“Montage of Attractions” by Sergei Eisenstein works. Exhibition of Sergei Eisenstein “Installation of attractions Sergei Eisenstein “Installation of attractions”

DEPARTMENT OF CULTURE OF THE CITY OF MOSCOW

RUSSIAN STATE ARCHIVE OF LITERATURE AND ART

STATE CENTRAL THEATER MUSEUM NAMED AFTER A.A. BAKHRUSHINA

STATE CENTRAL MUSEUM OF CINEMA

MUSEUM OF THE STATE ACADEMIC BOLSHOI THEATER OF RUSSIA

GOSFILMFOUND OF RUSSIA

FILM CONCERN "MOSFILM"

FILM COMPANY "STV"

MULTIMEDIA ART MUSEUM, MOSCOW / MUSEUM "MOSCOW HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY"

present an exhibition

SERGEY EISENSHTEIN "MONTAGE OF ATTRACTIONS"

Curator: Olga Sviblova

As part of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow

This year, the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, the first Russian museum to specialize in photography, new media and contemporary art, celebrates its 20th anniversary.

We are opening our anniversary year with the Sergei Eisenstein exhibition “Montage of Attractions,” which will feature photographs, drawings and fragments of films, costumes for films and personal items related to the life and work of the legendary Russian cinematographer. The exhibition is also timed to coincide with the Year of Cinema, which was announced in Russia in 2016.

The program of the festive evening includes a musical congratulation from Diana Arbenina, as well as a charity auction in support of the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (MAMM).

Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, was founded in 1996. Today, the museum collection includes more than 130,000 exhibits, and this is the largest and most representative collection, reflecting the entire history of the development of Russian photography and contemporary art, using photography as a media. The museum has the most complete corpus of works by Alexander Rodchenko, Russian modernist photography (Max Penson, Eleazar Langman, Mikhail Prekhner, Georgy Petrusov) and Russian pictorialism (Alexander Grinberg, Yuri Eremin, Nikolai Andreev, Nikolai Svishchov-Paola). A significant place in the collection is occupied by video art, Internet art and new media. The modern period is represented by the works of Boris Mikhailov, Alexander Slyusarev, Nikolai Bakharev, Sergei Chilikov, Sergei Bratkov, Olga Chernysheva, the AES+F group, Oleg Kulik, Dmitry Bulnygin. In the last few years alone, exhibitions from the museum's collection have been shown at the London Hayward Gallery, Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), the Photographic Museum of Winterthur, the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Modern Art (Turin), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Sao Paulo, the Photographic Museum Amsterdam.

The main goal of MAMM is to promote the development of Russian contemporary art in all its diversity, as well as to introduce the Russian public to outstanding works by the stars of the world art scene.

Since 1996, the museum has held more than 1,500 exhibitions in Russia and abroad. We were the first to introduce the Russian public to the work of Fluxus and the group Zero, and showed large-scale exhibitions of arte povera, Joseph Kosuth, Andreas Gursky, Rebecca Horn, Annette Messager, Fabrice Ibert, David Lynch, Marc Quinn, Damien Hirst, Ai Weiwei, Tarin Simon and many other artists, without whom it is impossible to imagine world art second half of the 20th and 21st centuries. Over the twenty years of the museum’s existence, leading world institutions have become MAMM’s partners, including the Center Georges Pompidou (Paris), Tate Modern (London), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), London’s Royal Academy of Arts, Art Museum Helsinki, Reykjavik Art Museum, etc.

The structural unit of the museum is the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia named after. Rodchenko, who is also celebrating her 10th birthday this year. Today, students and graduates of the School have already become a noticeable phenomenon in the Russian and international artistic landscape. They regularly participate in significant museum and gallery exhibitions around the world and become laureates and finalists of the most important Russian awards in the field of contemporary art - the Innovation Prize and the Kandinsky Prize, as well as international awards and competitions, including World Press Photo, Foam Talent, MACK First Book Award, Leica Oskar Barnack Award, Vienna Book Festival and German Photobook Award.

In the year of our twentieth anniversary, we thank everyone who has helped and is helping the museum, and especially patrons, collectors, artists and heirs.

Following the example of the Pompidou Center, which today celebrates its 40th anniversary, MAMM declares its anniversary year the Year of the Patron. After all, only through our joint efforts can the museum’s collection grow and develop.

1929. Silver gelatin print. State Central Cinema Museum.

On the set of S. Eisenstein's film "Ivan the Terrible".

Sergei Eisenstein on the set of the film “Old and New” (“General Line”).
1929 Silver gelatin print State Central Cinema Museum

Lyudmila Tselikovskaya and Nikolai Cherkasov in the film “Ivan the Terrible”.
1943-1944 Author's silver gelatin print

Russia, Moscow..

On November 24, 2016, the exhibition “Sergei Eisenstein “Montage of Attractions”” opened at the Multimedia Art Museum. It is dedicated to the Year of Russian Cinema, which declared 2016, as well as to the 20th anniversary of MAMM.

The uniqueness of the exhibition “Montage of Attractions” lies in the fact that it united on one site various documentary evidence and artifacts related to the work of the classic of Russian cinema, the great director, screenwriter, artist, teacher, author of fundamental works on film theory, Sergei Eisenstein. In total, MAMM presents about 260 exhibits. Some of which museum visitors will see for the first time. Photographs, drawings, film fragments and many other documentary evidence of the life and work of Sergei Eisentein were provided byState Film Fund Russian Federation (Gosfilmofond of the Russian Federation), Cinema Concern "Mosfilm", Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, State Central Museum of Cinema, State Central Theater Museum named after. A.A. Bakhrushina and others.

The exhibition features a lot of drawings by Eisenstein (and he drew all his life), photographs of the director: his portraits, photographs of his performances and the production of Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, footage from the filming of his famous films, as well as photographs taken during Eisenstein’s trip in 1930 year in the USA and Mexico.

The halls also display costumes for the film “Ivan the Terrible,” as well as sketches of sets and costumes for performances staged by Eisenstein. Of particular interest are the beaded reticule and earrings given by the director to the daughter of his friend Grigory Roshal, Marianna, who was Eisenstein’s student. They are accompanied by a dedicatory inscription: “Do not throw beads following the example of the teacher.”

But the main part of the exhibition are fragments of Eisenstein’s films, which are shown both on large screens, including in the central part of the exhibition space, and on tablets for individual viewing.

Here you can also see posters for the director’s films, some of which were created by Alexander Rodchenko. For example, the exhibition includes two works by Alexander Rodchenko for the film “Battleship Potemkin”, and one of them exists in a single copy.

The very name of the exhibition “Montage of Attractions” refers to the program manifesto of Sergei Eisenstein, written back in 1923. Olga Sviblova, director of MAMM and curator of the exhibition, spoke about this, as well as how the surviving documentary evidence helps to better understand the personality and formation of the director’s personality.

Olga SVIBLOVA: Eisenstein staged in “Montage of Attractions” main question. In the center of any artistic activity the viewer is standing. All his life he will be absolutely scientifically, seriously engaged not only in the psychology of creativity, but also in the psychology of perception of creativity. Because he, unlike many cultural figures, will seriously go over to the side of the viewer. It was painful and painful for him, but he went over to the side of the revolution and sorted things out with this all his life. But already in 1923, in his programmatic article “Installation of Attractions,” he clearly said, “I’m on the side of the viewer. If the viewer does not feel my message, then this is not a bad viewer. It’s me who’s a bad artist.” And we tried to make the exhibition so that it would have an emotional impact on the viewer. And not just because there are a lot of screens, a lot of material. Because it is impossible to identify a logical progression in Eisenstein, either in his life or in his work, and construct it academically. This part, which we conventionally call “biographical,” is the most academic. We see here Eisenstein’s children’s drawings, and we understand that the boy, the child, was already thinking in absolutely character-based ways. That is, this is an amazing vision and coverage of reality, like characters, characters and the development of these characters. That is, his path was predetermined, despite the efforts of his father to make him also an architect and despite the fact that Eisenstein would graduate from the Institute of Engineering... He was proud of this, that “I am an engineer.” He didn't say, "I'm an architect." This is the combination of a constructive principle - that’s why Eisenstein is still a great theorist - a constructive principle that tries, finding it intuitively. very clearly build the logic of how it affects the viewer, and what he wants to say in each film. We can say that Eisenstein's films are didactic. He tried absolutely sincerely in them, just sometimes didactically, as in children's story, explain what is happening in Russia, the impulses of Soviet power, its desire to create certain myths. We understand that October and Potemkin are myths. But he doesn’t make a concrete event out of them, he makes a Greek tragedy out of them. Because there was no person in the world who knew world culture like that except Eisenstein. When we started working on this exhibition, and it started four years ago, we re-read everything that Eisenstein wrote. It's toma-toma-tom. We have compiled a list of simply figures of world culture, composers, architects, artists, graphic artists, photographers, filmmakers, to whom Eisenstein refers. We ended up with 230 neat pages, without any text gaps. That is, the way it whistled world culture through Eisenstein, but it did not pass through any other cultural figure, nor through one director, nor through one artist. But in this huge cultural flow, Eisenstein constructs his message very rigidly. “Montage of Attractions is how to get that message across.”

It is no coincidence, as Olga Sviblova said, that a decision was made to extend the ongoing exhibition “Alexander Rodchenko. Experiments for the future." Thus, in one exhibition space you can get acquainted with the work of two great innovators of Russian art - Eisenstein in the field of cinema and Rodchenko in photography. The exhibition “Montage of Attractions” opens the anniversary year for MAMM. In 2016, the Multimedia Art Museum turns 20 years old. “Mounting attractions” will last until February 26, 2017.

PHOTO REPORT

Olga Sviblova and general manager Channel One Konsantin Ernst. Photo by Aleksey Salomatov

Poster for the film "Ivan the Terrible". Photo by Aleksey Salomatov

Text: Alexey Salomatov
Photo and video materials: Alexey Salomatov

The Multimedia Art Museum (aka the Moscow House of Photography) celebrates its twentieth anniversary with the exhibition "Sergei Eisenstein. Montage of Attractions", unique material for which was provided by three archives (RGALI, RGACFD, Gosfilmofond of Russia), three museums (A.A. Bakhrushin Theater Museum , State Museum cinema, Bolshoi Theater Museum), as well as Mosfilm and the STV film company.

In fact, in the Year of Cinema, MAMM offered an interesting translation of the history of experiments, triumphs and dramas, searches and discoveries of the greatest hero, director, theorist of Russian and world cinema into the language of multimedia installation. “Montage of Attractions,” the director’s most famous formula, provides the key not only to Eisenstein’s films, but also to the exhibition created by Olga Sviblova, Anna Zaitseva and architects Kirill Ass and Nadya Korbut.

Instead of the beginning, there is a long paper strip with a drawn line in 1916 for tea, sugar, coffee, in which, it seems, they do not stand, but live - an effective “test of the pen” of a novice cartoonist and, of course, the promise of future films. But also a tuning fork. Game, cartoons, play on words (sometimes in three languages ​​at once, as in the Moscow auto cartoon of September 1941) and things (as in the signature to a gift for a student - a beaded pouch: “Unlike the teacher - never dream!”, where instead of the word " beads", as in a charade, the pouch itself) - this is not a preparation of "impromptu" for future use, it is a way of thinking and living. Here is a photograph of Viktor Dombrovsky - Mikhail Romm and Eisenstein on the set of "Ivan the Terrible" in 1942-1943. They could stare at the camera on duty, but for both directors (and Romm is also an actor made up for the role of Queen Elizabeth I of England) it’s too boring. In addition, the appearance of the lens is almost like a command “Motor! Let’s start!” And now Romm-Elizabeth, from the chair-throne, leans towards Eisenstein, taking him by the chin like a naughty child. The photograph doubles the space of the game, not to mention the meanings... Much later, Romm recalled that Eisenstein “almost never said anything seriously,” “his caustic and good-natured witticisms,” he recalled, “that every phrase of his had to be understood in two ways ..."

The “duality” of the gaming element permeates the exhibition, which is structured very subtly... Thus, the “translation” of the famous paintings “Strike”, “Battleship Potemkin”, “October”, “Old and New (General Line)” into the format of display on tablets, of course, a tribute to modern “speech”, in which parallel editing has already become routine (bow to the author of “October”!) videos from YouTube, Instagram pictures, comments on Twitter and blog posts... But it is curious that the same format - with other technical capabilities, of course , - used Eisenstein in theatrical productions. Thus, Eisenstein responded to Lunacharsky’s call in 1923 to stage Ostrovsky’s plays by staging “The Sage,” in which Glumov’s diary was presented as something similar to a modern video blog. Film inserts from the “diary” appeared on the backdrop of the stage and parodied documentaries and popular silent films about Fantômas... In the eccentric “The Sage” Eisenstein picked up a movie camera for the first time.

Eisenstein almost never said anything seriously

But to this rhyme in the exhibition, which loops the theatrical search of the 1920s, the discovery of a new film language and modern cursive writing on tablets and phones, another one is added. I am referring to the parallel between the "montage of attractions" and the search for constructivism, which is evident, say, in Eisenstein's sketches for scenery and costumes in theatrical productions. These “roll calls,” as well as references to buffoonery and circus tricks, are a direct bridge not only to FEX, but, of course, also to the large exhibition of Alexander Rodchenko right there in the museum.

The curators avoid extensive comments, trying to give the floor to Eisenstein himself wherever possible. Fortunately, his speech turns out to be not only brilliant, generous with unexpected associations (what is the wartime cartoon “St. Sebastian in the military registration and enlistment office” worth? Need I say that the hero, who, as expected, is covered in arrows, is recognized as fit for service?), but also very modern. In an era when visual information is crowding out verbal information, his drawings do not require translation. Among graphic works in the third part of the exhibition, where “Alexander Nevsky” performs together with “Ivan the Terrible” - on many screens at once, next to the “Desultory Visions” of dancers without heads, you can see the sketch “Testing a Man by a Blizzard.” His character, like an aerialist under a circus big top, hangs holding a ring with one hand. But instead of the arena and spectators, there are whirlwinds of a blizzard around him, in which he cannot see anything.

The autobiographical nature of the drawing is almost beyond doubt. Just look at the footage from “Alexander Nevsky”, next to which are rare photographs from Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre”. In 1940, Eisenstein staged it in Bolshoi Theater. The point is not even that the photographs reveal the “operatic”, conventional nature of the film. The opera and the film communicate diametrically opposed political contexts. "Alexander Nevsky", for which the director received the Stalin Prize, was withdrawn from distribution after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. And as a sign of friendship with Germany, an opera by Wagner, so beloved by Hitler, was urgently staged on the stage of the Bolshoi... The war will return “Nevsky” to the country’s screens. And Eisenstein would eventually unexpectedly get a chance to work with color - the gloomy dance in the feast and murder scene in the second part of Ivan the Terrible was shot on captured German color film. And the whirlwind movement in this episode will suddenly remind you of the drawing where a blizzard swirls and twirls around the author’s alter ego, hanging by a thread. Either as an acrobat in a circus, or as a child in hide and seek, or as a doomed prince in “Ivan the Terrible”... Eisenstein knew what he was drawing when he sketched out this phantasmagoric plot.

MOSCOW GOVERNMENT
DEPARTMENT OF CULTURE OF THE CITY OF MOSCOW
RUSSIAN STATE ARCHIVE OF LITERATURE AND ART
STATE CENTRAL THEATER MUSEUM NAMED AFTER A.A. BAKHRUSHINA
STATE CENTRAL MUSEUM OF CINEMA
MUSEUM OF THE STATE ACADEMIC BOLSHOI THEATER OF RUSSIA
GOSFILMFOUND OF RUSSIA
FILM CONCERN "MOSFILM"
STV FILM COMPANY
MULTIMEDIA ART MUSEUM, MOSCOW / MOSCOW HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY MUSEUM

present an exhibition

SERGEY EISENSHTEIN “MONTAGE OF ATTRACTIONS”

Curator: Olga Sviblova

As part of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow

Strategic partners of the exhibition: Norilsk Nickel, MasterCard
Strategic partners of the Museum: OJSC Novatek, Ahmad Tea in Russia
Opening partners: Ruinart, Burnier

As part of the celebration of the 20th anniversary, MAMM presents the exhibition “Montage of Attractions”, dedicated to the work of the great director, artist, screenwriter, teacher, author of fundamental works on film theory - Sergei Eisenstein. The exhibition is also timed to coincide with the Year of Cinema, which was announced in Russia in 2016.

Sergei Eisenstein is a legendary figure in the history of world cinema. It is impossible to overestimate the influence he had on the development of modern Russian and foreign cinema. A huge number of books and scientific studies are devoted to Eisenstein, he is one of the most mentioned directors all over the world, and his famous film “Battleship Potemkin” is rightfully recognized as one of best films in history based on surveys of critics, directors and the public.

The exhibition at MAMM presents different facets of Eisenstein’s work: his drawings - from the earliest, which show how vividly and characterfully he thought already in childhood, to the later - and Eisenstein drew all his life. In the drawings of the encyclopedic educated genius, his plans, realized and unrealized, his emotional and intellectual experiences associated with world culture, which reflects the history of human civilization, are outlined as if in cursive writing. The exhibition features friendly caricatures of close friends - Mikhail Romm (the drawing was completed by Romm himself and signed “Partially spoiled by M. Romm”), director Grigory Roshal, actor Maxim Shtraukh, cameraman and photographer Viktor Dombrovsky, as well as numerous caricatures.

The exhibition includes sketches of sets and costumes for performances staged in the 1920s, both by Sergei Eisenstein himself and other directors, as well as costumes for the film “Ivan the Terrible.” A special place in the exhibition is occupied by unique artifacts - a beaded reticule and earrings given by Eisenstein to the daughter of his friend Grigory Roshal - Marianna. Eisenstein had a long-term friendship with Roshal's family. The birthdays of Marianna and Sergei Eisenstein practically coincided and were celebrated together for many years. Later, Marianna Roshal became Eisenstein’s student and worked as an assistant on the set of the epic “Ivan the Terrible.” Sergei Eisenstein made his last gift to Marianna Roshal when he was already seriously ill and could not walk. He gave the girl, whom he had known since infancy, a beaded reticule with a dedicatory inscription: “Do not throw beads like your teacher.” At that moment, Eisenstein had problems with the second episode of Ivan the Terrible, and he knew that even the Stalin Prize received for the first episode of the film would not save the second from censorship.

The exhibition contains many photographs related to the life and work of the director. These include portraits of Sergei Eisenstein, created by classics of Russian photography: Alexander Grinberg, Dmitry Debabov, Moses Nappelbaum and others; photographs of Eisenstein’s famous performances from the time of his work at Proletkult, photographs documenting his trip to America, photographs of Eisenstein with figures of Russian and world culture, and of course, footage from the filming of Sergei Eisenstein’s famous films: “Strike”, “October”, “Battleship” “Potemkin”, “Old and New”, “Bezhin Meadow”, “Alexander Nevsky”, “Ivan the Terrible”, created by his cameraman friends: Viktor Dombrovsky, Boris Francisson, Alexander Sigaev and Yakov Tolchan. The exhibition will show a series related to Sergei Eisenstein's work on Richard Wagner's opera Die Walküre, staged at the Bolshoi Theater in 1940.

The exhibition will feature posters for films by Sergei Eisenstein, including two works by Alexander Rodchenko for the film Battleship Potemkin. One of Rodchenko’s posters became canonical and was widely circulated, while the other, which was not included in the film’s advertising campaign, exists in a single copy, drawn by the artist.

The main place in the exhibition, of course, is given to fragments of Sergei Eisenstein’s films. In his famous article “Montage of Attractions” in 1923, Eisenstein wrote: “An attraction in the context of a theater is every aggressive moment of the theater, that is, every element of it that exposes the viewer to a sensory or psychological impact, experimentally verified and mathematically calculated for certain emotional shocks of the perceiver... In formal terms, I establish the attraction as an independent and primary element of the performance's design - a molecular (that is, composite) unit of the effectiveness of the theater and theater in general. In complete analogy, there is Gross’s “figurative preparation” or elements of Rodchenko’s photo illustrations.” Eisenstein wrote this article while still working in the theater, but it was in it that his creative method was formulated, which he would develop while working in cinema - “montage of attractions.”

The revolutionary theory of “mountain attractions” is more relevant today than ever. In an era of growing information noise, the struggle for the feelings and thoughts of viewers is the main thing for every artist.

In our anniversary year, our museum space hosts simultaneously exhibitions of two great innovators of Russian art, the beginning of whose creative activity coincided with the beginning of the twentieth century and its great revolutionary upheavals - Alexander Rodchenko and Sergei Eisenstein. Both of them lived and worked for the sake of the future. Their work changed the development of Russian and world culture and, almost a hundred years later, does not lose its relevance. Their unique angles and visual metaphors set the vector of movement.