joerookery said:
Chas tell us the story!!!
rendsburg said:
You're bound to be disappointed; it's something of a spoiler, and, way, way off topic.
The subject in the photo is Eduard Tisse (aka, Edouard Tissé, Edward Tissé) 1897-1961. Tisse was a Russian born cinematographer who collaborated with director Sergei Eisenstein to create some of the Soviet Union's most celebrated popaganda films, chief among these are:
Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925),
Stachka (Strike, 1925), and
Aleksandr Nevskiy (Alexander Nevsky, 1938). For further information on Eisenstein see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Eisenstein
And, for Tisse (you'll need some German, here):
http://www.deutsches-filminstitut.de/dt2tp0123.htm
In 1927, Eisenstein was commissioned by the government to direct a film commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The result was
Oktyabr (October).
In this film, Tisse appears in a brief cameo that was also the first sequence staged before the camera. He plays a German officer whose men fraternize with Russian troops after the announcement of the Tsar's abdication and the fall of the monarchy. The scene plays out when it is announced that the Provisional Government, lead by Kerensky, has every intention of continuing the war with Germany. The short lived fraternity dissolves into a frenzied scramble by the Russian troops to their trenches under the fire of Maxims.
This sequence provides a cinematographic bounty of Ersatz Pickelhauben (all Preußen and mostly Filz).
The production still above is from the collection of the late Eisenstein scholar, Jay Leyda, who was a Professor at NYU when I attended film school there in the 1980s.
Thank goodness I can't hear the boos.
Chas. :roll:
