Bezhin Meadow: Sequences from an Unfinished Film (Бежин луг)

The Russian Film Archives present

Bezhin Meadow Sergei Eisenstein

History of an unfinished film (1935-1937)

Professor Rostislav Yourenev tells the fate ofthis film,

You're going to live an unique experience...

the resurrection of a lost film

that will be restored

from the notes, the old pictures,

pieces of film like these ones...

where there are only 2 or 3 frames of the film :

Bezhin Meadow by Sergei Eisenstein

This restoration is the work of an old friend of Eisenstein,

director Sergei Youtkevitch

and the young film historian Naoum Kleiman.

The story of Bezhin Meadow is a real tragedy.

During the early thirties,

when Eisenstein came back from America,

leaving to the Hollywoodian toilers

the complete footage of Que Viva Mexico,

back home in USSR,

his dream was to direct

a great and meaningful film.

Finding a script or a story

was fruitless for a while.

Finally, he's been given

the script from Alexander Rjechevsky

about the murder of pioneer Pavel Marozov

by his own father, enemy of collectivism.

Sergei Eisenstein began working with passion.

This drama was for him

the expression of a tragic

and fundamental conflict:

the brutal struggle

between the old and reactionary country,

stuck to the past,

and the new soviet and socialist country.

Through the image of Stepok's father,

tousled and fearsome,

surrounded by old shrews,

he saw the old Russia,

whereas the new Russia

was embodied in the image of pioneer Stepok,

illuminated by the sun of future,

supported by the communists and the komsomols

of the new soviet country.

The scene where the church is converted into a club

should have been the climax.

The religious feeling

embodied in famous compositions

such as the Crucifixion, the Deposition,

Samson destroying the temple above his head,

was opposed to the new momentum of collective action,

popular, gay and full of energy.

A first rough cut of the film was screened

without Eisenstein, who was seriously ill.

The reception was very negative.

As he wanted to answer to these critics as an artist,

Eisenstein went back to work.

With the novelist lsaac Babel, he rewrote the script,

replaced the performer of the father character

and a few other players.

He changed the church sequence,

which has been the most criticized,

by a dynamic sequence

of fight against the burning of the kolkhoz

kindled by the koulaks.

But Eisenstein wasn't able to finish this version.