès.

In 1906, Sergueï travelled with his parents to Europe and saw his first film in Paris : Les 400 Farces du diable by Georges Méliès. In 1909, his parents divorced and his mother moved to Petrograd (today Saint-Petersburg) : Eisenstein remained with his father in Riga, but regularly visited his mother. He made a definitive move to join her in 1915.

In 1917, the Revolution broke out in Petrograd. It was in a climate of insurrection that Eisenstein attended the first performance of the Masked Ball, a play by Lermontov, staged by Meyerhold, with sets and costumes by Golovine. This experience was to be a determining factor for his future artistic career as a stage director and film director. Drawing from a very early age, he published political charicatures in the Saint Petersburg press under the pseudonyme of Sir Gay. He sketched out stagings and drew sets for commedia dell’arte shows. On March 2 (March 15 according to the Gregorian calendar), the Tsar Nicolas II abdicated : on April 4 (17 according to the Gregorian calendar) : Lenine entered Russia and in October, after the failure of General Kornilov’s military coup, the Bolsheviks took over power in Petrograd.

In 1924, Eisenstein produced in a gas factory, Tretiakov’s play Gas Masks, which heralds his passage from the theatre to the cinema. His first feature length film, The Strike, draws on both the tragic and the burlesque registers, outlining a syncretic style which would never cease to assert itself in Eisenstein’s cinema. In 1924 he broke up with the Prolekult Theatre. In December 1925, The Battleship Potemkine, which celebrated the 1905 revolt of the Odessa sailors was presented at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. With this film, Eisenstein instantly aquired world celebrity. He travelled to Berlin and worked with Edmund Meisel on the musical score of Potemkine, met Friedrich Murnau, Emil Jannings, Fritz Lang, Karl Freund…

This stay in Berlin inspired him the aborted project Glass House, which was supposed to take place in a sky-scrapper made entirely of glass.

In 1918, Eisenstein joined the Red Army as an engineer and was sent to the front where he was appointed painter-decorator in the theatrical department. Demobilised in September 1920, he was sent to the Moscow Military Academy where he studied Japanese. Giving up his engineering studies, he decided to devote himself exclusively to the theatre.

In October 1920, he joined the first Workers’ Theatre of the Proletkult as head set-designer ; he was soon to become the artistic director. He designed the sets and costumes for The Mexican (after Jack London) in 1921, in a much-noted staging and gave lessons 1

A strategy of broken or visual narrative intended to produce the maximum impact on the spectator.

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In Moscow he met Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and received propositions to go and work in Hollywood. Eisenstein began to prepare his following film, The General Line, but the work was interrupted by the commission of a film celebrating the events of October 1917. Shot in Leningrad, with colossal means, October was presented to the public in 1928. It was in this film that Eisenstein developed the intellectual technique of montage according to which the assembly of two images does not produce a third image but a concept : thanks to this technique which enabled the cinema to accede to the register of abstraction, Eisenstein considered producing a film after Das Kapital by Karl Marx, an aborted dream which would never cease to haunt film buffs.

and where he would stay for over one year, for the shooting of ¡ Que Viva Mexico ! which was more than trying and not without mishap. He frequented Mexican artists and intellectuals, notably the mural painters Diego Rivera and Jose Clémente Orozco, and drew intensely.

At the beginning oft he year 1932, following an insistent demand from Stalin, he resolved to return to the USSR, leaving his film unfinished and abandonning the rushes to Upton Sinclair, who would never give them back to him – the film would never be mounted by Eisenstein, much to his dismay. Upon his return to Moscow he took up the Chair of film direction at the VGIK (the State Cinematographic Institute) : henceforth he would not stop teaching, producing on the fringe of his directing projects often unfinished, an important theoretical corpus.

In 1934, because homosexuality was sanctioned, he married the journalist Péra Attachéva, his unfailing supporter and faithful confidante. In 1935, he began the shooting of Bezhin Meadow, which the government broke off definitively in 1937 and for which he had to dedicate himself to self-criticism, whilst witnessing his friends and collaborators fall under Stalinst Terror, his master Meyerhold was the first concerned and was executed in 1940. He set to work on a book about montage. In 1938, he directed Alexander Nevsky, a narrative which went back over the foundation of the Russian nation, whilst at the same time in a transparent manner comparing the situation of the Russian nation facing Nazi Germany. The film and its success earned him a return to favour in the eyes of the Stalinist regime.

In 1939, he travelled to Central Asia and made test shootings for a new project, The Great Fergana Canal, which remained unfinished. In 1940, whilst he started to think about his work Method, which took him back to the theatrical activities of his youth, he mounted Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Bolshoi Theatre, with serious diplomatic issues.

In 1928, he was appointed professor at the Institute of Cinema and at that time broke away from the group of the LEF. In 1929, before the release of The General Line, Eisenstein, Grigori Alexandrov and Eduard Tisse, left to go abroad on a mission to study film sound. In order to finance his voyage, Eisenstein gave lessons, conferences and interviews, wrote articles and tried to direct films. He spent time in Germany, took part in the Congress of independent film directors at La Sarraz in Switzerland and shot a film devoted to abortion, Womens’ Misery, Womens’Joy before being expulsed from the Confederation ; he visited Belgium and Holland and resided in Paris where he directed Romance sentimentale with Alexandrov.

In Paris, he met a number of intellectuals, film directors and artists including Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Jean Painlevé, Georges Bataille, and even James Joyce. On February 17, 1930, he gave a conference at the Sorbonne on “the intellectual cinema” whereas the projection of The General Line was forbidden. In May, he set off for the United States with Tisse and Alexandrov, after having negotiated a contract with the Paramount Company. He was invited to speak at several universities on the east coast, and then stayed in Hollywood where he worked on a number of scenarios all of which were rejected

by Paramount, and he met Griffith, Chaplin, Disney who became his friends as well as Upton Sinclair.

The latter committed to producing ¡ Que Viva Mexico ! , a film devoted to Mexican history and the Mexican Revolution. In December 1930, in a fiercely anti-Communist climate, Eisenstein, accompanied

by Tisse and Alexandrov, left the United States and arrived in Mexico, which he described as a paradise

Starting in 1941, Eisenstein began his work on Ivan the Terrible, of which the first part was presented in Moscow in 1945. The second part of the film, was to be refused and censored by the Central Commitee of the Communist Party, was completed in 1947. Subject to a great deal of pressure and anxiety, Eisenstein’s health rapidly and seriously deteriorated ; in spite of everything, he continued to teach at the VGIK and to work on his theoretical œuvre. He died of a heart attack in February 1948, he was only 50 years old.

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3.

EXHIBITION ITINERARY Because of his constant dialogue with the arts, Eisenstein’s work lends itself admirably to the exhibition’s approach : firstly it allows the use of the sources which the film director himself used in each one of his films, borrowed from an extraordinarily vast historical and cultural range, stretching from antiquity to modern times and from the Orient to the West.

The exhibition then examines the effects of montage which Eisenstein developed in his cinema, based on the mode of collision. And finally, by moving the films within the space of the exhibition, to be in contact with other works and other mediums, we will explore a new regime of film visibility, notably with the assistance of analytical approaches enabling the exposition of iconographic circulations.

The layout of the exhibition, conceived according to a chronological and monographic plan, thus combines a didactic approach which will allow the visitor to discover the artistic sources of each one of the films, and an immersive approach which will invite him/her enter into a succession of spaces each one of which has its particularity, each work by the film director making use of a range of references and a specific style. Finally, the last section of the exhibition, reversing the approach, endeavours to show the manner in which Eisenstein, from the beginning of the 1930’s, uses the cinema, no longer just as an art, but also as a method and a theoretical instrument, which enabled him to analyse works from the past, architecture, drawing, painting or sculpture in cinematographical terms.

He therefore renewed the means of analysis in use in art history.

EXHIBITION DESIGN The exhibition design, made by Jean-Julien Simonot, uses an original structure of modular scaffolding, a reference to the constructivist culture and architectural vocabulary, crucial to Eisenstein’s aesthetic, whilst at the same time allowing a fluid manner of organisation for the confrontation between the different mediums and to place, literally, the film at the centre of the spaces.

This aesthetic choice structures the layout according to the fundamental principles of Eisenstein’s philosophy such as conflict-montage, collisionmontage, and ecstasy.

A complementary exhibition space will allow the visitor to discover in images Eisenstein’s life and artistic trajectory through a rich photographic and film documentation, which for the most part will be presented for the first time in France, recounting the voyages of the film director and of his numerous encounters and friendships with the artists and intellectuals of the whole world.

The exhibition of films does not replace but completes the projection in a theatre : all of the film director’s movies will be projected in their full versions, during the whole of the duration of the exhibition, in the Auditorium Wendel, at Centre Pompidou-Metz. image JJ Simonot, scenographer

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SECTION 0 HIS MAJESTY EISENSTEIN

Man Ray, S.M. Eisenstein, 1929 Épreuve gélatino-argentique, 8,3 x 6,2 cm Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne © Man Ray Trust / Adagp, Paris © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Guy Carrard / Dist. RMN-GP

In this introductory section, the visitors will at first discover an installation which brings together the most emblematic sequences of Eisenstein’s cinema simultaneously mounted on three screens which allow the presentation of obssesional motives and recurrent artistic themes which define his work. In this way, we can immediately underline the force of Eisensteinian cinema using his most celebrated images, of which certain have remained deeply engrained in the collective visual memory, sometimes without even being associated with the name of the film director. Such an installation enables, as an analytical approach to extract Eisenstein’s specific lyricism, a lyricism which mixes ecstasy with cruelty and with pathos, just as the film director himself claimed, “in my films, we shoot crowds of people, farm workers that we had buried in the earth up to their necks after having caught them with a lasso had their skulls ground by horses hooves (¡ Que Viva Mexico !), we crushed children on the steps of Odessa we threw them from the roofs, (The Strike), we had them killed by their parents (The Bezhin Meadow) we threw them into flaming flax (Alexander Nevsky) [...] a shot horse is hanging from a bridge which is opening (October), and arrows sink into the bodies tied to a fence below Kazan under siege.”

From a formal standpoint, Eisenstein’s montage of images obeys and illustrates the principle of collision which he developed and made claim to, that is to say a montage based on relationships of difference, of shock and of contrast and not on relationships of identity or analogy.

Faced with this will be mounted a group of photographic portraits of Eisenstein, produced in very various styles, during the course of the 1920’s and 1930’s by his Soviet contemporaries, but also some European and American : Dmitri Debabov, Moissei Nappelbaum, Germaine Krull, André Kertész, Man Ray, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy ou Margaret Bourke-White… illustrating how much Eisenstein was a man who was recognised in the avant gardist networks of his time and that at an international level.

During his lifetime, he was indeed the darling of numerous artistic and intellectual circles. Whilst outlining a biography in images, these portraits are a testimony to the manifest pleasure that “His Majesty Eisenstein” procured from playing at this theatrical game.

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SECTION 1 THEATRE TRAINING

Sergueï Eisenstein, Esquisse pour La Maison des cœurs brisés de Bernard Shaw, costume du Personnage de Sam Mangan Эскиз костюма Менгена к пьесе Б. Шоу “Дом, где разбиваются сердца“. 1922. papier, crayon graphique, aquarelle, 35,2 х 22,8 © Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

Jacques Callot, Scapino, Capitano Zerbino, issu de l’ensemble des Balli di Sfessania Ensemble de 18 estampes Bibliothèques-Médiathèques de Metz, (FIE_CAL_390_1)

Here we will deal with the initial relatively little known first phase of Eisenstein’s artistic career, in the domain of the stage, whereas he did in fact contribute to the theatrical effervescence which characterises Russia during the 1920’s. We will firstly go back over his training with his “spiritual father”, the stage director and dramaturge Vsevolod Meyerhold, who then revolutionised the Russian theatrical stage. All through his life, Eisenstein would maintain a relationship of profound admiration but also a rivalry with him.

past as to experiments which were contemporary to him, as his assimilation of Cubism, of Excentrism, and of Constructivism testifies. Eisenstein’s creations dialogue in this way with those of Alexandra Exter, of Lioubov Popova, of Alexander Vesnine...

In addition, it is as part of his theatrical activity that Eisenstein approached the camera for the first time, on the occasion of the staging of Enough stupidity in every wise man for which he directed his very first film, with Dziga Vertov as instructor, Glumov’s Diary, presented in this section. Marking the transition between Eisenstein’s theatrical and cinematographic periods it testifies to the importance for the stage/film director – as for the whole of the Russian avant-garde theatrical scene – of circus culture and acrobat and clown shows, perceived as any other ressource. It is on this occasion that Eisenstein developed his famous reflection on the subject of “the montage of attractions” that he defined as “any agressive moment of theatre […] from the moment it subjects the spectator to a sensory or psychological action experimentally verified and mathematically calculated to obtain determined emotional shocks”.

Meyerhold initiated him into biomachanics, a new method of preparing actors, which aimed to “organise” his/her body in a way which “excites” the spectator, which would lead Eisenstein to become interested in a problem, which remained fundamental for him, that of expressiveness in art.

With Meyerhold, he shared the same liking of the commedia dell’arte, for the circus, and for the funfair theatre, as do illustrate in the exhibition a group of engravings taken from the Balli di Sfessania by Jacques Callot. Photographic documents of shows staged by Eisenstein as well as a selection of sketches, never shown in France, for the sets and costumes allow an evaluation of the theatrical and scenographic innovations imagined by the future film director. Eisenstein reveals himself here to be sensitive as much to the theatrical traditions of the

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

SECTION 2

THE STRIKE

Jacques Callot, [12], [Le joueur de violon] de la série Les Gobbi Ensemble de 20 estampes Bibliothèques-Médiathèques de Metz, (FIE_CAL_418_1)

Sergueï Eisenstein, La Grève, 1925 © FSF

The first full length feature film directed by Eisenstein as part of Goskino, was devoted to a strike movement in a factory under the old Tzarist regime, to the process by which the strike comes about and develops. The film was initially conceived as an episode of a much greater ensemble entitled Towards to Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which was intended to expose the different lessons that the Russian workers had learnt from the combats preceding the October Revolution. Whilst making use of real sets and making the hero the mass of rebels, The Strike mixes the comic register with that of the tragic, the world of the circus and of the theatre with that of the factory, combining the symbol with the real thing. To Dziga Vertov, who accused him, for this film, to have plagerised him Eisenstein shot back that he did not practice “cine-eye” but rather “cine-fist”, “capable of cracking skulls”. Eisenstein directed this film with the assistance of Grigori Alexandrov, who would assist him in all his film projects up until Mexico. The Strike scored a notable success in Russia, propulsing Eisenstein towards celebrity as a revolutionary film director. The film won the Gold Medal at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris of 1925, but it was not until 1967 that it was commercially distributed in France.

notion of “types” which is the process enabling the elaboration of the appearence of a person in such a way that his personality and his social class should immediately become recognisable and identifiable to the spectator. In this sub-section are assembled works by Augustin Carrache, Jacques Callot (the Gobbi), Grandville, Johann Kaspar Lavater and Charles Le Brun whose heads of expression are explicitely quoted in The Strike when Eisenstein films the metamorphosis of the police informers into animals expressing their respective characters.

A second group of works is devoted to the treatment of the space of the factory and of the city, which in conformity with the Eisensteinian syncretic system associates older artistic sources (Piranesi’s imaginary prisons) to the Constructivist contemporary industrial imaginary world (Popova, Deineka). Finally, from the point of view of the plot, we understand the principle of visual collision developed by Eisenstein by associating the film noir and the American detective (The Mark of Zorro by Fred Niblo) to a mannerist painting (The descent from the cross by Tintoretto), which is a reminder of how much Eisenstein’s film uses not only an avant-gardist vocabulary but also the classic sacred iconography. Likewise, a monumental battle painting by Alexandre Protais, Soir de Waterloo, enters in resonance with the impressive massacre scene on which the film comes to an end, comparing the murdered strikers to animals put to death in the abatoir.

In this section, a first group of works deals with notions of caricature and of phisiognomy2, which Eisenstein makes a great deal of use of, exercising a decisive influence on the development of his 2

Science claims a correlation between a person’s appearence and their character.

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SECTION 3

THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKINE

Alexandre Rodchenko, Affiche pour Le Cuirassé Potemkine, 1926 101 x 72 cm © Adagp, Paris, 2019 © A.Dobrovinsky Collection

Sergueï Eisenstein, Le Cuirassé Potemkine, 1925 © FSF

The Battleship Potemkine tells the story of a rebellion which took place in Odessa in 1905 and treats it as a prefiguration of the 1917 Revolution : the sailors of the Battleship Potemkine, who were forced to eat rotten meat, start a mutiny which spreads from the port to the entire city, before being savagely repressed. With his film, produced in 1925 in a record time of three months, in a battleship specially reconstituted for the occasion, Eisenstein instantly acceded to world celebrity, notably thanks to the distribution of his film in Berlin – the music for the Berlin version, composed by Edmund Meisel, played an essential role in the success of the film.

This fame was never refuted : in 1958, at the Brussels Universal Exhibition, The Battleship Potemkine was declared “the best film of all time” out of twelve films pushing Chaplin’s The Gold Rush into second place. In France, because of its highly subversive content, the film did not obtain a distribution authorisation until 1953.

He does indeed extol revolutionary solidarity, through the dialectic motive of the “one for all / all for one”, played out throughout the film. Eduard Tisse’s photography, Eisenstein’s faithful operator in all of his projects, contributes a great deal to the success of the film, notably by his lyrical manner of filming mists and waves.

Whist insisting upon Eisenstein’s dialogue with his contemporaries (posters by Alexander Rodtchenkoand by El Lissitzky, photomontages by Youri Rojkov, of the Sergueï Tretiakov Theatre...), this section exposes the sources of the figurative motives developed by Eisenstein in his film : homoerotic themes with the cast of the dying slave

by Michelangelo and a group of drawing studies of male nudes by Alessandro Allori which refer to a sensual and powerful sculpturalness of the bodies of the sailors filmed by Eisenstein : pathetic themes with a study for the Massacre of the Innocents by Nicolas Poussin and engravings by Félix Vallotton which are an echo of the cruel repression exercised by the Cossacks in the film : extatic themes finally with a terra cotta from the xviii th century after Bernini’s Transverberation of Saint Theresa by Luc Breton, which enters into resonance with the tearful figure of the mother with child whose pram hurtles down the steps of the Odessa stairway indisputably, Eisenstein’s most famous anthological sequence – and over and above that in the history of the cinema.

Following the example of The Strike, the film was initially intended to be a more ambitious project, going over all of the events of 1905, The Potemkine rebellion, the only episode in the end retained, was intended to act as a key moment, a condensation in itself of the revolutionary spirit of 1905. Just like the synecdochic principle dear to Eisenstein, la pars pro toto 3.

3

The part represents the whole.

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SECTION 4

GLASS HOUSE

Sergueï Eisenstein, Glass House, vers1927 © Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

after Das Kapital by Karl Marx, Glass House would never see the light of day. However, in the writings and reflections of the film director, he would never cease to come back to this, including in the form of a “spherical book” which he aspired to write in the theoretical domain.

It is in Berlin in 1926, inspired by modern architecture and its experiments concerning glass, notably by the work of Mies van der Rohe, that Eisenstein decided to shoot a film, inside a skyscraper entirely constituted of this material. His discovery afterwards of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work only reinforced his desire to go through with this project. The film director, who then declared feeling “hemmed in, in the cinema”, imagined exploiting the ressources of transparency in order to radically revolutionise the cinematographic medium and transform it into a “cinema of weightlessness”, thanks to the superposition of the shots, the adoption of a polycentric viewpoint and the abolition of the usual spatial points of reference. In addition, the project included a powerful dystopic dimension since it dramatised a society where everything is visible by everybody and where the progressive realisation by the inhabitants of the skyscraper of this absolute and general transparency established a climate of suspicion and oppression, leading to despair and to death.

From this project there remain a group of drawings and of notes which allow us to imagine what might have ressembled this “impossible film”, representative of the demon of incompletion running through all of Eisenstein’s works. Apart from these works, in this section is to be found a structure specially conceived for the exhibition, composed of transparent panels on which fragments of films referring to the aesthetic issues of the Glass House will be projected onto screens in varying formats.

In the middle of it will be placed drawings coming from the Chtchoussev Architectural Museum of Moscow devoted to different Russian and Soviet architectural projects (Chtchoussev, Vesnine, Kroutikov, Melnikov…) which testify to the irruption of glass and of the issue of transparency in Soviet architectural theory and practice of the 1920’s.

A project as ambitious as it was visionary, like many other of Eisenstein’s aborted projects, such as that, which was contemporary to this one, to shoot a film

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SECTION 5

OCTOBER

Auguste Rodin, L’Éternel printemps, vers 1884 Bronze patiné, H : 64, l : 58, P : 38 cm, Don Madame Stephen Pichon, 1933 Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie de Besançon, Inv. 933.6.1 © Besançon, musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie – Photographie Chipault & Soligny

Sergueï Eisenstein, Octobre, 1928 © FSF

In 1927, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, the Soviet government commissioned a film from Eisenstein, still crowned by the success of Potemkine. Having at his disposition almost illimited means, the filmmaker transformed Leningrad into a gigantic film set – the city was deprived of electricity for several days because of the shooting and it was the custom to make a joke of the fact that the film provoked more damage to the city than the Revolution itself !

and epic, but also tries out clowning around and ridiculessness, which was to earn him a good deal of misunderstanding and rejection from both the audience and the Soviet critics who were expecting a repeat of Potemkine.

Another source of discord and controversy : Eisenstein’s decision to use a non-professional actor, Nikandrov, the spitting image of Lenine, to portray the revolutionary leader, who was then the subject of an immense cult.

With October, the idea was to transform into mythical images the founding event of the Soviet regime, to shoot a film-monument in ist honnour, in which the popular masses occupy the most important place. In addition it was to be the first film in which Stalin was to intervene notably to eliminate from the red screen any presence of Trotsky.

The October section goes back over Eisenstein’s positioning between different regimes relationships with history by assembling his historical working documentation relative to the October Revolution4, the film recording of the monumental theatrical reconstitution in 1920, by Nikolai Eveinov, of the events of October 1917 and photographs of the shooting of the film. In addition, Eisenstein, in October, tries to play out the 1917 Revolution but also to give it a trans-historical meaning : this is why sources are used which give the Russian Revolution an allegorical and universal dimension : a reference to the French Revolution with a group of engravings by Jean-Louis Prieur, to the events of the Commune and more generally to revolutionary imagery of the nineteenth century. Eisenstein knew and was since his childhood fascinated by the French revolutions and naturally turned towards this model when he needed to shoot his film.

But Eisenstein did not satisfy himself by just making a glorification film, he also pursued his experimental research in it, attempting notably to establish an “intellectual cinema”, capable of reconciling the emotional spheres with those of philosophical reasoning. He thus aspired to go beyond the cleavage which divided the Soviet cinematographic milieu between the partisans of the “acted” (fictional cinema) and the “non-acted” (documentary cinema). In the sequence known as from the Gods, he therefore tries to translate into images the concept of atheism. Eisenstein does not therefore hesitate to mix up genres : pathetic 4

Photographs showing the looting of the Winter Palace.

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

SECTION 6

THE GENERAL LINE

Gustav Klucis, La jeunesse communiste à l’assaut du semis ! , Affiche, 1930-1931 Lithographie sur papier. 102,4 x 72,6 cm. Courtesy of the Latvian National Museum of Art, Inv. No. VMM Z-7855 ; Cat. No. 264. Photo by : Normunds Brasliņš.

Sergueï Eisenstein, La Ligne générale, 1929 © FSF

The General Line, a project initiated in 1926, had as its objective, through the peasant Marfa’s combat to modernise her village, to call for the industrialisation of the rural areas and the elimination of a povertystricken past, undermined by tradition.

In this section, apart from a group of unpublished photographs of film shooting (like the majority of film shooting photographs they are used as an introduction to each section), a series of works and documents are presented which refer to the productivist and modernist ideology presented in the film, notably through the motive of the tractor (photomontages by Vassili Elkine, by Solomon Telingater, posters by Gustav Klucis). Likewise, the presence of the rationalist architecture of Le Corbusier at the heart of the film is underlined, through the creations of his Soviet disciple Andrei Bourov, allowing Eisenstein to pusue his exploration of the relationship between architecture and cinema.

Eisenstein does not hesitate in parallel to these reminders of a new mechanised and modern era, to refer to an ancient mythological vocabulary, notably in the famous sequence known as Marfa’s dream, to establish a new mythology. The mating of the cow and the bull as a cosmic explosion, but also the couple formed by the peasant and the animal refer in fact to different levels of myths like architypes, that Eisenstein invokes by way of the ghost-like and fantasmatic figure of the Colossus, for a long time attributed to Goya and that of Europe abducted by Zeus, portrayed in the exhibition by a bronze by Valentin Serov whose art Eisenstein appreciated enormously.

Interrupted by the commission of October, the shooting of the film started up again in 1928, with a reworked scenario, and was released under the title of The Ancient and the New. From that moment on, he had to glorify Stalin’s first Five-year plan launched in 1928 and notably the enterprise of collectivisation of the rural areas. He recounts the foundation of a modernised and mechanised farming cooperative, and the combat of the Kolkhozes aided by the Communist party, against the Koulaks, the rich peasants and against the administrative strictness. Indeed, thanks to her untiring efforts, the peasant Marfa succeeds in providing her village with an exemplary farm by its modernity and its productivity, with a tractor and with a bull. The film is placed under the auspices of a sensual lyricism, of which the extasy culminates in the famous sequence with the cream separators, which the film maker assimilated to the “new Grail”. Eisenstein was hoping to apply his reflections on audiovisual montage to his film and to have it synchronised by a European company on the occasion of his tour abroad, but the negotiations on the subject ended in failure. The projection of the film was not authorised in France at the last minute in 1930, whereas the film maker had intended to give a conference on it at the Sorbonne.

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

SECTION 7

¡ QUE VIVA MEXICO !

Orchestre miniature Squelettes utilisés pour orner les autels lors du Jour des morts, éléments consommables, 75.1474.76.1-2 IA bis, Paris, musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Photo © musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac

Sergueï Eisenstein, La Matildona, vers 1931.

Crayon de couleur sur papier, 10.67h x 8.27w in (27.10h x 21w cm) Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York and Matthew Stephenson, London © Estate of Sergei Eisenstein

In 1931, without having been able to bring to fruition any of his numerous film projects for Hollywood, a consequence of the Great Depression, Eisenstein began shooting a new film, devoted to Mexico, probably on the advice of Robert Flaherty.

Having taken an interest in Mexican culture since his staging of The Mexican in 1921, Eisenstein thought he would devote his film to the history and to the revolutions of the liberation of the Mexican people. Discovering a land which he perceived as a paradise and which fascinated him because of the coexistance of what he sees there between several cultures, religions and styles, he decides to film a cinematographic fresco composed of documentary material and of fictional stories acted out forming four episodes framed by a prologue and an epilogue, each episode being devoted to an artist (Goya, Posada, Orozco…). To the political dimension of the project a strong ethnological and anthropological dimension is attached, sustained by Eisenstein's readings on “pre-logic” and “primitive” philosophy.

Much tot he film maker’s dismay, who took it as a tragedy and a traumatism, the project remained unfinished and would even be mutilated since ist producer, the writer Upton Sinclair, terrified by the size oft he project, stopped financing the filming and conficated the rfimled rushes. Eisenstein, obliged to return to the USSR under pressure from Stalin, would never see them and would not be able to mount them during his lifetime. Of this project there only remains a group of rushes and several versions mounted by people other than Eisenstein who only supplied an approximation of the initial Eisensteinian plan.

This section is divided into two parts, respectively devoted to the prologue of the film and to the episode known as the Feast of the Dead. In the prologue which testifies to the symbiosis of the Mexicans with their arts as well as the syncretism of their culture, the works of Mexican artists to whom Eisenstein was close or who had marked him are assembled – the photographers Tina Modotti and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the mural artists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros and also the painter Jean Charlot. The second section is devoted to the Feast of the Dead, a major component of Mexican popular culture, in which are assembled, alongside the engravings by José Guadalupe Posada, to whom the episode is devoted, a group of pieces borrowed from the Musée du Quai Branly – skulls made of sugar, skeletons of musicians made of cardboard – that can be found in sequences filmed

by Eisenstein where the spirits of the carnival and the Dance of Death come and join in, in a spirit of generalised subversion. An ensemble of drawings made by Eisenstein during his stay in Mexico is also presented in this section : these very transgressive and liberated line drawings, often bicoloured, develop an iconography which does not hesitate to telescope with myths and we come back tothe erotic and violent themes developed by Eisenstein in all of his films (torment, cruelty, eroticism, eroticism of the male body…) and which assume in ¡ Que Viva Mexico ! a heightened dimension. They constitute the author’s private diary, to which they provide a joyful graphic experimental terrain.

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

SECTION 8

THE BEZHIN MEADOW

Katsushika Hokusai, Branche de cerisier en fleur, Années 1820 Paris, musée Guimet - musée national des Arts asiatiques Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (MNAAG, Paris) / Thierry Ollivier

Icône Russe : Vierge de Vladimir Yaroslavl, 1781.

Tempera sur panneau de bois enduit, revêtement métallique d'argent avec incrustation de pierreries colorées.

Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais. © Petit Palais/Roger-Viollet

Inspired both by the eponymous novel by Ivan Turgenev and by the story, treated as a myth by the government, of “Pavlik” Morozov, a young peasant who denounced his father as a saboteur of collectivisation, Eisenstein conceived it in the middle of Stalinist terror, a film dramatising the combat , leading to death of a son and his father. He hoped with this project, to produce an audiovisual polyphony, whilst experimenting with the method of interior monologue. He again used the procedure which was dear to him in his Mexican project of the coexistance of several temporalities, not hesitating in the use of mythical and biblical archetypes, such as the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. He also mobilises numerous visual references, from the Japanese print to Flemish art and orthodox icons. Whereas Socialist realism had been adopted, as early as 1934, as a method of official creation and the war on “formalism” was beginning, the authorities interrupt the filming and demand of Eisenstein a new more “realistic” scenario, that he co-signed with the writer Isaac Babel, together with the recruitment of other actors. The shooting which came out of this was yet again interrupted – false rumours then abounded in the international press as to the arrest of Eisenstein – and the project was definitively buried in 1937 by Boris Choumiatski, Head of the State Central Cinematographic Administration.

Eisenstein had to devote himself to the humiliating and arduous exercise of autocricism by going back over “the errors of the Bezhin Meadow”.

Choumiatski ordered that the copies of the film be destroyed ; Eisenstein sank into a profound nervous disorder. The negative, conserved on the premises of Mosfilm, was destroyed during the bombing of Moscow by the Nazis in 1941. The film editor, Esther Tobak, at the request of the film maker had saved photogrammes of the two versions of the film which Naoum Kleiman and Sergueï Youtkevitch were able to use in 1967 to partially “ressusitate” the project, revealing the visual richness of Eisenstein’s plan and his dialogue with the arts.

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In this section an ensemble of casting photographs is presented giving an idea of the Eisensteinian method of “typing” and which considering the tragic destiny of the film, come across as poignant documents. Fragments of contact sheets are also shown which are taken from the sequence, highly controversial because of its Dionysiac character, of the transformation of the church into a workers’ club. They are accompanied by an icon and a Japanese print which represent the two poles of inspiration, aesthetic and thematic, between which Eisenstein’s visual film world is unfurled, of which the compositions come from systems of perspective other than classic, a double reference which we will come across again in yet another form even more pronounced in his last film, Ivan the Terrible.

THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

SECTION 9

ALEXANDER NEVSKY

Anonyme, Saint Georges, Novgorod, XVIème siècle Tempera sur bois. Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais © Petit Palais/Roger-Viollet

Vassili Trokhatchev , Photographie de tournage, Alexandre Nevski, 1938 © Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

The film goes back over in a hagiographic manner the victorious resistance of the Russians, led in the xviii th century by the prince and saint Alexander Nevsky against the Teutonic invasion – an episode which in 1938, the year of Anschluss, obviously took on a very contemporary significance. Stalin did indeed give the commission to Eisenstein in order for him to awaken the Russian patriotic conscience faced with the menace and the growing aggressiveness of the Nazis, by making use of folklore, heritage and Russian national history. For Eisenstein it was an ultimate chance to “retreive the situation” with the government following his succession of failures culminating in the Bezhin Meadow. For his film, Eisenstein took his inspiration from the aesthetic of the icon and of the Lubok5 and began a collaboration with the composer Sergei Prokofiev whom he considered as his musical alter ego, in order to explore what he called the “verticalmontage”, that is to say the audiovisual counterpoint which was to reach its most brilliant execution in the celebrated sequence of the Battle on the Ice. To portray the prince, the choice fell upon Nikolaï Tcherkassov, whose performance would be crowned in 1941 with the Stalin Prize. Dmitri Vassiliev was imposed on Eisenstein as co-director.

lived silently as a source of shame. The film was precipitously withdrawn from the screens at the time of the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of non-agression, before being re-released massively in June 1941 after the German invasion of Soviet territory.

The section concentrates on the sequence of the Battle on the Ice : if the brilliant audiovisual montage which it uses is appropriate for the cinematographic medium, it does not share any less with the history of art, the classic problem of the manner of representing a battle, Eisenstein in this respect carefully studied the advice of Leonardo da Vinci.

Several sources of inspiration for the sequence are to be found mobilised here, of different epochs and contrasting styles but all of which come from the heroic genre : two casts of cavalrymen coming from the Panathenean Frieze of the Parthenon ; an icon from the school of Novgorod on which features a figure of Saint George as a warrior ; a large scale engraving by Jacques Callot representing the siege of Breda, a popular engraving6 representing the warrior Anika, in which colour, like music in the film, plays the role of a counterpoint. Eisenstein’s sequence is in addition related to a battle scene extract from the Birth of a Nation by David W. Griffith, the founding narrative of the north American federal state and of modern cinematography, to which Eisenstein owes a great deal.

The film, of which the premiere was triumphally presented at the Bolshoi, was a huge success and earned Eisenstein the Order of Lenin award, the highest distinction possible, which the film maker 5

Popular Russian art of engraving.

6

Lubok.

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

SECTION 10

IVAN THE TERRIBLE

Utamaro Kitagawa , La maison de thé Nakadaya, vers 1794-1795 Paris, musée Guimet - musée national des Arts asiatiques Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (MNAAG, Paris) / Harry Bréjat

Sergueï Eisenstein, Ivan le Terrible, 1945 © FSF

In 1941, following his success with Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein received a proposition to shoot a film about the Tsar Ivan iv, nick-named The Terrible, still in the perspective, in the context of the war against Germany, to exalt Russian patriotism around strong national figures. Up until then, Ivan the Terrible had the inflammatory reputation of being a sadistic, perverted and immoral monarch. Stalin wanted therefore to restore his image by insisting on his decisive role in the process of unification of the Russian state in the xvi th century and in the construction of the nation. For the dictator, it was thus a means of justifying his own resort to terror, in the name of State interest : the film showed that Ivan was cruel because he had no other choice than to be that way. The shooting only started in 1943, whilst Eisenstein was in Alm-Ata in Central Asia where the Soviet production studios had been evacuated to. The film maker imagined a vast lyrical fresco in three parts, with Shakespearean colours, which had to go back over the tsar’s efforts to unify Russian territories into a modern and powerful state, inspite of numerous interior and exterior obstacles. Inspired by Pouchkine’s Boris Godounov, Eisenstein’s project constituted a perilous reflection on power for its author since it portrayed the tsar in the grip of solitude and remorse, that his conscience tormented, notably in the second part, before sinking into insanity and complete isolation in the third part. Eisenstein again made use of Nikolaï Tcherkassov for the title role, on whom he imposed numerous difficult exercises in order to aquire his hieratic body language, and he renewed his collaboration with the composer Prokofiev.

In order to film the numerous interiors, decorated with icons and frescos, Eisenstein relied on the talent of Andrei Moskvine. If for the first part Eisenstein won the Stalin Prize in 1946 – at the celebration for which he was taken ill with a violent heart attack – the second part was to be censored and unauthorised because of its historical distortion : the tsar was characterised as a Hamlet lacking willpower and surrounded by degenerate supporters recalling the Klu-Klux-Klan ; the film failed because of its excess of mysticism and its unwarrented fascination for shadows. Indeed, in 1947, Stalin hosted Eisenstein and Tcherkassov, for an audience at midnight in the Kremlin, in order to correct what he considered to be a problem with the film, which is revealing of the importance which the little “Father of the peoples” attached to the film. The second part which Stalin would censor, and which included a sequence filmed in colour on an Agfa reel brought back from Germany like a war trophy, would not come out of the USSR until 1958.

As for the third part, which would never see the light of day, only a few scenes were shot.

In this section, numerous sources of inspiration for this “film-opera” with sumptuous sets and costumes are called upon : icons, from which Eisenstein borrowed the inverted perspective and the colours and which regularly appear on the screen : a painting of peddlers (Vassily Sourikov), a Japanese print to which Eisenstein adds his gestual, his composition and his shadow world… He thus develops a film with a delibrately antinaturalist and syncretic aesthetic, which refers just as well to German expressionism as it does to Disney’s cartoons, and the Kabuki Japanese theatre.

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

SECTION 11 EISENSTEIN THE ART HISTORIAN AND THEORIST

Le Greco, Le Christ au jardin des oliviers, 1er quart 17ème siècle Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Hervé Lewandowski

Vassily Kandinsky, Figure verte, 1936 Strasbourg, musée d'Art moderne et contemporain, Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI

During the course of the 1930’s and 1940’s when he was finding himself more and more marginalised as a film director, Eisenstein withdrew towards teaching at the VGIK7 and engaged in an intense theoretical activity, leaving behind a multitude of texts and essays as visionary as they were ambitious, but often unfinished. He mobilised and handled an impressive multitude of references taken from extremely varied cultural and visual worlds, without paying attention to disciplinery and geographical frontiers, taking in each technical innovation with enthusiasm (cinema in colour, in three dimensions, television...). he developed a number of hypothetical theories that he had the opportunity of testing on his students. One of his major projects was thus represented by the “cinematism” : in Eisenstein’s opinion the cinema had to function as a “method”, to use his own term, which enables the decoding, analysis and rereading of the history of art according to cinematographic procedures and categories (montage, cutting, framing...). Eisenstein, in advance of his time did indeed try to unmask cinema in earlier artistic production, predating the invention of the film projector. This is what the last section of the exhibition endeavours to show. It starts with documentary views of the film maker’s apartment, a veritable autoportrait of the latter which functions like a thought space as extremely varied objects which were assembled there (books and works of art) were disposed according to a principle of montage, forming a “film of objects”.

Just like emanations from this theoretical laboratory, were thus exposed different works taken from all mediums, coming from various periods and cultures, which Eisenstein had analysed : views of the Parthenon photographed from several angles at the end of the nineteenth century, paintings by El Greco, Tintoretto, Toulouse-Lautrec, Delauney and even Kandinsky, films by Walt Disney and by Jean Painlevé…

7

This hanging combines and unites two key notions of Eisensteinian aesthetics which at first sight, should oppose each other but which come together in the exhibition space in a dialectic unity dear to the artist : on the one hand the montage, of which Eisenstein endeavours to find manifestations as early as in Antiquity ; on the other hand, plasmaticity, that is the capacity of a form to metamorphose itself continuously, a primitive and mythological persistance, which according to him, finds its reincarnation in Disney’s art.

National Institute of Cinematography.

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4.

FIVE QUESTIONS TO THE EXHIBITION CURATORS Centre Pompidou-Metz –How did the idea of this exhibition come about ? Is it unique ?

ecstatic. For him, Piranesi for example, produced ecstatic architectures which appeared to wish to prolong themselves, soar upwards indefinitely, out of frame. As for the eye, it is a question of recalling of course the lexicon of the cinema, but also to insist on the fact that Eisenstein is an eye ; he embodies the vision he has of the history of art. We often think of him as one of the greatest film directors, but we forget too often how much he also practiced other arts, such as the theatre, drawing, dance and was a great theorist and art historian. We therefore wanted to insist on this interdisciplinery character of his work as well as on his capacity to combine the popular with the academic.

Ada Ackerman - Dominique Païni who was the initiator of the genre exhibited cinema, notably with the exhibition Alfred Hitchcock and art : fatal coincidences at the Centre Pompidou, wanted to devote an exhibition to Eisenstein. This is how the project came about. Over the past few years, there have been a multitude of exhibitions on Eisenstein.

Our exhibition is unique in that it has the vocation of showing how he is part of the world history of the arts, past and contemporary. The exhibition endeavours to present how his work comes into resonance with classic issues of portrayal. The idea is also to show just how much Eisenstein took part of course in the adventure of Russian and Soviet art but also that his work falls within, more generally, the history of world modernism, since he is the link with the European, American and Mexican avantgardists.

CPM - How do you exhibit Eisenstein’s cinema ?

Philippe-Alain Michaud - Since 2000, there has been a great movement of exhibitions of artist’s films, we find in history representations of the xxth century, many approaches to the exhibition of films, in particular in the construcitivist context. In the 1920’s, the constructivist theatre and the plays in which Eisenstein took part, integrated the cinema : it is thus that his first film, Glunov’s Diary, was projected.

CPM - What do you mean by the title The Ecstatic Eye. Sergueï Eisenstein, filmmaker at the crossroads of the arts ?

AA - Ecstasy is a fundamental concept of Eisenstein's theory and practice. He understands it in the etymological and literal sense of ek-stasis which means “to come out of oneself”. For him, the most important material in art, was the spectator’s psyche. The idea therefore consisted of transforming, of deeply moving the spectator, to make him/her come out of him/herself in such a way that he/she becomes another political and social man/woman and for that Eisenstein took a serious interest in the process of religious and mystic ecstasy. In the theatre, just as in the cinema, he sought to lead the spectator to ecstasy. When Eisenstein took an interest in transformation, the passage from one quality to another, he also does it from the point of view of the work of art and of the composition.

Consequently, he considers many artists to be

Eisenstein’s films are not a priori made for exhibition but for projection in cinema theatres. The idea of an exhibition is to try to present his films in another way, by confronting the images shot by Eisenstein with other cinema images and other works from the visual arts such as sculpture, painting, photography and drawing. The aim is to show the visual sources which have marked him. His style is very syncretic, it is based on creating relationships and combinations of completely heterogenerous systems of reference.

The idea of the exhibition is therefore to produce another approach in order to accede to Eisenstein's films.

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

CPM - What are the most notable works in the exhibition ?

CPM - For you, what are the most notable moments of the associated programme of the exhibition ?

PAM - The most notable works in the exhibition are first and foremost Eisenstein's films which will be shown in a fragmentary way. All the films will be projected in extenso in the Auditorium Wendel of the Centre Pompidou-Metz during the whole duration of the exhibition. Inside the exhibition itself, will be presented film loops by Eisenstein confronted with the works which have inspired them, for example the engravings of Piranesi’s prisons which will be compared with The Strike. In the first instance, Eisenstein used sources taken from the history of art using an extremely broad spectrum, which stretches from the Orient to the west and from antiquity to modern times. He uses these visual sources in his films, then he discusses the works from the past from a cinematographic point of view in order to show that the cinema did not only come into being with the technical recording and projection apparatus.

This is a sort of technical application of a way of thinking of the images on the basis of movement.

AA - We are working with the Russian stage director Vladimir Pankov whose style is characterised by a mixture of the arts which recall Eisenstein’s aesthetic, and evoke what the film maker called the “montage of attractions”, supported by a troupe of multi-talented actors. Pankov wishes to show how much what Eisenstein was doing during the 1920’s is still relevant today and can find a continuity in the most experimental contemporary theatrical forms.

Amongst the projections of the full versions of Eisenstein’s films there will be two interventions by the composer Pierre Jodlowski, author of the cine-concert of The Strike. Eisenstein had initially intended that his film The General Line was to have a soundtrack, but was never able to realise this during his lifetime. Yet we are in possession of notes that he wrote in order to provide for this sound track. Pierre Jodlowski has studied them and is preparing an installation using Eisenstein’s notes and the film’s images. This is a world premiere, exclusively for the exhibition.

AA - Numerous works will be coming from Russia, notably from the Russian National Literary and Artistic Archives (RGALI), which houses the most important Eisenstein archive collection. The artist’s plans and documents as well as certain elements from his personal collection, certain Russian works, such as a group of monumental paintings by Pavel Korine which come from the Tretyakov Gallery or the photomontages by Youri Rojkov to illustrate a poem by Mayakovsky, will thus be shown for the first time to the French public.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the Musée du Quai Branly is to proceed with the restauration of several exceptional objects relative to the Mexican feast of the dead : skeletons in papier-maché, including a five-metre high monumental figure.

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

5.

LIST OF ARTISTS Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Pavel Korine

Jacques Callot

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Charlie Chaplin

Anton Lavinsky

Honoré Daumier

Michelangelo Buonarroti dit Michel-Ange

Alexandre Deïneka

Tina Modotti

Eugène Delacroix

László Moholy-Nagy

Robert Delaunay

José Clemente Orozco

Walt Disney

Jean Painlevé

Guillaume Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne

Giovanni Battista Piranesi dit Le Piranèse

James Ensor

Lioubov Popova

Alexandra Exter

Nicolas Poussin

Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard dit Grandville

Jean-Louis Prieur

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

Alexandre Protais

David Wark Griffith

Emmanuel Radnitzky dit Man Ray

José Guadalupe Posada

Diego Rivera

Katsushika Hokusai

Jacopo Robusti dit Le Tintoret

Utagawa Hiroshige

Alexandre Rodtchenko

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris dit Le Corbusier

Auguste Rodin

Vassily Kandinsky

David Alfaro Siqueiros

Andor Kertész dit André Kertész

Domínikos Theotokópoulos dit Le Greco

Kitagawa Utamaro

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Gustav Klucis

Félix Édouard Vallotton

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

6.

CATALOGUE By going back over the sources of artistic inspiration and the visionary character of Eisenstein’s work, it is a question of discovering or rediscovering a major figure of the seventh art and of world culture, a man considered las a Russian “Leonardo da Vinci”, who was the first to present himself as a film director in artist’s clothing. Eisenstein was at one and the same time a doer, an amateur, a collector, a commentator and an image editor.

By making use of the vast range of references mobilised by Eisenstein in his work, the catalogue confronts fixed images and moving images, revealing in an exemplary manner the way in which a creator builds his images, at a time when the question of artistic genesis had become central.

SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN

THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS EXHIBITION CATALOGUE PUBLICATION DIRECTED BY : ADA ACKERMAN PUBLISHER : ÉDITIONS DU CENTRE POMPIDOUMETZ BOUND, 320 PAGES, C. 21 X 27 CM LANGUAGE : FRENCH PUBLICATION DATE : 25 SEPTEMBER 2019 ISBN : 978-2-35983-059-0

L’ŒIL EXTATIQUE

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

7.

RELATED EVENTS SAT. 28.09 CINE-CONCERT THE STRIKE Pierre Jodlowski

around with his Director of Photography, Eduard Tisse and his assistant Grigori Alexandrov.

Eisenstein had great hopes for this film. Alas, he was never able to terminate it, the producer having decided to close down the adventure whilst conserving the parts which had already been shot.

Eisenstein found himself for ever dispossessed of his precious rushes. The film would be mounted by several people, including Alexandrov, declaring having made a version“as close as possible to what Eisenstein wanted”. Alexandrov’s version does allow the discovery of the power of Eisenstein’s images, of which the ambition was to recount in a sumptuous epic all the complexity of Mexico and its history.

8 PM | Studio | Cine-Concert | 88' Electroacoustic music to accompany a silent film.

The composer is developing his work in France and abroad in the field of acoustic music and electric sound and is characterised by its theatrical and political integration. His activity leads him to perform in the majority of venues devoted to contemporary music but also in parallel circuits : dance, theatre, the visual arts, electronic music. He is also founder and Artistic Director of the studio éOle – in residence in Odyssud Blagnac since 1998 – and at the Novelum festival in Toulouse and its région (from 1998 to 2014).

XIXA Brian Lopez and Gabriel Sullivan 8.30 PM | Studio | Concert | 120' For a long time Brian Lopez and Gabriel Sullivan performed at the heart of the alternative rock scene in Tucson Arizona, collaborating with Giant Sand, Mambo Orkesta and Calexico. When they discovered la Chicha, they decided to explore this psychedelic pop, derived from a mixture of Cumbia and of guitars, which had its moment of glory in Peru towards the end of the 1960’s.

After the concert by Xixa, the evening will continue with a DJ set.

Let yourself get carried away by these diabolical rhythms and celebrate the Feast of the Dead loud and strong !

30.09 > 06.10 THE GENERAL LINE – SOUND SYNOPSIS Pierre Jodlowski Studio | Installation | Continuously during opening hours For the General Line Eisenstein dreamt of composing a soundtrack which would have allowed him to experiment with the different principles of audiovisual montage that the advent of talking films seemed to be able to offer him and the potential of which he greeted with enthusiasm. From this project, which he was never able to put together, have come down to us several pages containing his precious and stimulating indications. From these notes, the composer Pierre Jodlowski will create a piece of music presented in the form of an installation.

12.02 and 13.02.2020 MONTAGE OF ATTRACTIONS SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN Vladimir Pankov

FRI. 01.11 NOCHE DE LOS MUERTOS ¡ QUE VIVA MEXICO !

8 PM | Studio | Theater Play in French and in Russian, surtitled in French.

Eisenstein calls “attraction” anything which can influence the attention of the spectator and provoke an emotional reaction in him/her.

Enough stupidity in every wise man by Alexander Ostrovsky, creation of a Russian comedy from the nineteenth century staged by Sergueï Eisenstein, outlines a governing principle in the history of Russian theatre. The contemporary stage director Vladimir Pankov examines Eisenstein’s relationship with staging. With his prolific style, he creates a

4.30 PM | Auditorium Wendel | Projection | 85' As an echo to ¡ Que Viva Mexico ! , a film which Eisenstein was never able to mount during his lifetime, let's celebrate the Feast of the Dead !

Fascinated by mexican culture, Eisenstein chose to make a film about Mexico, which he travelled

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total spectacle, which brings together all of the stage techniques, music, sound, dance, marrying the sublime and the grotesque, in order to pass on to the spectator a powerful experience.

Ackerman (CNRS/THALIM) and Philippe-Alain Michaud (Mnam),curators of the exhibition The Ecstatic Eye. Sergueï Eisenstein, filmmaker at the crossroads of the arts at the Centre Pompidou-Metz.

This round table will be followed by the projection of Ivan the Terrible at 8.30 PM.

This creation has been initiated by the Festival Passages in collaboration with Centre PompidouMetz as part of the exhibition The Ecstatic Eye. Sergueï Eisenstein, filmmaker at the crossroads of the arts. The creation begun at the end of the year 2018 in Moscow and will continue in Vire, where the world premiere will take place at the Préau CDN de Normandie-Vire, A creation of the Gitis - The Russian Institute of Theatre Arts in Moscow / Sound Drama Company. As part of the Russian Seasons with the support of the Russian Cultural Seasons Foundation - and the Institut français.

SUN. 03.11 ARCHITECTURE, CINEMA, MONTAGE : EISENSTEIN AND LE CORBUSIER Pascal Rousse 4 PM | Briey-en-Forêt | Conference Shuttle service leaving Metz at 2 PM. Return predicted at 8 PM.

OCT. > FEB. 2020 PROJECTIONS OF CINEMATOGAPHICAL WORKS BY EISENSTEIN

Considerably impressed by different films by Eisenstein that he saw in the USSR in 1928, Le Corbusier began a friendship and artistic and intellectual exchange with the film director.

Eisenstein was himself the son of an architect and fascinated by architectural theory, and had already read several works by Le Corbusier.

The affinity between the two men crystallised in the film The General Line (1929), in which the experimental farm is directly inspired by the principles stated by Le Corbusier in his book Vers une architecture.

Pascal Rousse proposes to cover the friendship and the exchanges between Eisenstein and Le Corbusier and to show how they influenced each other respectively in their way of thinking and in their work. He will most particularly insist on the architectural component of Eisenstein’s work.

Preceded by a visit of the Cité radieuse and then followed by a projection of The General Line.

Auditorium Wendel | Projection Ahead of the projections, conferences and encounter will be organised in order to exchange on Eisenstein’s methods of creation, the content of his works, his theoretical reflections and his rich and varie relationships with other arts.

FRI. 2 PM | Eisenstein’s world, diaporama | 10' 2.10 PM | The Battleship Potemkine, 1925 | 80' 3.30 PM | October, 1927 | 100' SAT. 11 AM | Eisenstein’s world, diaporama | 10' 11.10 AM | Ivan the Terrible, First part, 1944-46 | 100' 2 PM | IIvan the Terrible, 2nd part, 1944-46 | 100' 4 PM | ¡ Que Viva Mexico ! , 1932/79 | 85'

SAT 16.11 CINE-CONCERT ALEXANDRE NEVSKI Orchestre national de Metz

SUN. 11 AM | Eisenstein’s world, diaporama | 10' 11.10 AM | Sentimental Romance, 1930 | 20' 11.30 AM | The General Line, 1929 | 90' 2 PM | The Bezhin Meadow, 1937 | 30' 2.30 PM | Alexander Nevsky, 1938 | 112' 4.25 PM | Glumov’s Diary, 1923 | 4'28 4.30 PM | The Strike, 1925 | 78'

8 PM | Arsenal de Metz, in partnership with the Cité Musicale-Metz | 120'

Alexander Nevsky is an epic Soviet film directed Sergueï Eisenstein, with the assistance of Dmitri Vassiliev and released in 1938 in a troubled international context. The original music was composed by Sergueï Prokofiev, in close cooperation with Eisenstein, bestowing upon the film a rare symbiosis between the image and the sound. The Orchestre National de Metz, conducted on this occasion by Jacques Mercier, will accompany this epic film retracing the combat of the prince Alexander Nevsky against the Teutonic knights, of which the battle on the Lake Peipus, known as “the Battle on the Ice”, such as Eisenstein portrays it, represents an anthological sequence.

OUTSIDE THE EXHIBITION THU. 17.10 VIVA EL GRECO : EISENSTEIN AND THE MASTER OF TOLEDO 6.30 PM | The Louvre Museum | Round table Contributors : Guillaume Kientz and Charlotte Chastel (Louvre Museum) curators of the exhibition “Greco” at the Grand Palais, Ada

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8.

YOUNG VISITORS WORKSHOPS

THE CAPSULE

09.11 > 09.02.20 (UN)MONTAGE OF IMAGES !

The Capsule is a place of encounters, exchanges and of artistic practices open to everyone.

Workshop for children aged 5-12 MARION BOUTURE AND MATHILDE BARBEY

WED. + SAT. + SUN. + PUBLIC HOLIDAYS (except 1st May) 2 PM > 6 PM | Landing of Gallery 1 | Continuously

SAT. + SUN. + PUBLIC HOLIDAYS (except 1st May) Aged 5-7 : 11 AM Aged 8-12 : 3 PM 90’ | 5€

Free admission upon presentation of an entrance ticket to the exhibitions, without reservation (subject to availability) Supplementary times during the school holidays for the Zone B : MON + WED + THU. + FRI. – 2 PM > 6 PM

Sign up online or on the spot (subject to availability).

Supplementary times during the public holidays for the Zone B : Aged 5-7 : WED. | 3 PM Aged 8-12 : MON. + THU. + FRI. | 3 PM

09.11.19 > 09.02.20 THE IMAGE FACTORY

Visionary, explorer and experimentor, Sergueï Eisenstein revolutionised cinematographic montage.

By looking into his research, children are going to discover this art of assembling images to create a story, thanks to a laboratory mixing fixed and moving images. Imagined by the artists Marion Bouture and Mathilde Barbey, the workshop is composed of several structures allowing the creation of fragments of stories and to explore the technique of montage in its diverse forms. And at the end of the session… Action ! Everyone presents his/her own scenario.

Thaumatrope, praxinoscope, phenakistiscope… behind this enigmatic vocabulary optical games, testifying to the development of moving images are hidden.

The audiences are invited to discover them, try them out and even make them !

They can also try out the Mash-up table, a unique tool of its kind which will allow them to create their own montage in real time, enough to turn yourself into a film director in an afternoon !

The workshops for children benefit from the support of the Group UEM and its affiliate efluid :

ASSOCIATED EVENT FRI. 01.11.19 AS PART OF LA NOCHE DE LOS MUERTOS COCO Projection | Auditorium Wendel | 2.30 PM | 105’ | 5€ Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina (Disney and Pixar studios) In Mexico, young Miguel dreams of making a career in music, but his family is opposed to it. On the occasion of the Feast of the Dead, he will live adventures taking him to the Country of the Dead where he will discover his family secrets.

A moment full of emotion and affection to be shared as a family.

The projection will be followed by a snack with Mexican flavours and traditional workshops in the conference room.

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9.

EXHIBITION PARTNERS Le Centre Pompidou-Metz constitutes the first example of decentralisation of a great national cultural institution, the Centre Pompidou, in partnership with the regional authorities. An autonomous institution, the Centre Pompidou-Metz benefits from the experience, skills and international renown of the Centre Pompidou. It shares with its elder the values of innovation, generosity pluridisciplinarity and openness to all audiences.

The Centre Pompidou-Metz produces temporary exhibitions based on loans from the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, which is, with more than 120 000 works, the most important collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe and the second in the world.

It also develops partnerships with museum institutions over the whole world. As an extension to its exhibitions, the Centre Pompidou-Metz also proposes dance performances, concerts, cinema and conferences.

It benefits from the support of Wendel, the founding sponsor.

Mécène fondateur

With the special sponsorship of of the Total Foundation.

The exhibition benefits from an exceptional collaboration and loans from the Russian State Literary and Artistic archives (RGALI).

Exhibition created with the special collaboration of the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac.

With the participation of Vranken-Pommery Monopole.

In media partnership with

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

G R A N D M E C E N E D E L A C U LT U R E

WENDEL, FOUNDING SPONSOR OF THE CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ Wendel has been involved with Centre Pompidou-Metz since its opening in 2010. Trough this patronage, Wendelhas wanted to support an emblematic institution with a broad cultural influence.

In acknowledgement of its long-standing commitment to cultural development, Wendel was awarded the title of “Grand Sponsor of Culture” in 2012.

Wendel is one of Europe’s leading listed investment companies. It operates as a long-term investor and requires a commitment from shareholder which fosters trust, constant attention to innovation, sustainable development and promising diversification opportunities. Wendel excels in the selection of leading companies, such as those in which it currently owns a stake : Bureau Veritas, IHS, Constantia Flexibles, Allied Universal, Cromology, Stahl or Tsebo.

Founded in 1704 in the Lorraine region, the Wendel Group expanded for 270 years in various activities, in particular in the steel industry, before becoming a long-term investor in the late 1970s.

The Group is supported by its core family shareholder group, which is composed of more than one thousand shareholders of the Wendel family, combined to form the family company Wendel-Participations, which owns 37.7% of the Wendel group’s share capital.

CONTACTS : Christine Anglade Pirzadeh + 33 (0) 1 42 85 63 24 c.angladepirzadeh@wendelgroup.com Caroline Decaux + 33 (0) 1 42 85 91 27 c.decaux@wendelgroup.com

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

THE FOUNDATION TOTAL PROGRAMME The Total Foundation covers actions of solidarity carried out every day in the world by our sites, our affliates and our business Foundation. With this programme, Total wishes to contribute to the development of the territories where it is implanted. By focusing on youth, this programme takes action along four axes : road safety, forests and the climate, education and youth insertion, cultural dialogue and heritage.

COMMITTED TO THE OPENING UP OF CULTURE AND THE VALORISATION OF HERITAGE Present in 130 countries and rich with more than 150 nationalities, Total is commited to the promotion of respect of others and to diversity by valuing rich and pluralistic cultures which are the conditions for living together.

To acheive this, Total has chosen to work for the preservation and the transmission of heritage, to encourage access to culture and artistic and cultural education for audiences who are remote from it and to support young contemporary creation.

With The Ecstatic Eye. Sergueï Eisenstein, filmmaker at the crossroads of the arts Total wishes to contribute to the influence of two of the territories in which it is implanted : Russia and the région Grand Est. Sergueï Eisenstein’s work is indeed closely tied to the history and the culture of Russia, where Total has been established for 25 years. The support brought to this exhibition falls into the continuity of preceding commitments : in Russia as early as 2006 alongside the Gergiev Foundation or with the Mariinsky Theatre ; and in France with the exhibitions Sainte Russie (Louvre, 2010), Monumenta (Grand Palais, 2014), Pierre le Grand, A Tsar in France (Château de Versailles, 2017) et Red. Art and utopia in the country of the Soviets (Grand Palais, 2019).

Already a partner in 2015 for Leiris & Co,the Fondation Total supports the Centre Pompidou-Metz for its contribution to the cultural dynamism of the Grand Est. In this region, Total is notably present in Carling with a platform for the fabrication of hydrocarbon resins and plastic materials which counts some 550 collaborators.

CONTACT : +33 1 47 44 46 99 presse@total.com @TotalPress

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10.

IMAGES AVAILABLE TO THE PRESS

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Sergueï Eisenstein, Ivan le Terrible, 1945 © FSF

André Kertész, Sergueï Eisenstein, 1929 Épreuve gélatino-argentique, 24,3 x 18,1 cm Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne © RMN-Grand Palais © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist.

RMN-GP

Man Ray, S.M. Eisenstein, vers 1929 Épreuve gélatino-argentique, 8,3 x 6,2 cm Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne © Man Ray Trust / Adagp, Paris © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Guy Carrard/Dist.

RMN-GP

Sergueï Eisenstein, Esquisse pour La Maison des cœurs brisés de Bernard Shaw, costume du Personnage de Sam Mangan Эскиз костюма Менгена к пьесе Б. Шоу “Дом, где разбиваются сердца“. 1922. papier, crayon graphite, aquarelle, 35,2 х 22,8 © Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

Jacques Callot, Scapino, Capitano Zerbino, issu de l’ensemble des Balli di Sfessania Ensemble de 18 estampes Bibliothèques-Médiathèques de Metz, (FIE_CAL_390_1)

Sergueï Eisenstein, La Grève, 1925 © FSF

Jacques Callot, [12], [Le joueur de violon] de la série Les Gobbi Ensemble de 20 estampes Bibliothèques-Médiathèques de Metz, (FIE_CAL_418_1)

Sergueï Eisenstein, Le Cuirassé Potemkine, 1925 © FSF

Alexandre Rodtchenko, Affiche pour le Cuirassé Potemkine, 1926 101 x 72 cm © Adagp, Paris, 2019 © A.Dobrovinsky Collection

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

Sergueï Eisenstein, Glass House, vers 1927 © Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

Auguste Rodin, L’Éternel printemps, vers 1884 Bronze patiné, H : 64, l : 58, P : 38 cm, Don Madame Stephen Pichon, 1933 Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie de Besançon, Inv. 933.6.1 © Besançon, musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie – Photographie Chipault & Soligny

Sergueï Eisenstein, Octobre, 1928 © FSF

Sergueï Eisenstein, La Ligne générale, 1929 © FSF

Gustav Klucis, La jeunesse communiste à l'assaut du semis ! , Affiche, 1930-1931.

Lithographie. 102,4 x 72,6 cm.

Courtesy of the Latvian National Museum of Art, Inv. No. VMM Z-7855 ; Cat. No. 264. Photo by : Normunds Brasliņš.

Sergueï Eisenstein, La Matildona, vers 1931.

Crayon de couleur sur papier 10.67h x 8.27w in (27.10h x 21w cm) Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York and Matthew Stephenson, London © Estate of Sergei Eisenstein

Katsushika Hokusai, Branche de cerisier en fleur, Années 1820 Paris, musée Guimet - musée national des Arts asiatiques Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (MNAAG, Paris) / Thierry Ollivier

Icône Russe : Vierge de Vladimir Yaroslavl", 1781. Tempera sur panneau de bois enduit, revêtement métallique d'argent avec incrustation de pierreries colorées. Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais. © Petit Palais/Roger-Viollet

Orchestre miniature Squelettes utilisés pour orner les autels lors du Jour des morts, éléments consommables 75.1474.76.1-2 IA bis Paris, musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac Photo © musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

Anonyme, Saint Georges, Novgorod, XVIème siècle.

Tempera sur bois.

Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais © Petit Palais/Roger-Viollet

Vassili Trokhatchev, Photographie de tournage, Alexandre Nevski, 1938 © Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

Sergueï Eisenstein, Ivan le Terrible, 1945 © FSF

Utamaro Kitagawa , La maison de thé Nakadaya, vers 1794-1795, Paris, musée Guimet - musée national des Arts asiatiques Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (MNAAG, Paris) / Harry Bréjat

Le Greco, Le Christ au jardin des oliviers, 1er quart 17ème siècle Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Hervé Lewandowski

Vassily Kandinsky, Figure verte, 1936 Strasbourg, musée d'Art moderne et contemporain Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMNGrand Palais / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI

Sergueï Eisenstein, Ivan le Terrible, 1945 © FSF

Piotr Williams, Portrait de Vsevolod Emilievitch Meyerhold, 1925 Huile sur toile, 209 x 136,5 Galerie nationale Trétiakov © Photo Alexey Sergueev

Sergueï Eisenstein, Esquisse de marionnette pour la pièce “Arlequin honnête“ Эскиз марионетки к пьесе “Честный Арлекин“.

1921, papier, crayon graphite, encre, peinture bronze, 36 х 19,9 © Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

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THE ECSTATIC EYE. SERGUEÏ EISENSTEIN, FILMMAKER AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE ARTS

Sergueï Eisenstein, La Grève, 1925 © FSF

Sergueï Eisenstein, La Grève, 1925 © FSF

Sergueï Eisenstein, Le Cuirassé Potemkine, 1925 © FSF

Vassili Trokhatchev, Photographie de tournage, Alexandre Nevski © Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

Sergueï Eisenstein, Stigmates “Стигматы“. Рисунок из серии “Святой Франциск, Стигматы“. 1931-1932 ; “Stigmates“. Drawing from the series “St. Francis. Stigmates“ ; papier, crayon graphite, crayon couleur, 27,6 х 21,7 © Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

Sergueï Eisenstein, Le Cuirassé Potemkine, 1925 © FSF

Alessandro Allori, Homme nu, suspendu par une main Copie d'après l'un des Élus tirés au Ciel par les anges dans la partie gauche du Jugement Dernier de MichelAnge (chapelle Sixtine, Vatican) Paris, musée du Louvre, D.A.G. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Michèle Bellot

Sergueï Eisenstein, Le Cuirassé Potemkine, 1925 © FSF

Michel-Ange, Esclave mourant, 1513-1515.

Paris, musée du Louvre Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Raphaël Chipault

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Sergueï Eisenstein, Ivan le Terrible, 1945 © FSF

Sergueï Eisenstein, Ivan le Terrible, 1945 © FSF

Sergueï Eisenstein, Ivan le Terrible, 1945 © FSF

Sergueï Eisenstein, Ivan le Terrible, 1945 © FSF

Sergueï Eisenstein, Le Cuirassé Potemkine, 1925 © FSF

Kitagawa Utamaro, Scène dans une maison de courtisanes Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 18ème (dernier quart) 19ème (premier quart) Cliché Ville de Nancy - P. Buren

Palais des Tsars, Russie. “Sainte Face“ Tempera sur bois. 1500-1600 Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais. © Julien Vidal/Petit Palais/Roger-Viollet

Honoré Daumier, Crispin et Scapin dit aussi Scapin et Silvestre, vers 1864 Paris, musée d'Orsay Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

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NOTES

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LE CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ 1, parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme 57000 Metz +33 (0)3 87 15 39 39 contact@centrepompidou-metz.fr centrepompidou-metz.fr Centre Pompidou-Metz PompidouMetz centrepompidoumetz_

OPENING HOURS Every day except Tuesday and 1st May 01.11 > 31.03 MON. | WED. |THU. | FRI. | SAT. | SUN. : 10 A.M. – 6 P.M. 01.04 > 31.10 MON. | WED. | THU. : 10 A.M. – 6 P.M. FRI. | SAT. | SUN. : 10 A.M. – 7 P.M.

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EXHIBITION PRICES Individual fare : 7€ / 10€ / 12€ according to the number of exhibition spaces open Group fare (starting from 20 persons) : 5,50€, 8€, 10€ according to the number of exhibition spaces open Profit from the numerous advantages of the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s partners with the following offers : C.G.O.S. ticket combined offer Centre Pompidou-Metz/SNCF TER Grand Est, combined offer voyage + entrance of the CFL (Chemins de Fer Luxembourgeois- Luxemburg Railways), Pass Lorraine, PassTime, Museums Pass Musées, City Pass.

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