Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born in Riga, Latvia, on 23 January 1898 into a Jewish family of German descent; he was the only son of the architect Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein and his wife Julia Ivanovna nee Konetskaya. He went to a technical grammar school in Riga and studied German, English and French. He spent his adolescence, after the divorce of his parents, with his mother in St. Petersburg. He studied at the Institute for Civil Engineering and pursued his interest in art and the theatre.
He participated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In 1918 he volunteered for the Red Army and became a member of the Proletkult theatre movement. From 1919 onwards he designed stage sets and directed a number of experimental plays.
In 1921 Eisenstein joined the Director's Workshop of Vsevolod Meyerhold, in 1923 he studied at the Cinema Workshop of Lev Kuleshov. He shot his first short film, Glumov's Diary, and published his theoretical text 'The Montage of Attractions' in the magazine LEF. In 1924 he studied film montage with Esfir Shub and made for Goskino the film Strike. This was the beginning of his collaboration with the cameraman Eduard Tisse, an artistic symbiosis which resulted in 1925 in the production of the legendary Battleship Potemkin shot in Moscow and Odessa, which was premiered in 1926.
In 1926 Eisentein and his assistant Grigori Aleksandrov traveled to Berlin to supervise the German premiere of Battleship Potemkin for which the composer Edmund Meisel created a powerful percussive score. He was invited to make a film for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, which is filmed on location in St. Petersburg throughout 1927. After a number of cuts ordered by the producers Sovkino, the film October (Ten Days That Shook the World) was released in 1928. Eisenstein started teaching a director's course at the State Technical School for Cinematography GTK, and worked on his last silent film The General Line. After being altered according to Stalin's wishes, it was released the following year under a new title, The Old and the New.
1929 marked the beginning of three years of travel for Eisenstein, Tissé and Aleksandrov. They went first to Berlin to promote October and to study at the UFA studios the technique of sound-film production. After an interlude in Switzerland where he participated in the Congress for Independent Filmmakers at La Sarraz near Lausanne, Eisenstein went to Paris and London, connecting with intellectual circles and the film communities of France and England.
In 1930 Eisenstein signed a contract with Paramount and went to Hollywood. He submitted scripts for three films which he hoped to realise: The Glass House, Sutter's Gold and An American Tragedy. The studio rejected them all.
Financed by the novelist Upton Sinclair and his wife Mary Craig, Eisenstein and his team went to Mexico in 1931, to shoot the film ¡Que viva México! . He also produced a great number of drawings inspired by Mexican life, some of them on erotic and blasphemous subjects. Unedited scenes of the film which were shown to critics and investors were highly praised for their visual beauty. Due to financial difficulties, growing alienation between the director and the Sinclairs and finally after Stalin's intervention, film work was halted.
Early in 1932 Eisenstein returned to the Soviet Union, with no chance to finish his film. After his return he proposed several films like The Black Consul, the comedy MMM and Optimistic Tragedy, but these were not accepted. He returned to teaching directing at the State Film School and worked on his theoretical writings. He worked from 1935 till 1937 on the film Beshin Meadow, which was finally stopped for ideological reasons and destroyed - a catastrophic loss for the director and his audiences.
From 1936 to 1938 he made for Mosfilm Aleksandr Nevsky, a historical film, with the powerful music by Sergei Prokofiev. The film brought him back into favour with the Soviet authorities and he was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1939. In 1940 he was appointed artistic director of Mosfilm. In 1941 his book 'Film Sense' was published in Britain and the project for the film epic in three parts Ivan the Terrible was started 1943. The script of the film illustrated with Eisenstein's drawings was published in the same year. The first part of Ivan the Terrible, for which he received the Stalin Prize, was premiered in 1945. The second part which had some colour scenes was completed in 1946, but displeased Stalin to such a degree that it was shelved immediately; of the third part only a fragment remained.
Eisenstein lectured and continued writing his great theoretical works throughout the years leading up to his premature death on 10 February 1948.
