page_title: Sergei Eisenstein
section_title: From theatre to cinema
hierarchical_section_title: Sergei Eisenstein / Career / From theatre to cinema
caption_attribution_description: 日本語: 二代目市川左團次（左）とロシアの映画監督セルゲイ・エイゼンシュテイン（昭和三年、モスクワ） English: Japanese kabuki actor Sadanji Ichikawa II (left, 1880–1940) and Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), Moscow, 1928
context_page_description: Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a Soviet film director and film theorist, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike, Battleship Potemkin and October, as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. In its 2012 decennial poll, the magazine Sight & Sound named his Battleship Potemkin the 11th greatest film of all time.
context_section_description: Eisenstein moved to Moscow in 1920, and began his career in theatre working for Proletkult, an experimental Soviet artistic institution which aspired to radically modify existing artistic forms and create a revolutionary working-class aesthetic. His productions there were entitled Gas Masks, Listen Moscow, and Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man. He worked as a designer for Vsevolod Meyerhold. Eisenstein began his career as a theorist in 1923, by writing "The Montage of Attractions" for art journal LEF. His first film, Glumov's Diary (for the theatre production Wise Man), 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. Battleship Potemkin (also 1925) was critically acclaimed worldwide. Mostly owing to this international renown, he was then able to direct October: 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 (also known as Old and New). While critics outside Soviet Russia praised these works, Eisenstein's focus in the films on structural issues such as camera angles, crowd movements, and montage brought him and like-minded others such as Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko under fire from the Soviet film community. This forced 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.
caption: With Japanese kabuki actor Sadanji Ichikawa II, Moscow, 1928
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