Sergej Eisenstein is one of the most important Russian film directors. Born 1898 in Riga, as an architect’s
son, he came to the film business via Vsevolod Meyerhold’s experimental theatre. In the 1920s, he directed
four films about the Russian Revolution, among which “Battleship Potemkin” stood out and made Eisenstein
famous all over the world. The film impressed by it’s experimental composition of images, a new technique of
film editing that opposed sharp contrasts and a dramaturgy that excluded an individual hero in favor of
collective endeavours of the masses.
1929 Eisenstein travelled through Europe and the United States to learn all about the newly invented sound
film. In 1932, he was ordered back to the Sovjet Union by state authorities. New projects by Eisenstein, who
had fallen out of favor, were rejected or banned, until in 1938, he got a shooting permit for “Alexander
Nevski”, a film about the Russians victory over the knights of the ‘Teutonic Order’ in the late Middle Ages.
The overwhelming success of “Alexander Nevski” led to an assignment by Stalin to direct a period drama
trilogy about Tsar Ivan IV. In 1944, Eisenstein successfully finished the first part of “Ivan the Terrible“,
the second part was banned by the censors and was first shown not before 1958. Eisenstein died in 1948 without
having completed the trilogy.