The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (129 page)

After the University of Toronto, and having had painters for parents, he was drawn into filmmaking. He has also done a good deal of work for Canadian television, especially documentaries with musical subjects. Family is very important to him, and he regularly works with his wife, the actress Arsinée Khanjian.

Exotica
drew a lot of attention in that it was a story of meetings at a strip club, and a model of his tender observation. Equally,
The Sweet Hereafter
—taken from a Russell Banks novel—in which an insurance man (Ian Holm) comes to a community devastated by a bus accident, explored so many subtle feelings beyond the evident tragedy. By those standards,
Felicia’s Journey
(based on a William Trevor novel) seemed heavy-handed—but that may be a measure of Ian Holm being more inward an actor than Bob Hoskins. A masterpiece from Egoyan would come as no surprise.

Sergei Mikhailovitch Eisenstein
(1898–1948), b. Riga, Russia
1923:
Kinodnevik Glumova
(s). 1924:
Stachka/Strike
. 1925:
Bronenosets Potyomkin/Battleship Potemkin
. 1927:
Oktyabre/October
(codirected with Grigori Alexandrov). 1928:
Staroie i Novoie/The General Line
(codirected with Alexandrov). 1931–32:
Que Viva Mexico
(unfinished; material later edited by Marie Seton and released as
Time in the Sun
, 1939). 1936:
Bezhin Lug/Bezhin Meadow
(unfinished). 1938:
Alexander Nevsky
(codirected with Dmitri Vasiliev). 1942:
Ivan the Terrible, part 1
(released in 1945). 1945:
Ivan the Terrible, part 2
(not released until 1958).

The son of a Jewish architect, Eisenstein was deserted as a child by his mother and lived in Riga and St. Petersburg. He studied to be an architect but, after service in the Red Army, he went into the theatre as a painter and designer. In the early 1920s, he worked in experimental theatre before making his debut as a director in 1923 on a film used in a stage production by Alexander Ostrovsky. His next four films are the basis of his contested reputation and key works in the uneasy relationship between art and propaganda. Inside Russia, they made Eisenstein one of the most honored of Soviet artists; while abroad, he was hailed by radical intellectuals as the model creative director to shame the prostituted talents who had supposedly sold out to the stereotypes of commercial cinema.

That now seems a very unsatisfactory interpretation. Compared with the abiding influence on cinema of Renoir, Murnau, or Fritz Lang, it is no longer possible to view Eisenstein as the man who laid down the theoretical basis of the medium—the British Film Institute once had that as part of a trilogy, with Griffith supplying the alphabet and Chaplin the humanity.

It is true that early Eisenstein is a stirring propagandist: in those first four films, the identification with Soviet ideals and myths is based on concrete realization—the outraged faces and vivid human gestures of
Strike
and
Potemkin
, and the agricultural processes of
General Line
. But the argument of those films is often foolish and, ultimately, inhumane. Indeed, actual political machines never live up to the purity of their own early propaganda. The propagandist purpose in Eisenstein’s films diminishes the human beings dressed up as authority just as uncompromisingly as the authorities are supposed to oppress the workers.

In short, the Soviet attitude to art was as narrow and totalitarian as its political history proved. One is less moved by the Odessa massacre in
Potemkin
than excited by it: the frenzied pictorial dynamism and the pulsing montage refute the message that cruelty is destructive. As montage always suggested, the sequence is cumulative, taking emphasis to the point of hysteria. Prejudice, bias, and emotional coldness are secondary to Eisenstein’s eye for the physical expression of power. It is the titles that carry the message, the images that overwhelm it. If you wish to find pathos in Russian cinema it is in Dovzhenko; as for a view of the people that embodies naïve Bolshevik idealism, look to Dziga Vertov. With Eisenstein, you confront a demonic, baroque visual theatricality, helplessly adhering to the confused theories of his writing on film. And he was quickly in decline:
Strike
is the finest of his films, the one in which the images show an inflamed imagination and a director as much obsessed by Freud as by Marx—for instance, Eisenstein’s treatment of violence is always participatory and masochistic. The images alone suggest how well he might have acquitted himself in the horror genre.

Few of his admirers wondered why, in 1930, Eisenstein went to America. From childhood, he had spoken English, French, and German, and been familiar with European culture; but he was also an immense, ambitious egotist, inhibited by the growing retrenchment in Russia. If his actions can be judged, he went to America to relax—to find new company and new subjects. And this idol of the kino-clubs signed with Paramount: after several aborted projects, he settled for Theodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
. In the event, incompatibility was recognized before shooting began; the project was eventually taken up by von Sternberg, who made it into something immeasurably subtler than Eisenstein could have dreamed of.

In bizarre anticipation of Orson Welles some ten years later, Eisenstein went south, to Mexico, to make an epic documentary. The venture was sponsored by novelist Upton Sinclair. Over 100,000 feet of film were shot before Sinclair turned cold over the Russian’s extravagance, tales of his lurid life in Mexico, and pressure from Stalin. The surviving footage reveals Eisenstein as a blazing decadent—increasingly preoccupied by the exotic yet striving for an iconography of Mexican morbidity. It is like dreadful Church baroque beside Buñuel’s pungent theses nailed on a door.

Eisenstein went slowly home, too famous to be abandoned, but often too ill to trouble the authorities. He was clearly persecuted by the bureaucracy: Paul Robeson as Toussaint L’Ouverture fell through; and
Bezhin Meadow
, based on a Turgenev sketch, was abandoned and Eisenstein made to admit to its failings. He escaped into the historical setting of
Alexander Nevsky
, his most spectacular film and his most plainly American in style. The allegory in
Nevsky
attacked Germany and the film was played down after the Soviet-Nazi pact; Eisenstein was also made to broadcast to Germany, welcoming the unexpected alliance.

Ivan the Terrible
was made under stress of war, but it suffers least from economy. Indeed, it is his most ornate film, with the actors reduced to gesturing gargoyles, their bodies subordinated to his all-important visual shapes, themselves an unhealthy mixture of iconography and melodrama. What does
Ivan
mean, setting aside the suffocating tedium that comes from its remorseless pictorial richness? It seems to me that it endorses the harsh stress on authority that Ivan pursues: again, the style of the film is like that of the tyrant. Some said that the movie was a disapproving comment on Stalin; and part 2 (including its garish color) was banned by the state and the director once more instructed to recant. The explanation is not clear, and one must allow something for the inane contortions of Soviet bureaucracy. A plan for part 3 was shelved and Eisenstein’s heart condition steadily deteriorated. There are those who still acclaim him, but his influence is now hard to detect.

So I became someone who hardly watched Eisenstein films any longer. If they came my way, my eyes were already clenched in regret. I could not help but blame Eisenstein for all the nonsense written about him, and for the fanciful position thrust upon him of montage pioneer.

My antagonism relaxed, gradually, on the morning of November 2, 1988, as I explored an art exhibit, “Eisenstein at Ninety,” at London’s Hayward Gallery (the show had originated at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford). There were television monitors playing scenes from the films, to be sure, but there was so much else: the crowded life of Eisenstein, the range of things he read, saw, and was intrigued by; his psychology, emotional and jazzy with Freudian prospects; the astonishing graphic work that seemed to spill out on paper like ink, or blood; and the delight in dance, gesture, and theatrical moments. The movies were but a part of the whole, and not necessarily the most lively. Eisenstein was more compelling to me as a painter, and as a life lived out with a self-mocking, cartoony exuberance. For he had a brilliance that elected to play the buffoon. He was a shooting star whose course helped us see the desperate but inescapable adjacency of the old Russia, Bolshevism, Amerika, and Mexico. His life was like a journal with drawings, and when one sees the whole strip form, then montage yields to mosaic. There is a gaiety, a frenzy, and a cruelty in the drawings that are missing in the movies. Suppose that—like Griffith—Eisenstein was one of the last geniuses of raw theatre who found himself trapped in movies …

Michael Eisner
, b. Mount Kisco, New York, 1942
On Sunday, September 16, 2001, the ABC network on American television premiered an alleged biography of Walt Disney—an atrociously rose-colored picture about the man in this book and in the culture of the world who has probably had the most influence. This broadcast took place five days after the demolition of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. It played with commercials—whereas in the days after the disaster in New York, ABC, like other networks, had forsaken them (presumably on grounds of “taste”).

It goes without saying—and it did go without saying—that ABC is now part of the business empire that includes Disney. It was taken for granted that the American public no longer cared about such conflicts of interest and had no real conception of historical objectivity—so why bother? But the program was introduced and concluded (this is called bookending—as if books any longer had anything to do with the state of things) by film of Michael Eisner, head of the Disney Company, telling us how much everyone at Disney felt for the dead and those left behind—but isn’t entertainment useful at such times?

It is not Mr. Eisner’s fault that he looks like a thug and speaks in a way that makes you want to get out of the room. It is certainly not his fault that he may remind us of Shrek. But it was, presumably, his decision to make and run the show and to think that a few cans of syrup would ease away any obstruction to our taking in the feeble ad for Disney.

Mr. Eisner is one of the most richly rewarded executives in the U.S. He began in television, and then moved to Paramount, where he was chief operating officer from 1976 to 1984. After that, he joined Disney, revived it after years of faltering, led it into the making of regular movies—from
Pretty Woman
to
Pearl Harbor
—as well as reviving the animated feature, and carrying the pleasure-dome principle into Europe with Euro Disney. Though, of late, the Disney and ABC numbers have faltered, I am certain that he works ferociously and that he is a brilliant businessman, whose immense salary and bonus schedules can be justified. He has had to have heart operations, and he has survived such things as the death of his second-in-command, Frank Wells, the defection of his onetime lieutenant Jeffrey Katzenberg (the mind behind
Shrek
), as well as his own misguided hiring of Michael Ovitz. He masterminded the merger of Disney with ABC and Cap Cities. He is a giant figure, breathlessly positive and chronically shallow. And—as Kane once said of Walter Thatcher—he represents everything I hate.

In March 2005, he resigned as CEO of Disney.

Denholm Elliott
(1922–92), b. London, England
In 1968, in his
Guide to British Cinema
, Denis Gifford said of Denholm Elliott that he was a “gentlemanly lead now skillfully adding a touch of mannered decay to character parts.” Well, indeed. The graduate from Malvern College had been a fine young lieutenant in
The Cruel Sea
(53, Charles Frend) and a hero with distinct hints of class. Elliott had been a prisoner of war of the Germans for three years, and he was married to Virginia McKenna in the mid-fifties. If he let down some of those hopes, and if the “decay” became a little florid at times, still Elliott (who died of AIDS) was for years a cherished character actor in whom the flickering light of decency never went out—no matter the temptation or the opportunity. He was the kind of actor adored by other actors, which is a way of saying that his combined resources of technique, observation, and kindness could get away with nearly anything. The list is long, but one must always remember that an actor at Elliott’s level lived from one phone call to the next. That surely helps account for his confused look of desperation and absurdity.

He made his debut in
Dear Mr. Prohack
(49, Thornton Freeland) and then got a break in
The Sound Barrier
(52, David Lean). After that he was in
The Holly and the Ivy
(52, George More O’Ferrall);
The Ringer
(52, Guy Hamilton);
The Heart of the Matter
(53, O’Ferrall);
They Who Dare
(53, Lewis Milestone);
Lease of Life
(54, Frend);
The Man Who Loved Redheads
(54, Harold French);
The Night My Number Came Up
(55, Leslie Norman);
Pacific Destiny
(56, Wolf Rilla).

There was then a notable gap in his work, coinciding with the failure of his marriage to McKenna. He picked up again with
Scent of Mystery
(60, Jack Cardiff);
Station Six Sahara
(63, Seth Holt);
Nothing but the Best
(63, Clive Donner);
The High Bright Sun
(64, Ralph Thomas);
You Must Be Joking
(65, Michael Winner);
King Rat
(65, Bryan Forbes);
Alfie
(66, Lewis Gilbert)—surely a signal moment in that Elliott was still in support, but to a very novel kind of English actor, Michael Caine;
The Spy with a Cold Nose
(67, Daniel Petrie);
Maroc 7
(67, Gerald O’Hara);
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush
(67, Donner).