Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein 23 January 1898 he  was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage". He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin(1925) and October (1927), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) andIvan the Terrible Eisenstein was born to a middle-class family in Riga, Latvia but his family moved frequently in his early years, as Eisenstein continued to do throughout his life.

In 1920 Eisenstein moved to Moscow, and began his career in theatre working forProletkult His productions there were entitled Gas Masks, Listen Moscow, andWiseman. Eisenstein would then work as a designer for Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 1923 Eisenstein began his career as a theorist, by writing The Montage of Attractionsfor LEF. Eisenstein's first film, Glumov's Diary (for the theatre production Wiseman), was also made in that same year with Dziga Vertov hired initially as an "instructor."

Strike (1925) was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film. The Battleship Potemkin (1925) was acclaimed critically worldwide. But it was mostly his international critical renown which enabled Eisenstein to direct October (aka Ten Days That Shook The World) as part of a grand tenth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution of 1917, and then The General Line (aka Old and New). The critics of the outside world praised them, but at home, Eisenstein's focus in these films on structural issues such as camera angles, crowd movements, and montage brought him and like-minded others, such as Vsevolod Pudovkinand Alexander Dovzhenko, under fire from the Soviet film community, forcing him to issue public articles of self-criticism and commitments to reform his cinematic visions to conform to the increasingly specific doctrines of socialist realism

Eisenstein was a pioneer in the use of montage, a specific use of film editing. He and his contemporary, Lev Kuleshov, two of the earliest film theorists, argued that montage was the essence of the cinema. His articles and books — particularly Film Form and The Film Sense — explain the significance of montage in detail.

His writings and films have continued to have a major impact on subsequent filmmakers. Eisenstein believed that editing could be used for more than just expounding a scene or moment, through a "linkage" of related images. Eisenstein felt the "collision" of shots could be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience and create film metaphors. He believed that an idea should be derived from the juxtaposition of two independent shots, bringing an element of collage into film. He developed what he called "methods of montage":