Fifty Years of Solitude

Premiere! For the 115th anniversary of his birth.
It is hard to find in the history of Russian cinema a name surrounded by so many clichés and at the same time so underestimated and deprived of proper attention. And yet abroad Sergei Eisenstein is considered the greatest director of our country; awards are named after him, books are written about him, documentaries and feature films are made about him. His silent film “October” inspired Michael Nyman to write a soundtrack for it, and for director Francis Ford Coppola, viewing this film determined his choice of profession. Chaplin, Joyce, Pirandello, Brecht, Einstein… admired Eisenstein and knew him personally.
The authors of the program attempted to gather all the scattered and contradictory materials devoted to Sergei Eisenstein, looking at his life and work without prejudice, from the perspective of our time. The program is based on letters and memoirs, recollections of contemporaries, and audio documents. From these documents emerges the image of a tragically lonely man, both in his work and in his personal life. It was the great loneliness of a brilliant artist and master, the loneliness of a director who wanted to make films about the same lonely titans that he himself was. He dreamed of a film about Moscow through the prism of the elements; he was not allowed to complete his epic film about Mexico; he wanted to make films with a polyphonic structure and a color palette like icon painting. Alas, few appreciated it…