Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein made Battleship Potemkin and October, and invented most of what film schools mean by montage. He trained as a civil engineer, served in the Red Army, and came to cinema through avant-garde theatre with a theory already formed: that meaning is produced by the collision between shots rather than by what either shot contains. Strike and Potemkin followed in 1925, and the Odessa Steps sequence - a massacre that never happened on those steps, invented for the film - became the most imitated five minutes in cinema. October, commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the revolution, is the reason the storming of the Winter Palace is pictured as a mass assault; the actual event was closer to an occupation of a building defended by cadets and a women's battalion, and Eisenstein's staging has been mistaken for documentary footage ever since, including in later documentaries. He spent 1930 to 1932 in Hollywood and Mexico, achieved nothing releasable, and returned to a Soviet film industry that had turned to socialist realism and had no use for formal experiment. Bezhin Meadow was destroyed on official orders. Alexander Nevsky in 1938 rehabilitated him, and Ivan the Terrible won a Stalin Prize for its first part and was banned for its second, in which the tsar's paranoia was too legible. He died at fifty of a heart attack. His theoretical writing, particularly on the montage of attractions and on what he called intellectual montage, is taught more consistently than the films. Ivan the Terrible Part II was released in 1958, ten years after his death and five after Stalin's. He had been made to write a public confession of his errors in 1946.

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