The Cinematographer’s House in Kyiv hosted the premiere of the Canadian-German production Eisenstein. One is hard put to refer critically to a film attracting such public attention. Indeed, the audience was packed, with those who had worked as extras in attendance together with their families and friends, watching every scene breathlessly. How can one wave one’s hands and open one’s profane mouth? Ukrainian territory — Odesa and Kyiv, to be precise — is not often used by smiling Western experts in cinematography to make ambitious pictures, enthusiastically allowing some of the natives to take part in this curious business. And that was precisely how the location shooting of Eisenstein was done in Ukraine. The film’s director, Briton Renny Bartlett, could not attend the premiere in Kyiv, being busy with another project as befits a hard-working artist. After all, it is nice to be armed with good color film and adequate financing, all those things that our directors do not have and will not have in the immediate future. A solid material basis allowed Bartlett to unhurriedly make a voluminous motion picture, working into it everything: Eisenstein, Meyerhold, Stalin, Battleship Potemkin, avant-garde theater, NKVD, Mexico, Mexican cacti, Hollywood, etc. However, listing the various objects and personae touched upon by the film could go on and on, yet the film is called Eisenstein, and it is about him, Sergei Mikhailovich, a great Russian Soviet film-director. Somehow, one is reminded of a certain girl who used to call everybody comical. That is, when asked how she treated, for example, physicists, she would happily reply, “I adore them! They are so comical!” And she loved poets because they were also very comical, and construction workers operating at high altitudes, and army generals, and men loading and unloading crates at the local grocery. In general, they were all comical. It was such a comical world. In fact, we see a comical Eisenstein in this film, a comical boy, a little bit of a clown, painting erotic pictures, singing juicy songs, winging around the world like a bird with bulging eyes, and then accidentally he dies, expelling a string of sticky saliva. Of course, he says something about the cinema (actually, the characters in the film do not speak but play the roles of talking heads, full of sound and fury, doubting nothing), but this is not necessary, not at all. The main thing is that he remains his old curly-haired, comical, and slightly stupid self. And everybody around him — from Meyerhold to the last secretary — is also comical. So are the people trying to watch the film. As for the author of the film, there is nothing I can say. We are not personally acquainted.
