Sergei Eisenstein
Film theorist

Eisenstein was among the earliest film theorists. He briefly attended the film school established by Lev Kuleshov and the two were both fascinated with the power of editing to generate meaning and elicit emotion. Their individual writings and films are the foundations upon which Soviet montage theory was built, but they differed markedly in their understanding of its fundamental principles. Eisenstein's 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—as Kuleshov maintained. 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":

With his cross-disciplinary approach, he defined the montage as the constructing act par excellence at the base of every work of art: "the principle of segmentation of the object into different camera cuts" and the unification in a generalized or complete image is what we can call the peculiarity of montage as constructive process, which "leaves the event intact (the caught reality) and at the same time interprets it differently."

Eisenstein taught film-making during his career at VGIK where he wrote the curricula for the directors' course; his classroom illustrations are reproduced in Vladimir Nizhniĭ's Lessons with Eisenstein. Exercises and examples for students were based on rendering literature such as Honoré de Balzac 's Le Père Goriot. Another hypothetical was the staging of the Haitian struggle for independence as depicted in Anatolii Vinogradov's The Black Consul, influenced as well by John Vandercook's Black Majesty.

Lessons from this scenario delved into the character of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, replaying his movements, actions, and the drama surrounding him. Further to the didactics of literary and dramatic content, Eisenstein taught the technicalities of directing, photography, and editing, while encouraging his students' development of individuality, expressiveness, and creativity. Eisenstein's pedagogy, like his films, was politically charged and contained quotes from Vladimir Lenin interwoven with his teaching.

In his initial films, Eisenstein did not use professional actors. His narratives eschewed individual characters and addressed broad social issues, especially class conflict. He used groups as characters, and the roles were filled with untrained people from the appropriate classes; he avoided casting stars. Eisenstein's vision of communism brought him into conflict with officials in the ruling regime of Stalin. Like many Bolshevik artists, Eisenstein envisioned a new society which would subsidize artists, freeing them from the confines of capitalism, leaving them absolutely free to create, but due to the material conditions at the time, budgets and producers were as significant to the Soviet film industry as the rest of the world. Due to the fledgling war, the revolution-wracked and isolated new nation didn't have the resources to nationalize its film industry at first.
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