Sergei Eisenstein was a Soviet director and film theorist who is credited with developing Montage filmmaking which was later adopted by early Soviet directors. He attained the mastery of state propaganda focused on filmmaking that put him in the bad books of the Soviet government of the time. He was a Communist who used his work in films to propel political ideas after the Russian Revolution. Before carrying out his first founding project, he made a few short films and silent films.
During his career as a filmmaker he did not achieve much success as he wished and desired to be a man of great fame who deserved great respect, Sergei Eisenstein chose to take on and fake the identity of the real Einstein even until changing his appearance to look like him. Learn more about Sergei Eisenstein, his biography, his death and his cause.
Biography of Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born on January 22, 1898, to Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein (father) of Russian German descent and Julia Ivanovna Konetskaya (mother) Russian, a middle-class family from Riga, Latvia, once part of the empire Russian in the governorate of Livonia. Her father was an architect whose job guaranteed her to move frequently, while her mother was the daughter of a successful merchant.
Julia left Riga in 1905 with Sergei for St. St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution, but Sergei often returned on occasion to see his father, who had joined him in St. Petersburg in 1910. He had been brought up in the Orthodox religion because it was the main Christian doctrine in Russia, but he later turned to atheism.
Just like his father, Sergei chose architecture as a profession and was enrolled in the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd as a student of architecture and engineering. In 1981 he left school to join the Red Army as part of military resources for the Bolshevik Revolution. This placed him on the opposite side with his father who supported the Tsarist government. Following the defeat of the tsarist government, Sergei was transferred several times to Petrograd, Vologda, Dvinsk and Minsk. In Minsk he came into contact with Kabuki theater, studied Japanese and learned some 300 kanji characters which he credits with shaping his pictorial dexterity. He then traveled to Japan for further studies.
Carrier start
Sergei Eisenstein returned to Moscow in 1920 and began his theater career with Proletkult. His works here were Gas Masks, Listen to Moscow and Wiseman. Soon after, he started working for Vsevolod Meyerhold as a designer. In 1923, he launched himself as a theoretician by writing The Montage of Attractions for LEF. In that same year, Glumov’s Diary made his first film starring Dziga Vertov who had been hired as an instructor for the Wiseman theater production.
His first feature film came as The Strike in 1925 and it received worldwide critical acclaim at that time. Based on the success of this film, he then directed October (aka Ten Days That Shook the World) on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917.
His career which spanned more than two decades saw him produce many works amid confrontations with the socialist government and the public of his time, but overall it was a huge success for him. He was repeatedly awarded several prizes, including the Stalin Prizes which he won twice in 1941 for the film. Alexander Nevsky in 1938 and in 1946 for the first film in the series Ivan the Terrible (1944). He was honored as an artist of the RSFSR in 1935 and received the Order of Lenin in 1939 for his film. Alexander Nevsky and a Google Doodle appeared in honor of his posthumous 120th birthday in 2018.
His death and his cause
As his career progressed, his health deteriorated. Sergei Eisenstein had a heart attack on February 2, 1946, and spent the next few years recuperating in health care. He had another heart attack in 1948 at the age of 50 which unfortunately led to his death. His corpse was found on the floor of his apartment in Moscow on the morning of February 11, 1948. He was later cremated on February 13 of the same year after being laid in the cinema workers’ hall.
Is he related to Albert Einstein?
Sergei Eisenstein, while he lived, often pretendedCharacter of the renowned physicist Albert Einstein. He went so far as to alter his appearance to look like the great scientist, but soon found it was Herculean to grow a bushy natural mustache like Einstein. To cover up for this, Sergei cut off some of his cat’s fur and stuck it to his upper lip whenever he wanted to do Einstein’s deed.
He managed to pull this off for a while and at other times failed miserably. At such unfortunate times, those who took him for an Albert Einstein would often engage him in conversation in German that he neither understood nor spoke. Other times he was asked to demonstrate some of his Einstein “work” that he failed at or say whatever came to mind. His fake mustache fell out from time to time and you can imagine how embarrassing that really was.
One would really start to wonder why he chose to impersonate another person, are they related in any way?
Albert Einstein as we know was born in Germany a theoretical physicist whose life and life works have been well documented. He had no trace of family ties with Sergei Eisenstein, a Russian director.