Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) – Film director and theorist. He studied civil engineering in Petrograd (St Petersburg) in 1915. In 1918 he began to work for the Red Army. In 1920, he began to study Japanese, which later had a strong influence on his cinematic vision. In 1921 he joined the Proletkult Theater and Meyerhold Workshop. In 1923 he staged the play Wiseman, which included his first short film Glumov's Diary. His revolutionary film trilogy comprises of Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928). In 1926, by Stalin’s request, he began to work on the film General Line (1929). In 1930 he traveled to America; in Mexico he maked the film Que viva Mexico! (Unfinished). The same year, he ended his travels at the request of Stalin. In 1932 he traveled to Georgia with his future wife, Vera Atasheva. In 1937 he worked on the book Montage and he became a professor at VGIK. He was dismissed from institute after the ban on Bezhin Meadow (1935-1937, destroyed) and rehired in 1939, when he received the Order of Lenin for Alexander Nevsky (1938). In 1945, he was awarded the Stalin Prize for Ivan the Terrible, Part I, but the Part II was banned by the Central Committee in 1946. Eisenstein died of a heart attack in 1948 at the age 50.