Eisenstein, Sergei (1898—1948) Russian pioneer film-maker and film-theorist. He was born in Riga (then part of Imperial Russia, but now the capital of Latvia) to a middle-class family. His parents separated in 1905 and he moved with his mother to St Petersburg. He studied architecture and engineering at the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering. He participated in the 1917 revolutions and in 1918 he joined the Red Army. He was stationed in Minsk for three years, which brought him into contact with Japanese culture (Kabuki theatre, with its aesthetic of the unexpected, in particular, impressed him). In 1920 he moved to Moscow and joined the artistic fray there between realism and constructivism, siding with the latter. He worked initially in the theatre as a designer and progressed from there to film, which is where he made his mark, creating several enduring masterpieces such as Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1927), and Ivan the Terrible (1944). As both film-maker and film-theorist, Eisenstein took a dialectic view of cinema: it was, for him, at once a powerful rhetorical device and a higher means of knowing the universe. This is the principle behind the concept for which Eisenstein is best known, namely montage. Inspired by Japanese haiku poetry, but clearly owing a debt to both genre and Marxism, montage achieves its effect through the collision of different kinds of sign forcing the mind to reach for a higher unified meaning. Montage works in two directions at once: by pushing the audience towards a synthesis of meaning not present in the film itself, it also compels the audience to pay more attention to what is before them. In contrast to his Hollywood contemporaries, Eisenstein was not interested in obtaining a completely realistic look in his films; in his view, reality did not speak for itself. Eisenstein’s Film Form (1949) and Film Sense (1942) are standard starting points for virtually any study of the history of film. Further Reading: D. Andrew The Major Film Theories (1976).