Exhibition materials relating to Sergei Eistenstein

This small collection contains captions on biographical information, Eisenstein's films and Ivan the Terrible, as well as copy photographs of scenes from Ivan the Terrible and copy drawings, presumably taken from Risunki k filemi 'Ivan Grozneii', Sergei Eizenshtein (see Archival history).

Sergei Mikhaylovich Eisenstein (1898-1948), Soviet film director and theorist, was born in Latvia and studied engineering and architecture at the Petrograd Institute He served with the Red Army during the civil war, and then became scene designer at the Proletkult Theatre. Although he only completed six films, he became most famous for The Battleship Potemkin (1926) and October; or ten days that shook the world (1928), which pioneered the use of montage. He developed a strong political and aesthetic style, which did not fit well into the new aesthetic of socialist realism when he returned to the USSR from a period in France in 1932. He was commissioned to make a three-part epic Ivan the Terrible, for which he received the Stalin Prize (first class) for Part I. Part II was not released until after the death of both Stalin and Eisenstein, and part III was never completed. He is the author of The Film Sense (1942), Film Form (1949), Notes of a Film Director (1959) and Film Essays (1968).

Usual EUL arrangements apply.

Biographical information taken from World Encyclopaedia (2004) and Who's who in the twentieth century (1999).

Single item.

Description compiled by Charlotte Berry, Archivist, 6 April 2005, and encoded into EAD 3 June 2005.

Usual EUL restrictions apply.

Transferred from the Main Library, 2004. This collection was created for an exhibition at the University's Main Library which was based on the portfolio Risunki k filemi 'Ivan Grozneii', Sergei Eizenshtein (RC 791.437 EIS/XX), Soviet Cinematograph Company, 1967: this contains thirty Eisenstein drawings for the film Ivan the Terrible.

Other collections relating to Eisenstein are held at: the British Film Institute, Special Collections; and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies: Eisenstein Collection.

It is not known whether this collection has been used as a basis for publication.