Sergei Eisenstein: Autobiography

A truly dreadful non-documentary, non-autobiography. It consists of a very occasional three or four sentences from Eisenstein's autobiography, and visually is a mishmash of excerpts from films -- the vast majority not even by Eisenstein! "Ballet Mechanique" is in there, as in some extremely early hand-tinted film footage a la Melies (and perhaps it is Melies). Vertov's "Man With A Movie Camera" is in there, too, as is "Entr'Acte" by Rene Clair, etc. -- Of course, not ONE of these films is identified during the course of the film itself. No interviews, very, very little in the way of Eisenstein film footage. I'm glad I purchased my DVD copy used. Still, it's the worst $6 I ever spent.

This mostly never seen before material was probably directed by Eisenstein when it was shot, but the pieces of film were put together by another guy, and therefore it has neither Eisenstein vision nor philosophy. The most interesting is to see the experiments with dynamic and mechanical camera movements. But editing was one of Eisenstein's greatest powers, and that was done horrible by Oleg Kovalov in this supposed documentary, unfortunately. I find it hard to interpret this as a real documentary or a film, because nobody is interviewed and the informative value is near to zip. All of the material is well worth watching though, and I liked to see Sergei Eisenstein read a dutch newspaper in a dutch train. Some sequences are accompanied by writings of Sergei, but do not expect something stunning or revealing of the whole.

7/10