Google Doodle rediscovers Russian film legend Sergie Eisenstein on his 120th birthday

In a beautiful black and white Doodle, Google on Monday celebrated the 120th birthday of Soviet film legend Sergei Eisenstein. 

Born on January 22, 1898 in present day Latvia, Eisenstein was the pioneer of montage technique. 

Son of an affluent architect, Eisenstein attended the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd as a young man. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, he worked as an engineer for the Red Army

Eisenstein spoke fluent Japanese and used the haiku as a model for his theories on montage.

The technique involved editing a fast-paced sequence of short shots to transcend time or suggest thematic juxtapositions. The doodle sees Sergei developing the film reels.

The Soviet film legend felt that editing involved the audience more than the passive reception of information from lengthy shots.

He directed several groundbreaking films, including ‘Battleship Potemkin’, ‘Strike’, and ‘The General Line’.

Apart from the sheer brilliance in filmmaking, Eisenstein also had strong political ideologies.

The filmmaker in his masterpiece October not only revisited the Russian Revolution of 1917, but it also parodied Stalin, who had commissioned it. 

The film was commissioned in Stalin’s Soviet Russia for the 10th anniversary of the 1917 October revolution, as a suitably fervent propagandist celebration. 

Google took to its website to describe, ‘His films were also revolutionary in another sense, as he often depicted the struggle of downtrodden workers against the ruling class.’

He was honoured with Stalin prize in 1941 and 1946. Sergei took his last breath on February 11, 1948 at the age of 50 in Moscow, Soviet Union.

Many experts feel that the careers of Brian De Palma, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Roeg and Oliver Stone and much of the dynamism of the music video scene, would have been inconceivable without Eisenstein’s ground-breaking experimentation.

He once famously said, ‘the hieroglyphic language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any political or tactical slogan, without recourse to the help of a rather suspect dramatic or psychological past.’