One of the iconic directors of twentieth-century cinema, Sergei Eisenstein is best known for films such as The Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevskii, and Ivan the Terrible. His work, in turn, has inspired other great moviemakers, including Akira Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola.
This is the first English-language edition of Eisenstein s recently discovered notes for a general history of the cinema, a project he undertook in the years before his death in 1948. He presents a vast genealogy of the various media and art forms that preceded cinema s birth and...

This collection for the first time brings together scholars to explore the ways that various people and groups in Italian society reacted to the advent of cinema. Looking at the responses of writers, scholars, clergymen, psychologists, philosophers, members of parliament, and more, the pieces collected here from that period show how Italians developed a common language to describe and discuss this invention that quickly exceeded all expectations and transcended existing categories of thought and artistic forms. The result is a close-up picture of a culture in transition, dealing with a...

This volume offers readable summaries, elaborations, and explanations of his sometimes complex and demanding theories of film.