Tisse, Eduard Kazimirovich

(Eduards Tisē). Born Apr. 1 (13), 1897, in Liepāja; died Nov. 18, 1961, in Moscow. Soviet cameraman. Honored Art Worker of the RSFSR (1935) and Latvian SSR (1947). Member of the CPSU from 1940.

Tisse began his career in film-making in 1914 in Liepája, shooting the first Latvian documentary and news films. As a war correspondent he filmed events of the Civil War (1918–20). His filming of V. I. Lenin was used in the documentary Vladimir Il’ich Lenin (1949). Tisse is best known as the cameraman for S. M. Eisen-stein’s films Strike Battleship (1925), Potemkin (1925), October (1927), Old and New (1929), Bezhin Meadow (1937), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Part 1 of Ivan the Terrible (1945; Part 2 was made in collaboration with A. N. Moskvin). He also worked with other directors, for example, on Meeting on the Elbe (1949) and Glinka (1952). Working jointly with Z. M. Agranenko, he made his debut as a film director with The Immortal Garrison (1956), for which he was also the cameraman. Together with Moskvin and A. D. Golovnia, Tisse was one of the founders of the Soviet school of camera art. He began teaching at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in 1921, becoming a professor there in 1943.

Tisse was awarded the State Prize of the USSR in 1946, 1949, and 1950. He was twice awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.