To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the first screening of his landmark film The Battleship Potemkin, we bring you a masterclass on the granddaddy of Soviet cinema, Sergei Eisenstein.
To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the first screening of his landmark film The Battleship Potemkin, we bring you a masterclass on the granddaddy of Soviet cinema, Sergei Eisenstein.
WHO IS HE?
Born in 1898 in Riga, Latvia, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a director, film theoretician, screenwriter and editor, whose fame rests upon the landmark films Battleship Potemkin and Ivan The Terrible and his invention of the montage technique in cinema, where a series of images can be juxtaposed for greater emotional impact.
WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
His best film, Battleship Potemkin, was the first major film that turned cinema into art. The Odessa steps sequence, where Tsarist soldiers massacre civilian protestors, remains today one of the most iconic scenes in the history of cinema. Although only a few of his films survive, (some were destroyed by Stalin or simply refused permission to begin shooting), Eisenstein and his generation succeeded in advancing the practise of filmmaking from Victorian picture shows to the kind of sophisticated cinema with which we are familiar today.
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