HEROES, HOMOS, and RUSSIA'S MASTER EDITOR

The master of editing. The father of montage. A genius. These are the things one hears about Sergei Eisenstein. What one almost never hears is that he was also gay.

“Not only the result, but the road to it also, is a part of truth,” writes Eisenstein. Thus, for Eisenstein, for the aggregate purpose and effect of a film to be “true,” so must each step the filmmaker takes be honest in terms of the filmmaker’s own truths. Eisenstein continues to write that, “No man aspiring to [filmmaking] can disregard any knowledge that will make him a truer film director or human being.”

While it would be a crime to suggest – as some have – that gay imagery is the only important thing in his films, it would also be naive to deny – as many more have – that it exists altogether . Eisenstein was gay. After a failed foray into Hollywood, he went to Mexico to shoot a film, the financing for which was pulled after he attempted to travel with bundles of homoerotic sketches including one of Jesus on the cross, His hose-like penis in the mouth of one of the robbers. Furthermore, Eisenstein believes a successful film (a “true” result) cannot avoid somehow representing the filmmaker’s own personal truths. Thus, it is not surprising that upon examination of his films there are overwhelming homosexual and homoerotic undertones – undertones that reveal themselves largely in Eisenstein’s hero-ization of the blue collar male, and frequently, his subsequent suffering and martyrdom.

Homosexual imagery was, of course, not new to the visual arts. Still, it is interesting to note that during Eisenstein’s formative years, his country, Russia, was experiencing a surge of gay recognition in art as well as politics. When Eisenstein was a child, the penalty for sodomy in Russia, which had previously been five year’s exile in Siberia, was reduced to imprisonment for a few months. The same year, Vladimir Nabokov, the father of the famous writer, began a campaign to decriminalize gay sex altogether. In 1906, Michael Kuzmin published Wings, a coming-of-age story about a young man discovering his homosexual attractions, and in 1917, the Bolsheviks abrogated the entire criminal code – among the laws nullified were those criminalizing sex between men.

Despite this burgeoning acceptance, Russia was not gay friendly, and Eisenstein “could never be a public homosexual the way his contemporaries, like Jean Cocteau or Gertrude Stein, could be, protected as they were by the polite tolerance of the artistic avant-garde.” This is why his homosexuality revealed itself in his work. What follows is an investigation of how.

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1923)

“Hero worship is a natural part of the homosexual aesthetic myth,” and nowhere does Eisenstein further exalt groups of men to hero status than in Battleship Potemkin. The homoerotic innuendo is overwhelming, most obviously so in the giant, lubricated pokers that plunge in and out of the cannon barrels on the ship’s deck. Perhaps the subtlest case of gay imagery appears at the moment of mutiny, when sailors scamper around the ship “like blood cells shooting through a massive vein,” or the shots of semi-nude sailors lying in hammocks.

But as we established earlier, it is the glorification of the proletarian male through which Eisenstein most fully realizes his homosexual imagery, and in Potemkin, this occurs just after the leader of the mutiny is killed. Reportedly, Eisenstein read that during the 1917 revolt in St. Petersburg, a young boy had his shirt ripped off before being executed. Obligingly, at the moment of mourning, Potemkin shows “a young lad [tearing] his shirt in a paroxysm of fury, revealing his bare chest.”

Furthermore, one can deduce that Eisenstein cared more about this moment than even the raising of the battleship’s flag, which immediately followed, as it is the boy he chose to write about, saying “his perforated body…and the two halves of the boy’s shirt lay on the granite steps near the Sphinxes.” Eisenstein also revisits this motif in Ivan the Terrible when the monk-turned-assassin has his shirt torn from him.

OLD AND NEW (1929)
As if bare-chested sailors didn’t carry a sufficiently homosexual connotation, Eisenstein leaves little to doubt in Old and New, where he graduates to bare-chested farm boys, and his decidedly most forceful homoerotic film.

Most notably is the test sequence for a new separating machine, on which the fate of the farmers cooperative relies, which results in a lush overflow of, yes, cream! “A discharge with life-affirming erotic overtones, that symbolizes their becoming newly whole and a sense of collective release of the farm cooperative’s members from both current want and past servitude.” Although the farm boys (and others) in this scene are saved in a sense – not martyred – Eisenstein is intent on reminding us of their suffering previous to this moment, and their heroic stick-to-itiveness despite their former indenture. Intellectual montage, yes, but also a clear sense of orgasmic montage as well.

IVAN THE TERRIBLE parts I & II (1944 & 1958)
Once again, as with Potemkin, there are examples of overt homoeroticism, as well as more subtle innuendo. An undeniable moment of gay imagery appears in a bizarre throne-room scene where a traitor unsheathes his sword. The Polish King then fondles it and returns it for a kiss.

The subtle homosexuality in Ivan the Terrible, somewhat converse to Eisenstein’s other films, is depicted through his indifference toward the female characters. While many of Eisenstein’s women exist in films of a predominantly male universe, in the Ivans, they are downright one-dimensional and even caricatures: one, a blonde Madonna, the other, an ogre. Like Marfa in Old and New, presented as an androgynous and immature woman, a large portion of Eisenstein’s gay “personal truth” shines through his careless portrayal of the film’s two major ladies.

Most importantly, this trilogy of films (interrupted by his death) is home to Eisenstein’s only directly referenced homosexual character: Vladimir. For much of history, gay artists have only safely been able to overtly portray homosexuality in the packaging of the evil or decadence. This is the route Eisenstein takes with the pretty, effeminate, blonde Vladimir. Indeed, “Vladimir is as pretty as a Hollywood starlet, and is portrayed by Eisenstein as a witless mama’s boy, constantly pursing his lips and batting his eyelashes.” Eisenstein constructs Vladimir in the image of a clear gay stereotype, and under the protection of the character’s otherwise deviant nature.

Interestingly, a screen test still exists for the unfinished part III which suggests that Eisenstein wanted Elizabeth I of England to be played by a young man.

It is clearly apparent that a homoerotic and homosexual exaltation of the proletarian male was a part of Eisenstein’s personal homosexual “truth.” His male characters, many discussed here, are erotically hero-ized. Still, as mentioned at the beginning of this essay, it is ridiculous to assume that such homoeroticism is simply the result of Eisenstein’s own erotic desires and nothing more. Eisenstein’s homoeroticism is clearly also a result of his politics, as seen in his choosing working-class men to idolize. Indeed, as Parker Tyler put it, “The Marxist world view which motivated his films provided a natural channel of expression for his eye for male beauty. The physical beauty of the male proletarian hero arose from a unique confluence of Eisenstein’s erotic sensibility and his political belief.”