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[Translate to English:] Porträtaufnahme von Jay Leyda

The Work of Jay Leyda: A Biographical Sketch

by Tobias Hering

“People were always telling me I wasn’t qualified to do something, but I just pursued my interests wherever they would take me.”

Born in Detroit and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Jay Leyda moved to New York City in 1930 at the age of twenty to gain practical experience in experimental camerawork as an assistant to photographer and filmmaker Ralph Steiner. “My wish to do creative work in kino precedes by many years my knowledge of or participation in the American working-class movement,” wrote Leyda in his 1933 application letter to the Soviet film studio Mezhrabpom, attributing his belated politicization to his lower middle-class upbringing in Ohio. The milieu of photographers and filmmakers he experienced during his first years in New York was thus all the more formative, figures such as Ralph Steiner, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Sidney Meyers, Irving Lerner, Tom Brandon, Willard van Dyke, and Leo Hurwitz, who experimented with the technical and artistic possibilities of film and photography and understood their work as a political practice. In 1931, as the Great Depression gained momentum, they joined forces to found the Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL) and devote their work to serving the “exploited classes.”

After completing his first film (A BRONX MORNING, 1931) amongst the WFPL milieu, Leyda was accepted to study under Sergei Eisenstein at Moscow’s VGIK film institute (then still known as the GIK). Over the next three years he was a first-hand witness to a period of upheaval that was formative for Soviet cinema (and for himself), working with Dziga Vertov and Joris Ivens as well as Eisenstein during a critical period of the filmmaker’s career. When the shooting of Eisenstein’s (later-aborted) film BEZHIN LUG (Bezhin Meadow, 1935) was due to begin, Leyda saw his chance to escape the disillusionment of the Mezhrabpom “factory” and applied to Eisenstein as a set photographer. “I would not have the nerve to ask you for a place in your group as an assistant or practicant, because my past experience is not the kind that would be very useful as assistant here, and your best students at GIK deserve to be the practicants. As for photography, I know that I have taken good photos in the past, and if my job is to take photos, the discipline will jolt me out of this year and a half of freightened modesty and I will give you photos as good as any still photographer in Potilikha – (or better).” (Letter from Jay Leyda to Sergei M. Eisenstein, February 23, 1935, Jay and Si-Lan Chen Leyda Papers, New York University) Leyda got the job and BEZHIN LUG became a formative experience for him, about which he later published many articles. For Leyda the project was symptomatic of the crisis in Soviet filmmaking under Stalin.

Presumably on the advice of Eisenstein, who saw the impending show trials against cultural figures on the horizon, in 1936 Leyda accepted an invitation from film curator Iris Barry to help build a film collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as assistant curator. “Returned to New York via Berlin, Paris, and London, acquiring films in each city,” reads a list entry in the Leyda biography in an issue of October magazine dedicated to him (No. 11, Winter 1979). Leyda traveled with a copy of Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN in his luggage, which he left to the MoMA.

In addition to his work for the MoMA, which provided him with a modest living, during this period Leyda applied what he had learned in Moscow as an editor and co-director to a number of political film projects, primarily as a member of the Frontier Films collective but also in work for trade unions and other non-commercial film projects with sociopolitical concerns.

Cosmopolitan / Exile: Hollywood ... Paris ... Beijing ... East Berlin

Jay Leyda saw film history as a decentralized process written by many authors which had to remain inscrutable to a nationalist perspective. He was far more interested in reciprocal influences than in the assertion of autochthonous creation, and in his books and articles, film history is revealed as a collective experience shaped by coincidences, hindrances, and dashes of serendipity to which inventors, craftspeople, geniuses, and risk-takers have contributed in equal measure.

While Leyda’s cosmopolitan biography is in part a reflection of his transnational research interests and his willingness to transcend borders, the course of his life was also a consequence of the professional reprisals that his sociopolitical activities and Soviet ties cost him in the US and which ultimately resulted in a twelve-year period of exile together with his wife, Sino-Caribbean dancer Si-Lan Chen.

After a targeted defamation campaign against Leyda and several other MoMA employees with “leftist” backgrounds, Iris Barry felt compelled to dismiss Leyda in 1940. One consequence of this break was that Leyda stopped working on his book on Soviet cinema, which he had begun in 1937 under the aegis of the MoMA. The book was not published until 1960.

In 1942 Leyda published his first translation of texts by Eisenstein, an essay collection titled The Film Sense. Leyda also began to spend periods of time in Hollywood, initially working as a consultant for Warner Brothers. The US entry into the Second World War created the opportunity to work on several pro-Soviet film productions, including MISSION TO MOSCOW by Michael Curtiz and SEEDS OF FREEDOM, an updated re-telling of BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN directed by Hanuš Burger. California also put Leyda into the role of mediator between the steadily growing scene of Europe’s pre-war avant-garde émigrés, makers of progressive, Depression-era American documentaries, and the budding, experimental US film scene.

From 1943-1944, Leyda fulfilled his military service in Fort Knox, Kentucky. After an early discharge due to pneumonia, he began researching the composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky and published The Mussorgsky Reader in 1947. As a result of renewed denunciations against him as a “Soviet cultural agent” and the advent of show trials against suspected “communists” in Hollywood studios, into which people close to him were being implicated, in 1945 Leyda switched career paths to focus primarily on literary history for the next several years. The outcome of this was two literary biographies unique in form and content: The Melville Log (1951) about Herman Melville and The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (not published until 1960), both of which involved years of archival research facilitated in part by a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1952, Leyda wrote the libretto for Walter Aschaffenburg’s opera Bartleby, based on the story of the same name by Herman Melville.

In 1953, five years after Sergei Eisenstein’s death, Leyda requested permission from the MoMA in New York to let him view and catalog film material shot by Eisenstein in Mexico in 1931 for a film that remained unfinished after a falling out with financier Upton Sinclair. Four years later, Leyda had compiled almost four hours of the material into a two-part “study film,” for which he laid out the material shot by cinematographer Eduard Tissé without any narrative arrangement, as if purely for inspection.

In 1957 an invitation from the Cinémathèque française took Jay Leyda and Si-Lan Chen to Paris. There Leyda was able to complete his book on Soviet cinema, though disagreements with Henri Langlois prevented a more permanent tenure in the French capital. Lotte Eisner, who ran the Cinémathèque with Henri Langlois, recalls in her memoir that Langlois increasingly thought himself surrounded by spies and believed Leyda to be one. “Perhaps because he had relationships with America, Russia, East Germany, and China, the good man.” (Lotte Eisner, Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland, p. 255)

A job offer for Si-Lan Chen at a newly founded ballet school in Beijing led the couple to China in 1959, where Leyda found a position as consultant for the State Film Archive. His work there and his at least initial contacts with film journalists and production structures once again made him a witness to a period of upheaval and artistic and political conflict in a national cinematography, an experience which he captured in his book Dianying – Electric Shadows: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (1972). After five years of intensive research in Beijing that had been subject to increasing hurdles, an invitation from the GDR Ministry of Culture facilitated the couple’s move to East Berlin. From June 1964 to mid-1969, Jay and Si-Lan Chen Leyda lived in a new apartment in the Hans-Loch-Viertel of Friedrichsfelde, one of the first prefabricated housing estates in the GDR.

Jay Leyda in the State Film Archive of the GDR

“Only gradually did I realize how against ‘unanimity’ China had made me.” (Jay Leyda, Dianying, p. 305)

Internally, the purpose behind Leyda’s invitation to the GDR was for him to work on the Robert Flaherty retrospective at Leipzig’s Documentary Film Week in 1964. From the start, however, there was also talk of a more long-term position at the State Film Archive (SFA) and a teaching role at the State Film Academy in Babelsberg (although the latter would be short-lived). The SFA hoped Leyda’s presence would bring international prestige—in the socialist countries, he and Si-Lan were seen as representatives of “another America” and as political exiles. But above all, they also sought his expertise to evaluate and activate the archive’s immense collection of films, at the time the third-largest in the world.

The State Film Archive of the GDR was founded in 1954 when the Soviet Union returned a large portion of the Reichsfilmarchiv holdings it had confiscated after the war. For the first ten years, the activities of the archive were focused on recording and cataloging its collection. From 1964, however, the SFA began to actively work with these holdings and also to take on the role of a well-equipped and knowledgeable partner to other archives within the FIAF network (Fédération internationale des archives du film, or International Federation of Film Archives). The constructive relationships developed during this period with western FIAF members such as the British Film Institute, the Cinémathèque québécoise, the Library of Congress, and above all the Museum of Modern Art benefited significantly from Leyda’s presence in East Berlin and his skills as a mediator and facilitator.

Leyda had a well-paid contract with the SFA that also gave him a great deal of freedom for his own research. He and his wife were also provided with an interpreter for the entirety of their stay in Berlin, with whom they formed a cordial relationship. While in Berlin, Leyda continued working on his Dianying book that he had begun in Beijing in 1963, oversaw the publication of the expanded German edition of his book Films Beget Films from Henschel-Verlag (Filme aus Filmen, 1967), and edited the autobiography of his long-time friend Joris Ivens, The Camera and I, which was first released in 1969 by the GDR publisher Seven Seas.

From Berlin, Leyda also embarked on a number of research trips to other European archives in the FIAF network and was a member of the SFA delegation at the annual FIAF congresses on several occasions. He spearheaded the SFA-initiated “Embryo” project of the FIAF, a systematic cataloging of short fictional films from the silent film era being held in member archives. While at the SFA Leyda worked most closely with Wolfgang Klaue, who initially headed the archive’s academic department before becoming director in 1969 (as well as FIAF president in the 1980s).

During these years, Leyda attended events organized by the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek (Friends of the German Cinematheque) at West Berlin’s Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts), from which the work of Arsenal later emerged. There he also showed his study film on Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico footage, EISENSTEIN’S MEXICAN FILM - EPISODES FOR STUDY, in March 1968. While in West Berlin he often stayed with Arsenal founders Erika and Ulrich Gregor and occasionally used their address to receive packages that would have been difficult to get through East German customs checks. Berlin was also where Leyda’s friendship with Naum Kleiman was born. Kleiman, the long-time head of the Sergei Eisenstein Archives, became Leyda’s most important confidant in the Soviet film scene when the political winds shifted there and Leyda’s transnational perspective put him in the position of a dissident.

In the fall of 1969, Jay Leyda accepted an invitation from Standish Lawder for a temporary teaching assignment at Yale University, followed by a teaching position at York College in Toronto. Though he would never return to East Germany, he continued to advise the GDR’s State Film Archive on issues of film research in the following years, in particular for the “American Social Documentary” retrospective organized by the SFA for the 1981 Leipzig Documentary Film Week, which focused on the political film work of the 1930s in which Leyda had been so actively involved.

In 1973, on the initiative of Annette Michelson, who was of a US generation for whom he had become a “somewhat remote and mythic figure” (as Michelson put it in her later obituary of him), Leyda was appointed as a professor of film studies at New York University. With this move, the long journey of emigration for him and Si-Lan Chen finally came full circle.

„Film Studies“

As an educator and facilitator, Leyda spent the last phase of his life as a mentor to a new generation of film scholars who shaped their discipline into a critical, historically focused field of social science. Today, he is considered one of the founders of contemporary film studies as a historically oriented academic field. A later focus of Leyda’s research was American filmmaking in the first decade of the 20th century, in particular the long-neglected early work of D.W. Griffith, an immense oeuvre of around 400 short films. One of Leyda’s last curatorial projects was the exhibition “Before Hollywood: Turn-of-the-Century Films from American Archives,” which he organized for the American Federation of the Arts together with his student Charles Musser in 1986.

Jay Leyda died in New York City on February 15, 1988, three days after his 78th birthday. Just two weeks prior, an exhibition on Leyda’s work had opened at New York University with a focus on his early photographs, curated by Elena Pinto Simon and David Stirk.

Si-lan Chen survived Jay Leyda by eight years.

The most important documentary sources for this biographical sketch were the papers of Jay Leyda and Si-Lan Chen held at New York University and the extensive collection of files on Leyda’s work in the GDR, held in Germany’s Federal Archives under the reference number DR 140 (State Film Archive of the GDR). Leyda’s books and articles as well as documents relating to him in a variety of other archives and personal estates provided additional sources of information. I also had the opportunity to speak with former companions and contemporaries of Leyda, who shared their recollections of him with openness and trust: Erika Gregor, Ulrich Gregor, Tom Gunning, Wolfgang Klaue (1935-2024), Naum Kleiman, Charles Musser, Elena Pinto Simon, and Harald Stadler.

Funded by:

  • Logo Minister of State for Culture and the Media