I just watched this compilation of footage shot in Mexico around 1930 by Eisenstein, and I was completely unprepared for the striking quality of these images, some of the most beautiful black and white cinematography I've seen. As I understand it, this footage, which Eisenstein was compelled to abandon, has been compiled and edited into a sort of travelogue by the Oleg Kovalov, who gets director credit for this film. This is a travelogue in a more old-fashioned sense – not a survey of resorts, hotels, casinos and airports, but an impression of the time, place, people and atmosphere of old Mexico. It has been edited per notes left by Eisenstein, along with a degree of interpretation guided by Kovalov's knowledge of Eisenstein's style and intentions. However far it might have strayed from those original intentions, it is a remarkably beautiful film in its own right. Early on in the film, the compositions look like Gaugin paintings come to life, as the provincial Mexicans strike the iconic poses that Eisenstein set up, surrounded by tropical foliage. In one particular shot, two young woman hold their pose under some palm leaves, but the one on the left repeatedly breaks into giggles, possibly over the strange attitude that the crazy Russian has asked her to hold. Really charming. Many of the scenes with the local people are moody, or even a bit spooky, some involving symbols of death. Others are more festive, but still with a dark quality to them. A Russian is a Russian, I guess. A stereo soundtrack has been added which consists of various ethnic music (not just Mexican), more modern, avant-garde music, and ambient sounds and sound effects that are so apt and well-timed to the film, they give you an eerie sense of being there. This is one of the best things I've seen in a long time, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

彼得·格林纳威将自编自导《爱森斯坦在瓜纳华托》前传《爱森斯坦在好莱坞》（Eisenstein in Hollywood，暂译）。埃尔默·拜克将继续饰演爱森斯坦这一角色。在这部影片中，爱森斯坦受卓别林邀请来到好莱坞，还结识了对当代电影影响重大的格里菲斯和刘别谦等人。该片有望于今年11月开机拍摄。

《爱森斯坦在瓜纳华托》讲述的是世界蒙太奇之父谢尔盖·爱森斯坦在墨西哥度过的一段奇特岁月。影片实验性颇足，并极具视觉冲击力，是英国导演彼得·格林纳威的巅峰之作，入围2015年柏林电影节金熊奖。 1931年，苏联导演谢尔盖·爱森斯坦（埃尔默·拜克 Elmer Bäck 饰） 到瓜纳华托拍摄他的新片《墨西哥万岁》。在那里，他接触到全新的文化以及当地文明对死亡的态度，也发现了另一个自己。在兼具欢乐和危险的异国他乡，他开始重新评估他的祖国和斯大林统治下的社会制度。“震撼爱森斯坦的十天”，片中的爱森斯坦这样描述自己在瓜纳华托的经历，这句总结来自爱森斯坦的经典电影《震撼世界的十天》，一部关于俄国十月革命的默片。在本片中观众可以感受到爱森斯坦在瓜纳华托经历像十月革命那样跌宕疯狂的冒险。虽然只有十天故事，影片却通过夸张的剪辑处理整理出爱森斯坦的电影成就和个人经历，串联出大师的传奇一生，无疑是人物传记电影里大胆而先锋的影像尝试。

1931年，世界格局已然开始风云四起，但电影业似乎也经历着诸多机遇和变革。大师级的导演谢尔盖·爱森斯坦前往遥远的墨西哥瓜纳华托，在这里开始了短暂而…

The great Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, whose Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible stand as masterpieces of world cinema, is the subject of this eccentric and puzzling production. Though based on memoirs Eisenstein wrote before his death in 1948, most of this film is barely a documentary at all, but rather a composite of images, many of which are fascinating and arresting. Eisenstein himself was known for startling and memorable images (perhaps the most famous of which is the shot of the baby carriage rolling down the steps in Potemkin), so memorializing him with clips from his own films interspersed with readings from his memoirs seems somewhat appropriate. But the voice-over in Russian (with English subtitles) is quite sparse, and at times the images onscreen, which include clips from Buster Keaton films and Hollywood musicals from the 1930s, are utterly mystifying.. --Robert J. McNamara

It's a 60-minutes documentary about different types, techniques and notions of montage used by Eisenstein. The movie is very imaginative, features a lot of interesting video-techniques to visualize different concepts of montage. This is not Eisenstein's film, but a series of montage lessons by V. Chubisov using Eisenstein's films for examples...

梅兰芳1935年去苏联访问期间，爱森斯坦为其拍摄的一部戏曲电影。

What is a revolutionary? The writings of Marx and Engels both use the metaphor of revolution as the "locomotive of history". Is, then, the revolutionary a standard bearer of progress, a pace setter, a frontrunner? None of the above, because in a world ruled by a turbo "devaluation" where only the new has market value, where commodity production spirals out of control, the "train of time" is a deadly trend. Alexander Kluge instead opts for Walter Benjamin's idea of the revolution as mankind "pulling the emergency brake". We must hold up the torch of reason to the problems at hand, and the true revolutionary is therefore the one who can unite future and past, merging two times, two societies, the artist who montages stories and history. And so we come to Alexander Kluge and his art. Kluge's monumental "News from Ideological Antiquity. Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital" is a 570-minute film available only on DVD which is based on the work of two other montage artists, James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein. These two met in 1929 to discuss filming Marx's "Kapital" which had been written 60 years beforehand. Now, eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood's capitalists nor Moscow's Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way. Most of the film consists of involved discussions between Alexander Kluge and other Marx-savvy writers and artists. Poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger compares the soul of man with the soul of money, author Dietmar Dath explains the meaning of the hammer and sickle on the Soviet flag and, from the standpoint of the Stoics, leaps (rather than marches at an orderly pace) into industrialisation, the actress Sophie Rois makes an impassioned appeal for Medea, differentiating between additive and subtractive love, filmmaker Werner Schroeter stages a Wagner opera featuring the "rebirth of Tristan in the spirit of battleship Potemkin", philosopher Peter Sloterdijk talks about Ovid and the metamorphosis of added value, a man at the piano analyses the score of a strike song while workers and factory owners face off in an opera by Luigi Nono, the poet Dürs Grünbein interprets Bert Brecht's aesthetisation of the Communist manifesto in swinging oceanic hexameter, cultural scientist Rainer Stollmann emphasises the myriad meanings of Marx's writings as science, art, story telling, philosophy, poetry. And social theorist and philosopher Oskar Negt looks sceptical when asked whether it's possible to find the right images for all this stuff when you're less interested in pedagogical content than the encompassing theory. Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But even if your own study of Marx is no more than a faded memory, it is hugely enjoyable to watch and listen to these experts as their "thinking gradually deepens through talking" and to watch Kluge interject, hopping adroitly from one thought to the next, surprising his interlocutors, catching them off balance, sending them off on new trajectories. We never know how much agreement and variance is hidden in Kluge's objections. His a Socratic approach to questioning, curious, open to everything, and so wonderfully subtle that at the end always find yourself wondering whether he had been driving at a particular target all along. Alexander Kluge is a great manipulator, an industrious loom, who weaves the most far-flung observations into his system. He is not filming "Das Kapital" but researching how one might find images to make Marx's book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination. The model for his underlying structure is Joyce's "Ulysses" where the entire history of the world is packed into a day in the life of his hero, Bloom. In Kluge's hands this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and concrete poetry. Coincidences, collisions. Back to back with a short film in which director Tom Tykwer stirs things up in a Berlin street, two readers struggle to recite the following sentence, slipping in and out of synch with increasing desperation: "Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective." No sooner are we shown "how the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man's essential powers, the perceptibly existing human psychology" than we have the history of capitalism is explained to us as a giant extension of the fairytale about the devil with the three golden hairs – every thing is a human being being cast under a spell. And the beginning of Mae West's film career runs parallel to the leap into industrialisation – a form of aesthetic slapstick in which not cream pies fly through the air but ideas and concepts. Unlike Eisenstein, who was driven to desperation by the herculean task of cutting the 29 hours of "October" into a 90-minute film version and turned to drugs into the process which left him temporarily blind, Kluge cooly sticks to his guns and his nine hours. And it's not a minute too long. (This article was originally published in Tagesspiegel on 8 January 2009. Helmut Merker is a film critic.)

1940年，迪士尼公司制作了第三部长片动画《幻想曲》，为动画史贡献了一部迄今仍难以企及的经典名作。本片由8部音乐短片组成，最早诞生的《魔法师的学徒》讲述了在魔法师严西（Yensid，迪士尼Disney倒写）手下学徒的米老鼠偷戴师傅的帽子，利用魔法指挥扫帚挑水并惹下大祸的 有趣故事。该片原打算收入“糊涂交响曲（Silly Symphonies）”系列，但因严重超支，入不敷出，故迪士尼决定另外结合几支经典名曲拍成一部音乐短片合集，一并发行。只是因过于艺术化以及二战等方面的原因，《幻想曲》并未取得预期的收益。除杜卡的《魔法师的学徒》外，本片收录曲目还有巴赫《D小调托卡塔与赋格》、柴科夫斯基《胡桃夹子》、斯特拉文斯基《春之祭》、贝多芬《田园交响曲》、蓬基耶利《时间舞曲》、穆索尔斯基《荒山之夜》和舒伯特的《万福玛丽亚》。 本片获第14届奥斯卡特别成就（音 乐和录音技术）2项金像奖。

影片故事情节由音乐推动，通过一系列动画对古典音乐中的杰作进行解读。除了第一段“魔法师的学徒”其它六个段落都无剧情，纯粹在表现影像与音乐的巧妙配合而已，一团色彩或线条可能暗喻某些概念。“魔法师的学徒”的主角是米奇，它是一位上进的魔术师，讲述了他如何超越自己极限，当学徒学习魔法的故事。“春之祭”描述的是进化的过程，从单细胞生物的形成讲到恐龙的灭亡。“时光之舞”是一出喜剧芭蕾舞剧，由驼鸟、大象、鳄鱼等动物演出。“荒山之夜”和“圣母颂”则讲述了黑暗与光明之间的斗争，最终黑暗邪恶势力的反抗随着清晨的到来而结束。