Sergei Eisenstein: Films That Shook the World

February 9–April 21, 2018

This major retrospective celebrates one of cinema’s most pioneering and influential figures, whose theory of montage shaped the way films are made and understood.

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Alexander Nevsky
Battleship Potemkin
Strike
October
Ivan the Terrible, Part I

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Films
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Events

Past Films

Ivan the Terrible, Part I
- Sunday, February 11 2 PM
- Saturday, April 21 6 PM
Sergei Eisenstein
USSR, 1944
In sixteenth-century Moscow, the newly crowned Czar Ivan battles both the nobility and the church in an effort to unify Russia. Scored by Sergei Prokofiev, Eisenstein’s painterly film is like a fresco come to life.

Peter Bagrov in Person (February 11 screening only)
Ivan the Terrible, Part II
- Sunday, February 11 4:30 PM
- Saturday, April 21 8 PM
Sergei Eisenstein
USSR, 1946/1958
The second part of Eisenstein’s unfinished trilogy follows Ivan’s return to the throne and his ruthless opposition to the schemes of the nobility to keep Russia divided among its princes and foreign interests.

Peter Bagrov in Person (February 11 screening only)
Misery and Fortune of Women
- Sunday, March 25 2 PM
Eduard Tissé
Switzerland, 1929
A treatise on the need for legal abortions, made in Switzerland by cinematographer Eduard Tisse and “supervised” by Eisenstein. With the poetic short Romance sentimentale.
Que Viva Mexico!
- Saturday, March 24 5 PM
Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Alexandrov
USSR, 1931/1979
Film to Table dinner follows

See Mexico through Eisenstein’s eyes in this compilation of footage shot in 1931, intended for an epic hybrid of documentary and fiction that the director never finished. With short Bezhin Meadow.
The General Line
- Saturday, March 17 7:30 PM
Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Alexandrov
USSR, 1929
BAMPFA Collection

Eisenstein’s “Russian Gothic” tells of a peasant woman’s struggle against superstition, hostility, and greed in her attempt to form a collective.
October
- Sunday, March 4 4:30 PM
Sergei Eisenstein
USSR, 1928
Digital Restoration

Made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, October fictionally recreates the revolution’s power and fury: so well, in fact, that some of its scenes have been reused in documentaries as the “real thing.”
Strike
- Friday, February 23 7 PM
Sergei Eisenstein
USSR, 1925
BAMPFA Collection Print / BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!

A strike by a group of factory workers and its brutal suppression form the backbone of Eisenstein’s agitprop masterpiece of ferocious montage.

Judith Rosenberg on Piano
Alexander Nevsky
- Saturday, February 10 4:30 PM
- Friday, February 16 4 PM
Sergei Eisenstein, Dmitri Vasiliev
USSR, 1938
Film to Table dinner follows the February 10 screening

Eisenstein’s first completed sound film has a score by Sergei Prokofiev to propel its tale of a thirteenth-century hero confronting foreign invaders.

Peter Bagrov in Person (February 10 screening only)
Out of the Vault: Sergei Eisenstein and His Contemporaries
- Friday, February 9 1:30 PM
JUST ADDED!

A panel of visiting scholars—all experts in the field of early Russian and Soviet cinema—joins Moscow-based scholar and archivist Peter Bagrov for this program of rare shorts and excerpts from the BAMPFA Soviet Cinema Collection.
Battleship Potemkin
- Friday, February 9 7 PM
Sergei Eisenstein
USSR, 1925
BAMPFA Collection

Eisenstein’s classic can be appreciated for “not only the perfection of its form, but the humanitarianism and enthusiasm that impregnated its revolutionary subject” (Georges Sadoul).

Introduction by Peter Bagrov; Judith Rosenberg on Piano

Sergei Eisenstein: Films That Shook the World

February 9–April 21, 2018

Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) is regarded as one of the world’s most creative, pioneering, and influential filmmakers and is among the most lauded figures in Russia’s cultural history. From Strike (1925) to Ivan the Terrible: Parts I and II (1944–46), Eisenstein’s films, as well as his writings and his theory of montage, have shaped how cinema is made and understood. Seen today, films like Battleship Potemkin, October (also known as Ten Days That Shook the World), and Alexander Nevsky still shock with their extraordinary beauty and invention.

BAMPFA commemorates the 120th anniversary of Eisenstein’s birth with this major retrospective. We are delighted that Peter Bagrov, an authority on early Russian and Soviet cinema, will travel from Moscow to share his knowledge of the filmmaker’s life, work, and aesthetics. (We regret that Naum Kleiman, who was also scheduled to join us, is unable to attend. A portrait of his life in cinema, Cinema: A Public Affair, screens February 22 in our Reverse Angle series.) Together with our concurrent lecture/screening series In Focus: Sergei Eisenstein and His Contemporaries, this series affords an opportunity to see nearly all of Eisenstein’s works in the best available prints—some of them imported from European archives—and to understand why the impact of this quintessential Soviet filmmaker’s work and ideas continues to be felt around the world.

This series continues through April; additional screenings to be announced.

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Series organized by Senior Film Curator Susan Oxtoby and supported in part by grants from the Trust for Mutual Understanding and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Film Series Sponsors: Susan and Kevin Consey

Thanks to our colleagues at the Institute for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies, UC Berkeley; the San Francisco Silent Film Festival; and the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra, who will present Prokofiev’s cantata Alexander Nevsky, op. 78, on January 5–7 at UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall (free admission; see bcco.org for details).

Supporter

National Endowment for the Arts
Supporter

Trust for Mutual Understanding