Was the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein a toady of the regime or an artistic genius? The question is debated by the zeks in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. They are well informed about the scene in The Battleship Potemkin, the best known of Eisenstein’s films, where the sailors mutiny over rotten meat. The zeks wouldn’t mind being offered that meat in their Gulag prison.
Eisenstein died in 1948, at the outset of the Cold War. Since then, Western film studies, strongly influenced by Soviet sympathizers, some of whom attended Eisenstein’s lectures in Moscow in the 1930s, have turned him into a mythic figure. At the Brussels World Fair in 1958, film critics named Potemkin the best film of all time. Many books have appeared that contribute to this mythic aura.
In The Cinema of Eisenstein, David Bordwell, a professor of film studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, quotes the zeks’ argument in Ivan Denisovichbut does not pursue it. Instead, he presents Eisenstein as an intellectual giant, if not quite the Aristotle of film theory, then its Leonardo, one whose ideas will occupy scholars “for decades to come.” While acknowledging that some may consider the Russian “a morally compromised political servant,” Bordwell makes no serious attempt to appraise Eisenstein’s role outside of the myth. He devotes one chapter to a brief account of his life and another (much briefer) to the myth-making process itself, but his interest and