Beyond the Stars, Part 2

Few figures in cinema history are as towering as Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Mikhailovitch Eisenstein (1898–1948). Not only did Eisenstein direct some of the most important and lasting works of the silent era, including Strike, October and Battleship Potemkin, as well as, in the sound era, the historical epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, he also was a theorist whose insights into the workings of film were so powerful that they remain influential for both filmmakers and scholars today.

A fascinating memoir in two volumes, Beyond the Stars—first published by Seagull in 1995 and now available again—was begun as Eisenstein approached the age of 50. Full of the famous names of his era, including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, Walt Disney and many more, it is a serious book of inquiry about film as a medium, offering countless reflections by Eisenstein on his own work and that of other movie pioneers.

‘Design and typography in this 2018 two-volume edition are both much more handsome and elegant than the clunky one-volume 1995 edition of nearly 800 pages. The two-volume format is substantially easier to work with . . . The assemblage is highly successful to the extent that we don’t readily see where the cuts and splices lie and an effective suturing serves to reanimate the subject of the writing and the endless energies of the text, pulsating from one fragment to another. Eisenstein thus seems more alive to us than ever in the infinite potential of the assembled textual particles.’—Helen Grace, Apparatus. Read the fascinating story of this memoir here.