Of all the pioneers of the cinema, the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein has exerted the most enduring hold on the popular imagination. Eisenstein worked with many people in different parts of the world. This book offers a unique portrait of the director based on the personal recollections of those who knew him. Their recollections were, for the most part, originally recorded by Norman Swallow for a film made for the BBC in collaboration with G. V. Alexandrov, co-author and co-director with Eisenstein of "October, Old and New" and "Que Viva Mexico " It is illustrated with over forty photographs, stills and drawings, among them Eisenstein s delightful childhood sketches and some of his designs for the theatre and the cinema, many of them never published before. Norman Swallow produced the BBC film which forms the nucleus of the book over a period of two years in Moscow, Leningrad, Riga and Odessa, as well as in Western Europe and the USA. The result is a vivid composite portrait of one of the greatest, as well as one of the most controversial, figures in the history of the cinema.