Monday would have been the 120th birthday of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, otherwise known as the father of cinematic montage.
To mark the occasion, Google put out a Doodle in honor of the Soviet filmmaker, showing Sergei Eisenstein clipping black-and-white strips from a film spool.
Eisenstein’s work famously features intricate arrangements of short shots, juxtaposed to shed light on the psychological composition of an event. Below is one of his most renowned montages: the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin.
But Eisenstein was not only a technical innovator.
As film titles like Strike and The General Line suggest, he had a keen social conscience; Eisenstein turned his lens on the neglected struggles of the oppressed working class.
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Write to Joseph Hincks at joseph.hincks@time.com
