What interests me about Sergei Eisenstein is his work as an artist under a totalitarian regime. I am moved by his curiosity and openness to the world, which opposed the system that surrounded him. I am half-Russian and grew up in the West in a world divided in two by the Iron Curtain. There were the Communists and capitalism, East and West, dictatorship and freedom. There only seemed to be polar opposites that did not intersect in any way. Sergei Eisenstein had to move between these opposing poles. He was sometimes forced to make painful compromises and accede to the authorities. Nevertheless, he created space for himself – in his art, his theoretical work and his flat. I find these spaces very inspiring. They show that in a system that appears to be dual, a third possibility often exists. In the light of current political polarisation, this is important even today.

Critics of Sergei Eisenstein accuse him of being a director of propaganda for Stalin, a maker of manipulative films. In my opinion, this view is based on an incomplete picture of his work and biography. Others see him as irrelevant or passé. What many are unaware of is that Soviet aesthetics of that time – Eisenstein’s films, Alexander Rodchenko’s photographs, or the of art El Lissitzky and other constructivists – still influence the media all over the world today. The way images are composed in Hollywood films, YouTube and advertising clips, among others, use the kind of arrangements that Eisenstein invented – and, of course, his montage technique. When I ask teenagers whether they have heard of Eisenstein, they say no. Students in my script courses knew of him but felt it was an onerous task to watch his films. They saw them as “boring Russian propaganda films.” Among my often very highly educated friends, only some can place Eisenstein’s name. When I ask them which film of his they know, they usually remember the staircase scene from Battleship Potemkin, or one from October, which they have seen on a late-night ARTE programme. But they don’t know any of his other films. My parents’ friends remember Eisenstein’s films as examples of important historical films about Russia. But only a few of them actually wanted to watch an Eisenstein film because they didn’t like the “ Communist message” they contained.