page_title: Sergei Eisenstein
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Sergei Eisenstein / Biography / Early years
caption_attribution_description: Mikhail Eisenstein with his wife and son Sergei Eisenstein. Mikhail was an Art Nouveau architect from Riga (Latvia) (1867-1920); Sergei was a sovietic film director (1898-1948). Original picture from 1900.
context_page_description: Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a Soviet Russian movie director and movie theorist. He was known mostly for his silent movies Strike, Battleship Potemkin and October. He was also known for his historical epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. His work had a major impact on early movie directors because of his creative use of and writings about montage.
context_section_description: Eisenstein was born in Riga, Latvia but his family moved a lot in his early years. Eisenstein continued to move often during his life. Eisenstein's father Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein was of German-Jewish and Swedish descent and his mother, Julia Ivanovna Konetskaya, was from a Russian Orthodox family. He was born into a middle-class family. His father was an architect and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Julia left Riga the year of the 1905 Revolution. She brought Sergei with her to St. Petersburg. Sergei would return at times to see his father. His father would later move to join them around 1910. His mother soon divorced his father and moved to France away from the family.
  At the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering, Sergei studied architecture and engineering, the job of his father. At school with his fellow students however, Sergei would join the military to serve the revolution. His father did not support his joining the army. In 1918 Sergei joined the Red Army with his father, Mikhail, supporting the opposite side. This brought his father to Germany after defeat, and Sergei to Petrograd, Vologda, and Dvinsk. In 1920, Sergei was transferred to a command position in Minsk, after success providing propaganda for the October Revolution. At this time, Sergei studied Japanese. He learned some three hundred kanji characters which he cited as an influence on his pictorial development. This also allowed him to see Kabuki theatre. Because of his studies, he traveled to Japan.
caption: Young Sergei with his parents Mikhail and Julia Eisenstein.
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