The Visual Story, 2nd Edition

INTRODUCTION

 

 

In Russia, on an icy winter night in 1928, an eager group of film students gathered 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 room with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and tall, white columns had become a lecture hall for the filmmaker and teacher Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Alexander Dovchenko were the first to develop formal theories of film structure based not only upon their own ideas but also on their practical experience making films.

Eisenstein’s dual talents would take him all over the world. In 1933, he spoke at the Motion Picture Academy in Hollywood and ...