INTRODUCTION
In Russia, on an icy winter night in 1928, an eager group of film students waited in a poorly heated classroom at the Soviet GIK. The building, located on the Leningrad Chaussée, had once been the exclusive restaurant Yar, but was now the Russian Film Institute. Its main dining room with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and tall, white columns had become a lecture hall. The students had gathered to hear the filmmaker and teacher Sergei Eisenstein who, along with Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovchenko, were among the first to develop formal theories about film’s visual structure.
Eisenstein’s ideas and filmmaking talents would take him all over the world. In 1933 he spoke at Hollywood’s Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Science and lectured ...
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