SERGEI M. EISENSTEIN

Sergei M. Eisenstein was born in a part of Russia that is now in Latvia in 1898. As a teen he joined the Red Army in the Russian Revolution, which split him from his parents. In 1920 he left the Army and moved to Moscow and started working in the theater, as a designer and as a writer. In 1923 he directed a movie short, and in 1925 he directed Stachka (Strike), which glorified the workers and made out the factory owners to be pure evil, and it was very popular. That same year he made Bronenosets Potyomkin (The Battleship Potemkin) and it is considered his masterpiece. Previously movies were made in a documentary like fashion, with a straight telling of a story, but Eisenstein recognized that while this made sense for a story on a stage, the medium of film allowed for an entirely new sort of storytelling, which he called "montage", and it is most effectively used in a sequence where a crowd of civilians are butchered on the Odessa Steps. The movie was shown throughout the world, and it had a major influence on moviemakers everywhere, encouraging them to experiment both with Eisenstein's new techniques, and also to find new ones of their own. In 1928, he made Oktyabr (Ten Days that Shook the World), a telling of the Russian Revolution, and although he was completely loyal to the Communist view of what happened, the Russian people were not nearly as receptive to his innovative filmmaking style as the rest of the world was. He traveled to many countries and started many films, but finished few. He made one more great movie in Russia, Aleksandr Nevskiy (Alexander Nevsky) in 1938. He would live just ten more years, passing away in 1948 at the age of 50.