The Soviet film director and cinema theoretician Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1898-1948) achieved fame for his emotionally inflammatory political epics of the Russian Revolution.

Born in Riga, the son of a wealthy shipbuilder, Sergei Eisenstein went as a young man to St. Petersburg, where he studied architecture and engineering. During the Russian Revolution he constructed trenches and also acted in plays for the Bolshevik army. Shortly after the civil war, he managed a carnival and a small workers' theater in Moscow. Following service with the engineering corps during World War I, Eisenstein was appointed assistant director and chief dramatist for the Proletcult Theater. His most celebrated avant-garde productions included a dramatization of Jack London's story, Mexicalia, of A. N. Ostrovsky's Much Simplicity in Every Wise Man, and an experimental play, Anti-Jesus.

First Films

Frustrated by the stage's inability to achieve total realism, Eisenstein abandoned theater for the incipient Soviet...