Jay Leyda

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Jay Leyda (born February 12, 1910 in Detroit , † February 15, 1988 ) was an American film historian and literary historian .

Leyda made the avant-garde short film A Bronx Morning . He has written standard works on Soviet cinema, Cinema (1960), on Sergei Eisenstein , on the compilation film , Films Beget Films (1964), and on Chinese film, Dianying. Electric Shadows (1972).

Life

Leyda took photos, was a member of the Workers Film and Photo League and made a short film in 1931. He studied with Sergei Eisenstein at the Gerassimow Institute for Cinematography in Moscow (1933) and worked as a photographer on his lost work Bezhin Meadow (1935–1937).

After his return to New York in 1936 he was given the position of assistant curator at the film department of the Museum of Modern Art , in 1940 he had to leave because of political hostility. In Hollywood he worked on projects for the Frontier Film Group . He was a technical advisor for the propaganda film Mission to Moscow ( Ambassador to Moscow ) directed by Michael Curtiz (1943). A communist since his youth, he evaded to London in 1954.

From 1959 to 1964 he was in Beijing, in the China Film Archive and then from 1964 to 1969 at the State Film Archive in East Berlin . Thanks to the changed political climate, he returned to North America and taught at Yale and at York University in Toronto. From 1973 on, he taught Cinema Studies at New York University . With his students, he explored American film in the pre-Hollywood era .

Leyda was married to the revolutionary dancer Si-Lan-Chen-Leyda (Sylvia Chen) since 1934 (* 1905, in Trinidad ).

In 1984 he was awarded the Eastman Kodak Gold Medal.

Filmography

  • A Bronx Morning (1931) (11 minutes, black and white, silent film). The short film is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
  • People of the Cumberland (1937) (21 minutes, black and white, sound film), with Sidney Meyers as co-director, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The film was a production of the Frontier Film Group . Were involved Elia Kazan , Ralph Steiner, Erskine Caldwell , Alex North , Earl Robinson and Helen van Dongen.

Works (selection)

  • The Film Sense . Ed .: Sergei Eisenstein. Harcourt Brace, New York 1942.
  • Jay Leyda, Sergej Bertensson: The Musorgsky Reader. A Life of Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky in Letters and Documents . WW Norton, New York 1947, OCLC 885379 .
  • Film shape. Essays in Film Theory . Ed .: Sergei Eisenstein. Harcourt, Brace, New York 1949.
  • The Melville Log. A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 . Harcourt Brace, New York 1951, OCLC 174510154 .
  • Jay Leyda, Sergei Bertensson, Sophia Satina: Sergei Rachmaninoff. A Lifetime in Music . New York University Press, New York 1956, OCLC 344823 .
  • The Years And Hours of Emily Dickinson . Yale University Press, New Haven 1960, OCLC 479248174 .
  • Movie theater. A History of the Russian and Soviet Film . George Allen & Unwin, London 1960, OCLC 468224244 . Revised new edition Princeton UP, 1983.
  • Films Beget Films. A Study of the Compilation Film . Hill and Wang, New York 1964, OCLC 186247574 .
  • Robert Flaherty . Ed .: Wolfgang Klaue . Henschel, Berlin (GDR) 1964, Das Flaherty-Erbe, p. 46-49 .
  • Film essays, with a lecture . Ed .: Sergei Eisenstein. Dennis Dobson, London 1968 (Praeger, New York, 1970). Princeton reissued, 1982
  • Dianying - Electric Shadows. An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China . The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1972, ISBN 978-0-262-12046-3 .
  • Jay Leyda, Zina Voynow: Eisenstein at Work . Pantheon Books, 1982, ISBN 978-0-394-41262-7 .
  • Jay Leyda, Sergei Eisenstein: Eisenstein on Disney . Methuen Paperback, 1986, ISBN 978-0-413-19640-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b David Stirk and Elena Pinto Simon in Ian Christie, Richard Taylor: Eisenstein Rediscovered . Routledge, 1993, ISBN 0-415-04950-4 , pp. 41 .
  2. ↑ Si-Lan Chen wrote an autobiography: Footnote to History (1984)
  3. ↑ Jay Leyda: A Bronx Morning . In: Museum of Modern Art . 1931. Retrieved February 12, 2010.
  4. ^ Sidney Meyers and Jay Leyda: People of the Cumberland . In: Museum of Modern Art . 1937. Retrieved February 12, 2010.
  5. ↑ Richard Meran Barsam: movie Nonfiction . Indiana University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-253-20706-1 , pp. 148 .

Web links

  • Jay Leyda in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  • Jay Leyda Papers, 1925-1956 , at the UCLA Library; Collection Guide of the Jay Leyda Archives in the OAC (Online Archive of California)
  • Jay Leyda and Shi-Lan Chen Leyda Papers Asia-Pacific American Archives Survey [1] . Short biographies of Jay and Shi-Lan Chen Leyda: [2]
personal data
SURNAME Leyda, Jay
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film historian, literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Detroit
DATE OF DEATH February 15, 1988