This special 35mm screening of the Sergei Eisenstein classic will be introduced by Ian Christie.
Regent Street Cinema introduction:
Kino Klassika Foundation and Regent St Cinema are proud to present Alexander Nevsky – the film that reinvented Sergei Eisenstein. Having been the world’s most famous revolutionary filmmaker at the end of the silent period, he was frustrated for nearly a decade in tackling the new medium of sound film – until Nevsky launched him as the prophet of a new kind of operatic cinema. Working closely with Sergei Prokofiev, he created an ultra-patriotic pageant of medieval Russia defeating its Teutonic enemies that became the USSR’s greatest cultural weapon against Nazi Germany. Like Tarkovsky in Andrei Rublev thirty years later, Eisenstein had reached back to a time so little known that he was able to invent a myth free of Soviet clichés. His film would inspire Olivier’s Henry V and many post-war epics set in the chivalric era.
Chicago Reader review:
Sergei Eisenstein turns the story of the great Russian prince into an abstract exercise in visual and aural counterpoint—it's more theory than movie. But Edouard Tisse's superb photography and Prokofiev's stirring score contribute to a rhythm that is well-nigh irresistible, culminating in the famous battle on the ice. Made in 1938, it was Eisenstein's first sound film—Stalin had sidelined him for a decade.
Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is an extract.
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