Joseph Spinel

Biography

The director Grigori Roshal recalled an evening when Spinel, the co-author of all his films since 1928, was talking at Roshal’s home about working with Eisenstein. He remembered the already completed “Alexander Nevsky” and showed new sketches for “Ivan”. Roshal described him as a man of small stature and great soul, filled to overflowing with Eisenstein.

Joseph Spinel was born on 7 October 1892 (25 September, Old Style) in Bila Tserkva, in Kiev Governorate, into the poor Jewish family of a teacher. According to some accounts he was the eighth child and survived several pogroms; this is hard to verify. In 1914 he graduated from the architecture department of the Kiev Art School. He then studied at Vkhutemas, the state art and technical school in Moscow: by some accounts from 1921 to 1926 in the architecture department, by others he graduated in 1927 from the printing and graphic arts faculty. His mentor there was Vladimir Favorsky. Many masters of the avant-garde were working in Moscow at the time, and for Spinel this circle became a school.

In the 1920s he illustrated several books in modernist graphic design. For the book “Youth, Go!”, which dealt with Aleksei Gastev’s ideas about the “education of the body as a working machine”, he made a series of sketches in a Suprematist and Constructivist spirit. In these drawings the body is reduced to circles, triangles and rectangles and looks like a mannequin with limbs on joints, and next to the anatomy of a hand comes the anatomy of an axe.

He worked in the theatre from 1921 and in cinema from 1927, when he was invited to the VUFKU studio in Odessa. In 1928 he began teaching at the Odessa film technical school and then at the Kiev film institute. In Ukraine he designed Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s “Arsenal” (1928–1929) and Roshal’s films, including “A Man from the Little Town”. From 1933 Spinel worked at Moskinokombinat in Moscow, which from 1935 became Mosfilm. His pictures include “The Petersburg Night” (1934), Mikhail Romm’s “Boule de Suif” (1934), “Dawn of Paris” (1936) and “The Oppenheim Family” (1938). He worked twice with Sergei Eisenstein: on “Alexander Nevsky” (1938) and “Ivan the Terrible” (1944–1946). It was said of the filming that a copy of the Novgorod cathedral was built in the workshop, and that the winter landscape was shot on warm June days on a field covered in chalk. I have not been able to verify this. During the war he was evacuated to Alma-Ata, where he taught and continued work on “Ivan the Terrible”.

He was one of the founders of the art faculty at VGIK, taught there from 1940, and became a professor in 1965. His students included Yuli Yekelchik, Levan Shengelia and Boris Manevich-Kaplan. In 1940 he was named Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR, in 1944 he received the Badge of Honour, and in 1951 the Stalin Prize, second class, for his designs for Mikhail Kalatozov’s “Conspiracy of the Doomed”.

In 1979 the publishing house Iskusstvo issued Tamara Tarasova-Krasina’s book “Iossif Spinel: The Artist’s Way”.

Spinel died in Moscow on 2 July 1980. His ashes are placed in the columbarium of the Donskoy Cemetery.