Oh wow this threw me back to film school. There is a great book by Ester Leslie called Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde that walks through the overlap in animation and the avant-garde movement. It's very in-depth read if you liked this article
A caption to a figure in the article reads "Georgi Molotov ... 'the great survivor', was one of Stalin's key enforcers for decades". Wasn't Molotov's name Vyacheslav? [0]
Reading the transcript of Stalin, Molotov, etc's conversation with Eisenstein was really interesting. Even if you disagree with their analysis and what they're doing, it's clear they know the period very well--it's hard to imagine modern politicians speaking on history like that.
It's hard to imagine a modern head of state incapable of delivering that level of basic national mythology/history. There's probably the occasional counterexample but this is common enough to regularly pop up in available transcripts of national leaders meeting to this day.
It's an interesting facet of Stalin's personality that he was a big movie nerd. Many of his "parties" ended with binge-watching movies with other high level party members (who were pretty much forced to be there).
"Great artist admired other great artist." Not really breaking news. I think the work of Disney and his team of animators has long been recognized as brilliant. There's no need for the chip on the shoulder.
The idea of Eisenstein as a live action animator is very cool though. I've only seen Battleship Potemkin, but even from that I see what the writer of this piece means. It took an admirer of animation to think that creatively about editing, and to make the move from realism to something more/less.
Fun fact: my grandfather was a dyed in the wool commie, and he saw Battleship Potemkin probably 1,000 times. My grandmother could not understand how he could watch it over and over again, but even after one viewing, I get it. It's thrilling.
"The viewer's opinion" (singular), not "the viewers' opinion" (plural). So he was only expressing his opinion as a viewer - not that that would have mattered less than any direct instructions...
OTOH, the translation is not that good, so I'm not sure the distinction I mentioned is intentional. For instance, what does this phrase even mean:
> Stalin pointed to Cherkasov that he had the capacity for incarnation and that we have still the capacity to incarnate the artist Khmelev.
Plus mentioning various French kings called "Ludwig", which are actually "Louis" in English...
