Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born in January 1898 and came up through Soviet cinema in the 1920s, where he directed Strike in 1925 and then Battleship Potemkin the same year - the latter eventually named by Sight and Sound as the 54th-greatest film ever made. October followed in 1928, closing out a silent trilogy that cemented his place as a pioneer in montage theory and practice. He shifted to sound with the historical epic Alexander Nevsky in 1938, then spent years on Ivan the Terrible, released in two parts in 1945 and 1958. He died in February 1948, halfway through that final project, but the method he built - the idea that meaning lives in the cut - outlasted him by generations.