Top 250 MoviesMost Popular MoviesTop 250 TV ShowsMost Popular TV ShowsMost Popular Video GamesMost Popular Music VideosMost Popular Podcasts
    Release CalendarBrowse Movies by GenreTop Box OfficeShowtimes & TicketsMovie NewsIndia Movie Spotlight
    What's on TV & StreamingBrowse TV Shows by GenreTV NewsIndia TV Spotlight
    What to WatchLatest TrailersIMDb OriginalsIMDb PicksIMDb Podcasts
    OscarsBest Picture WinnersBest Picture WinnersEmmysSTARmeter AwardsSan Diego Comic-ConNew York Comic-ConSundance Film FestivalToronto Int'l Film FestivalAwards CentralFestival CentralAll Events
    Born TodayMost Popular CelebsMost Popular CelebsCelebrity News
    Help CenterContributor ZonePolls
For Industry Professionals
  • All
  • Titles
  • TV Episodes
  • Celebs
  • Companies
  • Keywords
  • Advanced Search
Watchlist
Sign In
Sign In
New Customer? Create account
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
  • Biography
  • Awards
  • Trivia
IMDbPro

Sergei Eisenstein(1898-1948)

  • Director
  • Writer
  • Editor
IMDbProStarmeter
See rank
Still of Sergei M. Eisenstein in the original 9 mins version of this 16 mm film which dedicated to the legacy of Sergei M. Eisenstein and the Soviet Film Culture.
A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resulting street demonstration which brought on a police massacre.
Play trailer1:33
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
1 Video
7 Photos
The son of an affluent architect, Eisenstein attended the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd as a young man. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, he worked as an engineer for the Red Army. In the following years, Eisenstein joined up with the Moscow Proletkult Theater as a set designer and then director. The Proletkult's director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, became a big influence on Eisenstein, introducing him to the concept of biomechanics, or conditioned spontaneity. Eisenstein furthered Meyerhold's theory with his own "montage of attractions"--a sequence of pictures whose total emotion effect is greater than the sum of its parts. He later theorized that this style of editing worked in a similar fashion to Marx's dialectic. Though Eisenstein wanted to make films for the common man, his intense use of symbolism and metaphor in what he called "intellectual montage" sometimes lost his audience. Though he made only seven films in his career, he and his theoretical writings demonstrated how film could move beyond its nineteenth-century predecessor--Victorian theatre-- to create abstract concepts with concrete images.
BornJanuary 22, 1898
DiedFebruary 11, 1948(50)
BornJanuary 22, 1898
DiedFebruary 11, 1948(50)
IMDbProStarmeter
See rank
  • Awards

Photos7

Sergei Eisenstein in October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1927)
Sergei Eisenstein in Alexander Nevsky (1938)
Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Blinnikov, Lev Fenin, Nikolai Vitovtov, Vladimir Yershov, and A. Gulkovski in Alexander Nevsky (1938)
Sergei M. Eisenstein (1898–1948) was and still is the greatest film director/film editor.
Sergei Eisenstein and Nina Poltavtseva in Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Sergei Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Known for

Nikolay Cherkasov in Alexander Nevsky (1938)
Alexander Nevsky
7.5
  • Director(as S. Eisenstein)
  • 1938
Sergei Eisenstein, Grigoriy Aleksandrov, Vladimir Stenberg, and Georgii Stenberg in October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1927)
October (Ten Days that Shook the World)
7.4
  • Director(as S. M. Eisenstein)
  • 1927
Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944)
Ivan the Terrible, Part I
7.7
  • Director
  • 1944
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Battleship Potemkin
7.9
  • Director(as S.M. Eisenstein)
  • 1925

Credits

Edit
IMDbPro

Director

  • Ivan the Terrible, Part III (1988)
    Ivan the Terrible, Part III
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Que Viva Mexico (1979)
    Que Viva Mexico
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Eisenstein's Mexican Project (1958)
    Eisenstein's Mexican Project
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot (1958)
    Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944)
    Ivan the Terrible, Part I
  • Seeds of Freedom
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Zapotecan Village
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Spaniard and Indian
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Mexico Marches
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Mexican Symphony
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Land and Freedom (1941)
    Land and Freedom
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Idol of Hope
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Conquering Cross
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Time in the Sun (1940)
    Time in the Sun
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • The Fergana Canal
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)

Writer

  • Taiwanese School: The Experiment of Sergei Eisenstein's Montage Theory (2009)
    Taiwanese School: The Experiment of Sergei Eisenstein's Montage Theory
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Sergey Eyzenshteyn. Meksikanskaya fantasiya (1998)
    Sergey Eyzenshteyn. Meksikanskaya fantasiya
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Sergei Eisenstein: Autobiography (1996)
    Sergei Eisenstein: Autobiography
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Que Viva Mexico (1979)
    Que Viva Mexico
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot (1958)
    Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944)
    Ivan the Terrible, Part I
  • Seeds of Freedom
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Time in the Sun (1940)
    Time in the Sun
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Nikolay Cherkasov in Alexander Nevsky (1938)
    Alexander Nevsky
    • (as S. Eisenstein)
  • Bezhin lug (1937)
    Bezhin lug
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Martín Hernández and Julio Saldívar in Thunder Over Mexico (1933)
    Thunder Over Mexico
    • (uncredited)
  • La destrucción de Oaxaca (1931)
    La destrucción de Oaxaca
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Sentimental Romance (1930)
    Sentimental Romance
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • The Storming of La Sarraz
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Iosif Gerasimovich in Old and New (1929)
    Old and New
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)

Editor

  • Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944)
    Ivan the Terrible, Part I
    • (as Sergei Eizenshtein)
  • Nikolay Cherkasov in Alexander Nevsky (1938)
    Alexander Nevsky
    • (uncredited)
  • Sentimental Romance (1930)
    Sentimental Romance
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Women's Misery - Women's Happiness (1930)
    Women's Misery - Women's Happiness
    • (as Sergei M. Eisenstein)
  • Battleship Potemkin (1925)
    Battleship Potemkin
    • (uncredited)
  • In-development projects at IMDbPro

Videos1

Battleship Potemkin
Trailer 1:33
Battleship Potemkin

Personal details

Edit
    • January 22, 1898
    • Riga, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire [now Latvia]
    • February 11, 1948
    • Moscow, Russian SFSR, USSR [now Russia](heart attack)
    • Pera AtashevaOctober 27, 1934 - February 11, 1948 (his death)
  • Other works
    Book: "The Film Sense"
  • Publicity listings
    • 10 Biographical Movies
    • 31 Print Biographies
    • 1 Portrayal
    • 7 Articles
    • 1 Magazine Cover Photo

Did you know

Edit
  • Trivia
    Spoke fluent Japanese, and used the haiku as a model for his theories on montage.
  • Quotes
    The hieroglyphic language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any political or tactical slogan, without recourse to the help of a rather suspect dramatic or psychological past.
    • [Montage] Considered the father of the cinematic montage, he often used heavily edited sequences for emotional impact and historical propaganda (his most famous being the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (1925) [Battleship Potemkin]).

Related news

Contribute to this page

Suggest an edit or add missing content
  • Learn more about contributing
Edit page

More to explore

Recently viewed

Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. Learn more.
Get the IMDb App
  • Get the IMDb App
  • Help
  • Site Index
  • IMDbPro
  • Box Office Mojo
  • IMDb Developer
  • Press Room
  • Advertising
  • Jobs
  • Conditions of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • Your Ads Privacy Choices
IMDb, an Amazon company

© 1990-2023 by IMDb.com, Inc.