Eduard Tisse

As the Russian monarchy crumbles, conflicts at Petrograd intensify, with Soviet hero V.I. Lenin leading the rebellion that overthrows the tsar's Winter Palace.

The story of the world-renowned Liepāja-born cinematographer Eduard Tisse, whose wife was convinced it was he who created all the famous films of Sergei Eisenstein. The creators of the film develop the story and cross the lines drawn by biography, trying to understand the magic interaction between a cinematographer and a director, between the cinematographer and the object in front of his camera.

“The Magic Beam” is a film essay woven together from newsreels and documentary material from different decades, fragments of hundreds of non-fiction and fiction Soviet films of the 1910s-1960s.

Eisenstein shot 50 hours of footage on location in Mexico in 1931 and 32 for what would have become ¡Que viva México!, but was not able to finish the film. Following two wildly different reconstruction attempts in 1939 (Marie Seton's 'Time in the Sun') and 1979 (Grigori Alexandrov's '¡Que viva México!') Kovalov has here compiled another hypothetical version of what Eisenstein's film might have been.

Documentary made for the 60th anniversary of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein.