The Filmmaker in Wartime: Sergei Eisenstein Inside and Out

In 1941, Sergei Eisenstein had a decision to make. Iosif Stalin commissioned him to make a film about Ivan the Terrible, and in the months that followed he vacillated about how to depict the bloody tyrant. The Nazi invasion in June temporarily distracted him from work on the film, but by the time he was evacuated to Alma Ata in October, Eisenstein was committed to making the defiantly unorthodox, transgressive film that we have. What changed? The bombing of Moscow in July compelled Eisenstein to reflect on his public and private responsibilities and on individualism and collectivism in ways that complicated those categories and clarified his determination to make Ivan the Terrible a serious study of political power and violence. His diary from this period contributes a first-hand account of the bombing, and shows us Eisenstein’s thinking about the political implications of interior and exterior at this critical stage in his life and work. This text, unpublished and unintended for publication, gives us a voice and a spectrum of positions that we have not heard before on this key set of discourses in Soviet history.