FILM: Bezhin Meadow

Summary: Four screenings in the month of February, dedicated to the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and his Revolutionary Aesthetics. This retrospective offers the rare opportunity to see classic Eisenstein films, so often circulated on inferior 16mm copies, in proper 35mm prints. Included are four of Eisenstein’s seven completed features, as well as a reconstruction of Eisenstein’s legendary “lost masterpiece,” Bezhin Meadow (1937).

Introduced by Literature PhD candidate Abraham Geil.

Free and open to the public!

For more information, including synopses of the films, see:
http://ami.duke.edu/events/archive/tags/Eisenstein+35mm+Retrospective

Bio: One of the cinema’s paramount creative geniuses, both as a director and as a theorist, Sergei Eisenstein was a seminal figure in the development of cinema as a distinct art form with its own unique grammar and language. Some hold him to be the most important and influential individual in the history of the medium, and his writings have been translated into over 20 languages. Principally and fundamentally, it was Eisenstein’s revolutionary notion, so powerfully and thrillingly expressed in his own intensely beautiful, intensely dynamic films, that the essence of cinema is montage: that meaning in cinema — ideas, emotions, rhythm, tone — is created through the juxtaposition, the collision, the editing together, of images. Eisenstein completed but seven feature films in his career (his filmography also includes a handful of shorts and two notable unfinished works), before dying too young: of a heart attack, shortly after his 50th birthday.

Location: Griffith Film Theater, Duke

Sponsors: Duke Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI); Duke Center for International Studies; Mary Duke Biddle Foundation