JAN 25-26, FEB 1-2, 6, 8-10

35mm PRINTS ► One of the cinema’s paramount creative geniuses, both as a director and as a theorist, the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a seminal figure in the development of cinema as a distinct art form with its own unique grammar and language. Some hold him to be the most important and influential individual in the history of the medium. Principally and fundamentally, it was Eisenstein’s revolutionary notion, so powerfully and thrillingly expressed in his own intensely beautiful, intensely dynamic films, that the essence of cinema is montage: that meaning in cinema — ideas, emotions, rhythm, tone — is created through the juxtaposition, the collision, the editing together, of images. (Conversely, in the mise-en-scène aesthetic championed by What Is Cinema? author André Bazin and others, it is within the frame, as opposed to between frames, that cinema reaches the ne plus ultra of expression.)

Like Andrei Tarkovsky, the other great Russian master being celebrated in our January/February 2012 program, Eisenstein completed but seven feature films in his career (his filmography also includes a handful of shorts and two notable unfinished works). Like Tarkovsky, Eisenstein died much too young: of a heart attack, shortly after his 50th birthday (Tarkovsky died of cancer at 54).

This retrospective offers the rare opportunity to see the bulk of Eisenstein’s work, so often circulated on inferior 16mm copies, in proper 35mm prints. Included are six of Eisenstein’s seven completed features (only 1929’s The General Line, also known as Old and New, is omitted), as well as reconstructions of Eisenstein’s two legendary “lost masterpieces,” Que Viva Mexico! (1933) and Bezhin Meadow (1937).