Sergei Eisenstein: A Retrospective

I’ve gone through the work of one other Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, who was more of a religious dissident than a loyal propagandist for the Soviet regime. However, there’s one Soviet filmmaker that stands above them all: Sergei Eisenstein.

Born in Tsarist Russia in 1898 (technically, the Governorate of Livonia), Eisenstein entered film through the theater. Working experimentally on stage, he had the perfect mindset for a nascent Soviet film industry looking for ways to break from...