Jay Leyda

Jay Leyda ( born February 12, 1910 in Detroit, † 15 February 1988) was an American film historian and literary historian. He turned the avant-garde short film A Bronx Morning. Leyda wrote standard works about the Soviet cinema, cinema (1960), about Sergei Eisenstein, on the compilation film, Films Beget Films ( 1964), and the Chinese film, Dianying. Electric Shadows ( 1972). Leyda photographed, he was a member of the Workers Film and Photo League and in 1931 he made a short film. He has studied with Sergei Eisenstein at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow ( 1933) and worked as a photographer at the verschollenem work Bezhin Meadow ( 1935-1937 ). After his return to New York in 1936, he received the post of Assistant Curator at the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art in 1940, he had to go because of political hostility. In Hollywood, he worked at the Frontier Film Group projects. He was technical advisor for the propaganda film Mission to Moscow (Ambassador in Moscow) by Michael Curtiz ( 1943). A communist since his youth, he departed in 1954 after London. From 1959 to 1964 he was in Beijing, the China Film Archive and then from 1964 to 1969 at the National Film Archive in East Berlin. Thanks to the changed political climate, he returned to North America and has taught at Yale and at York University in Toronto. From 1973 on he taught Cinema Studies at New York University. He and his students explored the American film in the time before Hollywood. Leyda was in 1934 with the revolutionary dancer Si -Lan Chen Leyda (Sylvia Chen ) married ( b. 1905, in Trinidad ).

1984, the Eastman Kodak Gold Medal he was awarded.

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 ), starring Sidney Meyers as co-director, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the film was a production of the Frontier Film Group. It involved Elia Kazan, Ralph Steiner, Erskine Caldwell, Alex North, Earl Robinson and Helen van Dongen.

Works (selection)

  • Jay Leyda (ed., Translator ): Sergei Eisenstein: The Film Sense, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1942.
  • Sergei and Jay Leyda Bertensson: Jay Leyda, Sergei Bertensson The Musorgsky Reader. Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky A Life of Letters and Documents in. W. W. Norton, New York 1947.
  • Jay Leyda (ed., Translator ): Sergei Eisenstein film form. Essays in film theory, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1949.
  • Jay Leyda The Melville Log. A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891. Harcourt, Brace, New York 1951.
  • Sergei and Jay Leyda Bertesson (ed., Translator ), with Sophia Satina: Jay Leyda, Sergei Bertensson, Sophia Satina, Sergei Rachmaninoff. A Lifetime in Music. New York University Press, New York 1956.
  • Jay Leyda The Years And Hours of Emily Dickinson. Yale University Press, New Haven 1960.
  • Jay Leyda cinema. A History of the Russian and Soviet film. George Allen & Unwin, London, 1960 .. Revised edition Princeton UP, 1983.
  • Jay Leyda Films Beget Films. A Study of the compilation film. Hill and Wang, New York 1964.
  • Jay Leyda and claw Wolfgang (eds.): Robert Flaherty, Henschel, Berlin ( GDR ), 1964 where:. Jay Leyda: The Flaherty Heritage, pp. 46-49.
  • Jay Leyda (ed., Translator ): Sergei Eisenstein film essays, with a lecture, Dennis Dobson, London, 1968, Praeger, New York, 1970 edition, Princeton, 1982.
  • Jay Leyda, Sergei Eisenstein Eisenstein on Disney. Methuen paperback, 1986, ISBN 9,780,413,196,408th
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