On the 125th birthday of the cinema classic Eduards Tisē, a portrait by graffiti artist Elementton will now decorate the wall of 9 Stendera Street, Liepāja.
“I think many people in Liepāja only know about Eduard Tisse because one of the Liepāja streets is named after him, but they have no idea about his great role in the development of world cinema,” says Mareks Alberts, the author of the idea. “As part of the project “Street Art Portraits on the Streets of Liepāja”, we are introducing Liepāja residents and city guests to the famous personalities of our city. Tisse is definitely one of them,” continues M.Alberts. The location is also quite meaningful – right next to the city’s movie theatre.
Eduard Tisse was born in Liepāja on 13 April 1897 and is rightly considered one of the world’s greatest cinematographers, and a founding father of Soviet cinema.
He spent his childhood and school years in Liepāja. He married Bianka Tisē (1921-2005), his daughter Eleonora is a cinematographer and lives in Oslo. In 1913 he graduated from the Liepāja Maritime School, and from 1911 to 1914 studied in the painting and photography studio of Professor E. Grenzing, shooting his first motion pictures and scenes of World War I.
From 1916 to 1918, he was a film correspondent on the fronts of World War I. From 1919 to 1923, he was a cameraman in the All-Russian photo-cinema department, reporting on the Civil War and filming Lenin. From 1921 he was a lecturer at the USSR State Film School, later at the Moscow State Institute of Cinematography. Professor at this institute from 1943.
He made a major contribution to the theory of the art of filmmaking. Participated in several Hollywood film projects. One of the films he directed, The Immortal Garrison, was awarded the Honorary Diploma of the Venice Film Festival in 1956. Meanwhile, his most prominent achievement as a cinematographer came with the filming of Sergei Eisenstein’s world-famous film “Battleship Potemkin” in 1925. From 1935 he was awarded the Meritorious Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. He helped the Rīga Film Studio to make the motion picture ” Back Home with Victory”. A street in Liepāja and the Liepāja amateur film studio are named after Eduards Tisē.
The project “Street Art Portraits on the Streets of Liepāja” has been funded by the Liepāja Culture Department and co-financed by the Liepāja beach bar Red Sun Buffet.