Naum Kleiman was born in Kishinev (Moldova) in 1937. He studied at the Faculty of Film History and Theory at the VGIK (State Institute of Film) in the class of Nikolai Lebedev. During his studies, Kleiman participated in film restoration, notably the restoration of intertitles for Chardynin's The Queen of Spades (1910). Students in his class also helped Sergei Eisenstein's widow, Pera Atasheva, systematize the director's archives. After completing his studies, Kleiman began working at the State Film Department of the USSR's Gosfilmofond (the country's largest film archive). As a scientific consultant, he participated in the restoration of Eisenstein's films The General Line/The Old and the New and Battleship Potemkin. With Sergei Yutkevich, he co-directed the "film in photos" Bezhin's Meadow, a reconstruction of Eisenstein's lost film.
In 1965, Kleiman participated in the creation of the Sergei Eisenstein Memorial and Scientific Museum (S.M. Eisenstein's Office), and he served as its curator from 1967 onward. The Eisenstein Cabinet was created according to the will of Eisenstein's widow, who bequeathed to the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR all of the director's personal belongings, documents, manuscripts, books, drawings, and photographs, which remained in his apartment on Smolenskaya Square in Moscow. The director's archive is now housed in the Central Archive of Works of Art and Literature (CGALI); the director's personal belongings and his library, which contains over 4,000 books in several languages, with Eisenstein's handwritten remarks, are housed in the Eisenstein Cabinet.
The creation of the Eisenstein Museum also marked the beginning of the Cinema Museum project. Leonid Trauberg and Sergei Yutkevich headed the commission tasked with creating the Cinema Museum. In 1987, the Museum of Cinema, of which Kleiman has been director from 1992 to 2014, began its work in the Kinocentre in Moscow. Today, the Eisenstein Cabinet is a branch of the Museum of Cinema.
Naum Kleiman has published several stories by Eisenstein. He is one of the editors and authors of the commentaries on Works of Eisenstein in 6 books (Избранные произведения Эйзенштейна" в 6 томах. (1964 - 71)), as well as other books in Russia and abroad (the most recent is The Method in 2 books (двухтомник Эйзенштейна Метод, составитель и He has participated in numerous seminars and conferences dedicated to Eisenstein around the world, and is the author and presenter of several television programs. He has organized several exhibitions of Eisenstein's drawings.
Naum Kleiman is a member of the EFA (European Film Academy), winner of numerous Russian and foreign awards, including the FIPRESCI Prize (1987). He is an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (1991).
