I do not attend film festivals anymore, or go to a cinema complex to see the latest must see release. I've given up on the arthouse cinema. Now and again Suzanne gets a DVD out (eg., the gay hustler My Own Private Idaho and we watch it. I was bored by Gus Van Sant's film, but I was much taken with Michael Mann's poetic Manhunter, an adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel The Red Dragon and an early Hannibal Lecktor film, as I was with his The Insider.

Last Sunday night I watched a DVD of Sergei Eisenstein's 1930s film Alexander Nevesky. I had seen Eisenstein's silent movies, Battleship Potempkin, October, and Strike---- and the much latter Ivan the Terrible, which was made in the 1940s.

When I was at uni in the 1980s the big conflict in cinema studies understanding of the history of film was between realism and expressionism. The conflict found canonical expression in the writings of Andr� Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein. I dutifully read both volumes of What is Cinema? and the two collections of Eisenstein essays edited by Jay Leyda, Film Form and Film Sense. Eisenstein was then in the ascendancy.

But had never seen Alexander Nevesky before.

Nevesky is a finely textured, and carefully crafted patriotic war movie. Its film form is composed from elaborate geometrical patterns, montage and an eye to visual design (eg., the armour of the German knights).

However, the film is an exultation of Russia and call to arms against the invading Germans. Nevsky was made in 1938, when Hitler was threatening his neighbors and war was immanent and is transparent in its anti-German and anti-Catholic sentiments. It was commissioned by Stalin in 1938 to create "a patriotic weapon" to stir Soviet sentiment against a threatened invasion by Germany.

Eisenstein turned to the legend of the thirteenth-century Russian prince who defeated an army of marauding Teutonic knights during a titanic clash on the frozen Lake Peipus. This State-sponsored epic says that the good and noble peasant people of Rus would have fallen before the Teutonic onslaught had it not been for the resilience of one man, a Russian hero. You can see why Stalin loved it.

Not withstanding this, Alexander Nevsky is generally considered to be one of the great achievements of Soviet and world cinema artistry.

The historical epic is matched in passion and grandeur by Sergei Prokofiev's equally famous score. The film was editied to the rhythm of pre-existent music, and not just have the music played or composed to match the film.

However, the soundtrack on the DVD I had was so abused that it muddied the clear arc of the score. The subtitles were close to useless. Still, you can see that Alexander Nevsky has long outlived its original patriotic purpose, and has become an classic of world cinema.

It is generally held that the historic battle on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus, where the peasant army of Nevsky is pitted against the better-equipped German force, is one of the most impressive spectacles in film history.

I was more impressed by film language being built on the construction of the individual images, and the way these were montaged against one another to give a rhythmic sequence. This is a quite different cinematic language to the long takes, unobtrusive editing, linear narratives driven by individual protagonists. and deep focus of realism advocated by Bazin.

What was noticeable, and disappointing, was that the film was less experimental in a stylistical sense than Battleship Potempkin, which made far greater use of creative editing. The images in Nevsky had a posed and static quality-- a series of individual shots. Yet they were very well constructed, highlighting the poverty of much contemporary film making.

For all that Nevsky was a close to a conventional, Hollywood-style war epic where the individual as the hero saves the homeland from the nasty enemy.

What Eisenstein raised for me is the relationship between images and their construction, between the still and the moving image and the construction and interpretation of images. These themes are explored more fully in the Michael Mann films mentioned above.