Sergei M. Eisenstein

Born in Riga (Latvia), on January 23, 1898, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was the son of a Jewish architect who came from Germany, and a lady from the Russian bourgeoisie. His academic training was very appropriate for cinema, a mixture of technique and artistic inspiration, since he studied Architecture and Fine Arts. He participated in the people’s militias in the October revolution of 1917. He then started in show business at the Riga Workers’ Theatre, of which he would be director. A great admirer of Charles Dickens , he sought maximum realism, which is why he came to stage a work called `Gas Masks´, whose action took place in a real factory.

When he discovered David W. Griffith ‘s great historical spectacles , he became fascinated by cinema, so he wrote books that developed the conception of montage. The most important is `The assembly of attractions´, where he explains that “aggressive aesthetic stimulants” had to be used so that the message that was wanted to be transmitted would last in the memory of the spectator. He demonstrated this himself on screen in his film debut, The Strike ., where the “stimulant” was a slaughter of cattle that symbolizes the bloody repression of the tsarist troops, and whose images were inserted in the sequence in which the troops charged against the strikers. This film did not have an absolute protagonist, but the central character was collective, the Russian people as a whole, which would make a school for Soviet cinema. His next work, The Battleship Potemkin, collects a real event, the rebellion of the sailors of the ship to which the title alludes. The tape broke the commercial blockade to which the newly created USSR was subjected, and was released worldwide. Also, the Odessa steps sequence remains one of the most shocking in movie history. At the time, Eisenstein was the darling of Stalin’s regime, but he fell out of favor with his next project, October , because it gave importance to the figure of Trotsky. The film was edited to remove this character, and Eisenstein was censored and banned from then on. He was ordered to stop filming on Que viva México and El prado de Bezhin was banned. Alexander Nevskyit would be his first sound film, for which Eisenstein was awarded the Order of Lenin. Next, he shot the first part of Ivan the Terrible and the second, The Boyar Conspiracy , but he did not get to shoot the third, as he died on February 11, 1948 of a heart attack.