Jay Leyda
Jay Leyda (February 12, 1910 – February 15, 1988) [1] was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film historian, noted for his work on U.S, Soviet and Chinese Cinema.
Leyda was born on February 12, 1910 in Detroit. He was a member of the Workers Film and Photo League in the early 1930s. He travelled to the Soviet Union in 1933 to study filmmaking at State Film Institute, Moscow, with Sergei Eisenstein. He participated in the filming of Eisenstein's lost film Bezhin Meadow (1935–37).[1] When he returned to the United States in 1936 to become an assistant film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, he brought the only complete print of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. In the 1940s he translated Eisenstein's writings.
His The Melville Log (1951) was a day to day compilation of documents which he had painstakingly collected on the life of Herman Melville.
He was awarded the Eastman Kodak Gold Medal Award in 1984. He taught at New York University from 1973 until his death in New York on February 15, 1988 of heart failure.
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[edit] Selected filmography
- A Bronx Morning (1931) (11 minutes, black and white, silent), in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.[2]
- People of the Cumberland (1937) (21 minutes, black and white, sound), co-directed by Sidney Meyers, also in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.[3] The film was a Frontier Film Group production. Also working on the film were Elia Kazan, Ralph Steiner, Erskine Caldwell, Alex North, Earl Robinson and Helen van Dongen.[4]
[edit] Selected bibliography
- Leyda, Jay; Bertensson, Sergei (1947). The Musorgsky reader; a life of Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky in letters and documents. New York: W.W. Norton. OCLC 885379.
- Leyda, Jay (1951). The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891. New York: Harcourt, Brace. OCLC 174510154.
- Leyda, Jay; Bertensson, Sergei; Satina, Sophia (1956). Sergei Rachmaninoff, a Lifetime in Music. New York: New York University Press. OCLC 344823.
- Leyda, Jay (1960). The Years And Hours of Emily Dickinson. New Haven: Yale University Press. OCLC 479248174.
- Leyda, Jay; Voynow, Zina (1980). Eisenstein At Work. Pantheon Books. ISBN 9780394412627. OCLC 8493672.
- Leyda, Jay; Eisenstein, Sergei (1986). Eisenstein on Disney. Methuen Paperback. ISBN 9780413196408. OCLC 19256739.
- Spark, Clare. Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001. Paperback revised edition 2006. Includes Leyda's role in the "Melville Revival."
[edit] References
- ^ a b David Stirk and Elena Pinto Simon in Christie, Ian; Taylor, Richard (1993). Eisenstein Rediscovered. Routledge. p. 41. ISBN 0415049504. OCLC 252972811.
- ^ Jay Leyda (1931). "A Bronx Morning". Museum of Modern Art. http://moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A3531&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1. Retrieved 2010-02-12.
- ^ Sidney Meyers and Jay Leyda (1937). "People of the Cumberland". Museum of Modern Art. http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A3531&page_number=2&template_id=1&sort_order=1. Retrieved 2010-02-12.
- ^ Barsam, Richard Meran (1992). Nonfiction film. Indiana University Press. p. 148. ISBN 0253207061. OCLC 24107769.
[edit] External links
- Jay Leyda at the Internet Movie Database
- Jay Leyda Papers, 1925-1956, at the UCLA Library; Collection Guide at the Online Archive of California
- Jay and Si-lan Chen Leyda Papers 1913-1987, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Collection Guide
