Eisenstein: the artist-teacher of audiovisual film

The film director Sergei Eisenstein shared a boundless pedagogical enthusiasm with several of his contemporaries.  Meyerhold wrote On Theatre, and many other texts about his developing ideas.   He held Directors’ Workshops, in which Eisenstein had been a student.  Mayakovsky produced a slim textbook he called How Are Verses Made?  Kandinsky and Klee and other painters who taught at the Bauhaus wrote new types of textbooks to explain and demonstrate their new concepts in art.  Frank Lloyd Wright used his autobiography to explain his ideas, both for his students and for others beyond his own school of architecture, the Taliesin Fellowship.  It is not by accident that he mixed his teaching with his autobiography, as he thought of himself as the living embodiment of his creative method.  Eisenstein also mixed autobiographical elements with his ideas in his texts.  However, unlike Wright, he worked under the extreme constraints of a totalitarian dictatorship, so his personal accounts mostly concentrated on his responses to other artists, art, theatre, music and landscapes, including viewing the country of Mexico as his self-portrait.  He saw the artist as a Janus-like figure:

‘…one face of theirs – the creator-artist – looks powerfully into the future, and the other face – the preacher and the teacher – is turned to the past, to what has been overcome, experienced, to what has hopelessly vanished – and to see the features of the imagined golden age of the future.’

In this image of the artist-teacher, idealism and the future are interdependent with the successes and failures of the past.  In Eisenstein’s case, his optimism about future audiovisual possibilities are built both on his successfully completed films, and his never to be completed projects, what he called in 1933 ‘things not done.’

For such an artist-teacher, the primacy of the lived is central to both making and teaching, as the imagined golden age continues to recede into the future, like water which withdraws into another breaking wave of experience.  A cyclical process, the position of its end and its beginning cannot be caught.  It is like making audiovisual film: the visual does not always come first, nor does the music.  Both elements are mutually inter-dependent, each one moving to dominate, breaking, then receding.

Robert Robertson