Kleyman Naum

Naum Ikhilevich Kleiman (born December 1, 1937, Chișinău) is a Soviet and Russian film scholar and film historian. Honored Art Worker of the Russian Federation (1998). Author of articles on the theory and history of the art of cinema. Specialist in the work of S. M. Eisenstein. From 1992 to 2014, he was director of the State Central Museum of Cinema and the Eisenstein Center in Moscow. Naum Ikhilevich Kleiman was born in 1937 in Chișinău. N. I. Kleiman’s parents came from Bolhrad in southern Bessarabia (mother) and the Jewish agricultural colony of Romanovka (father). During the Great Patriotic War, he was evacuated with his mother and grandmother to Andijan (his father was at the front); after the city was liberated in 1946, the whole family returned to Chișinău. In 1949, together with his parents, he was deported to Siberia—first to forced labor in the taiga, then to Guryevsk. His grandfather, Mendel Ikhilevich Kleiman (1880—1943), was sent away in the first wave of deportations in 1941 and died in a camp two years later. In 1955, the family was allowed to leave the special settlement. He studied at the mathematics faculty of Kyrgyz University in Frunze. In 1961 he graduated from the film studies faculty of VGIK (the workshop of N. A. Lebedev and E. M. Smirnova) and began working in the Soviet Department of the State Film Fund. He was a scholarly consultant on the restoration of S. M. Eisenstein’s films Old and New (The General Line), October, and Battleship Potemkin. He was one of the consultants, together with Vladimir Nikolayevich Antropov, Candidate of Art Studies and film scholar, and Yefim Samuilovich Levin, Candidate of Art Studies and film scholar, in the making of Vadim Lvovich Chubasov’s film S. M. Eisenstein: Lessons in Montage. He took part in the restoration, as a photofilm, of the destroyed Eisenstein film Bezhin Meadow as director (together with S. I. Yutkevich) and scholarly consultant.