One of the All-Time Great Directors

Rating: Null/10 (10 February 2001)

What would Eisenstein do today! His films still pack tremendous wallop even 65 years later. Yes, the baby carriage falling down the steps and the bullet in the eye still impact today, but the most telling image is the lock-step soldiers with rifles and bayonets at the ready, treading forcefully down the steps is an even greater image! Eisenstein's films are masterworks of double entendre for just as he silently condemns the czarist authorities, the irony that he portrays is that the communists are just as guilty. I believe that his films deliberately show this irony as his way of damning all authoritarian/totalitarian regimes, and he got away with this in the USSR by doing precisely this. The characters in his films are not first-rate actors, but the images and faces of these characters are startling in their realism. Watch the monk playing the organ in "Alexander Nevsky" and you'll see what I mean. What a face! And Eisenstein...what an artist of the first rank!