Book excerpt: I.B.Tauris is delighted to announce the reissue in paperback in three volumes of the definitive, most comprehensive edition, in the finest translations and fully annotated, of the writings of this great filmmaker, theorist and teacher of film - and one of the most original aesthetic thinkers of the twentieth century. Now in paperback for the first time, Volume 1 documents from the definitive Russian texts the complex course of Sergei Eisenstein's writings during the revolutionary years in the Soviet Union. It presents Eisenstein the innovative aesthetic thinker, socialist artist and humourist, passionately engaged in the debates over the art forms of the future. Importantly, this was also the period of Eisenstein's great silent masterpieces, 'The Strike', 'The Battleship Potemkin', 'October' and 'The General Line', and of his controversial sojourns in Hollywood and Mexico.