Sergei Eisenstein  Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (, tr. ; 11 February 1948) was a Soviet film director and film theorist, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films "Strike" (1925), "Battleship Potemkin" (1925) and "" (1928), as well as the historical epics "Alexander Nevsky" (1938) and "Ivan the Terrible" (1944, 1958). In its 2012 decennial poll, the magazine "Sight & Sound" named his "Battleship Potemkin" the 11th greatest movie of all time. Sergei Eisenstein was born 22 January 1898 in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire in the Governorate of Livonia) was born to a middle-class family. His family moved frequently in his early years, as Eisenstein continued to do throughout his life. His father, the famous architect Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, was born in Kiev Oblast, to a Jewish merchant father, Osip, and a Swedish mother. The family had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. His mother, Julia Ivanovna Konetskaya, was from a Russian Orthodox family. She was the daughter of a prosperous merchant. Julia left Riga the same year as the Russian Revolution of 1905, taking Sergei with her to St. Petersburg. Her son would return at times to see his father, who joined them around 1910. Divorce followed and Julia left the family to live in France. Eisenstein was raised as an Orthodox Christian, but became an atheist later on. At the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering, Eisenstein studied architecture and engineering, the profession of his father. In 1918, he left school and joined the Red Army to serve the Bolshevik Revolution, although his father Mikhail supported the opposite side. This brought his father to Germany after the defeat of the Tsarist government, and Sergei to Petrograd, Vologda, and Dvinsk. In 1920, Sergei was transferred to a command position in Minsk, after success providing propaganda for the October Revolution. At this time, he was exposed to Kabuki theatre and studied Japanese, learning some 300 kanji characters, which he cited as an influence on his pictorial development. Eisenstein moved to Moscow in 1920, and began his career in theatre working for Proletkult, an experimental Soviet artistic institution which aspired to radically modify existing artistic forms and create a revolutionary working-class aesthetic.