Sergei Eisenstein Trivia
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49 free Sergei Eisenstein trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Sergei Eisenstein trivia quiz covers the Soviet director whose theories of montage still shape how films are cut a century later. The easy questions handle the basics: his birthplace, his most famous film and its most famous sequence, the 1905 mutiny it dramatised, the composer who scored his sound films and the tsar whose second instalment was banned. From there it moves through the films one by one: the cattle slaughter in Strike, the maggoty meat and the hand-tinted red flag of Potemkin, October's tenth-anniversary commission, the Battle of the Ice in Alexander Nevsky, and the three-part Ivan the Terrible that ended with a Central Committee resolution and confiscated footage. The harder half is for cinephiles: the $100,000 Paramount contract, Upton Sinclair and the doomed ¡Que viva México!, the pornographic drawings found by US customs, Bezhin Meadow and Pavlik Morozov, the five methods of montage, the debt to Kuleshov, the countries that banned Potemkin, the films that pay homage to the Odessa Steps, and the Kabuki theatre and 300 kanji that shaped his eye. If you enjoyed our Truffaut, Hitchcock or silent film quizzes, this is the deep dive on the father of montage. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for Sergei Eisenstein and each of his films before publishing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city, then part of the Russian Empire, was Sergei Eisenstein born in 1898?
Riga
Riga still shows off the family name: Eisenstein's father Mikhail designed many of the Art Nouveau apartment houses that tourists now come to the city to see.
Q 02Eisenstein is considered a pioneer of which theory and practice of film editing?
Montage
Montage, as Eisenstein saw it, works by collision: he compared the clash of one shot against the next to the explosions inside an engine, each one driving the film forward.
Q 03Battleship Potemkin marked which uprising's twentieth anniversary?
The 1905 Revolution
The 1905 Revolution failed, and the real mutineers ended up handing over their ship in a Romanian port. Eisenstein stops the film earlier, as the fleet lets the Potemkin sail through unharmed.
Q 04What sets off the mutiny aboard the ship in Battleship Potemkin?
Maggoty meat rations
Maggoty meat rations. The ship's doctor inspects the crawling carcass and pronounces it perfectly fit to eat, and when the mutiny comes he is thrown overboard himself, as food for the worms.
Q 05Battleship Potemkin's most famous sequence, endlessly imitated, shows Cossacks firing on a crowd where?
On a giant staircase in Odessa
On a giant staircase in Odessa, although no such massacre ever took place there. Troops did fire on crowds elsewhere in the city, and Eisenstein moved the killing to the steps.
Q 06Which gangster film pays homage to Battleship Potemkin with a pram rolling through a railway-station shoot-out?
The Untouchables
The Untouchables restages the scene in Chicago's Union Station, where Eliot Ness stops to help a mother with her pram just as the gangsters he is waiting for walk in.
Q 07Why was Battleship Potemkin's red flag shot as a white one?
The film stock made real red look black
The film stock made real red look black, so a white flag was run up for the camera. Afterwards it was coloured red by hand, frame by frame.
Q 08Which city's 1958 world's fair hosted the critics' poll that named Battleship Potemkin the best film ever made?
Brussels
Brussels's verdict did not last. From 1962 the best-known critics' poll put Citizen Kane first, and kept it there for five polls in a row.
Q 09In a famous three-shot sequence in Battleship Potemkin, stone statues of which animal seem to wake and rise up?
Lions
Lions. Three separate statues, one asleep, one stirring and one on its feet, are cut together so quickly that a single stone beast seems to rear up, standing for a people waking to revolt.
Q 10What was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film, released in 1925?
Strike
Strike was planned as one chapter in a seven-film history of the workers' road to power. The series was never finished, though the mutiny film he made next grew out of the same scheme.
Q 11The climax of Eisenstein's first feature cross-cuts the crushing of the workers with footage of what?
Cattle being slaughtered
Cattle being slaughtered: by cutting from the abattoir to soldiers mowing down the factory hands, Eisenstein left the audience to draw the conclusion for itself: these men were being butchered like animals.
Q 12October took its international title, Ten Days That Shook the World, from a book by which American journalist?
John Reed
John Reed watched the Bolsheviks take power and wrote the story up as an eyewitness. He died in Moscow three years later and was buried as a hero beside the Kremlin wall.
Q 13Which experimental Soviet artistic institution did Eisenstein work for when he began his career in Moscow theatre in 1920?
Q 21Eisenstein's 1929 film The General Line was made to promote which Soviet policy for the countryside?
Collectivising the farms
Collectivising the farms. For once Eisenstein built a film around a single heroine, a peasant woman, where his earlier epics had made the crowd itself the hero.
Q 22Which unfinished Eisenstein film, halted by the authorities in 1937, told the story of the boy 'martyr' Pavlik Morozov?
Bezhin Meadow
Bezhin Meadow no longer exists as a film: the reels were lost in a wartime air raid. What can be seen today is a slideshow rebuilt in the 1960s from single frames saved from each shot.
Q 23What became of Boris Shumyatsky, the film chief who halted Eisenstein's Pavlik Morozov film?
Proletkult
Proletkult took him on as an assistant scene painter. Within three years he was co-directing its Moscow theatre and had shot his first scrap of film, to be projected in the middle of one of its shows.
Q 14Which form of Japanese theatre did Eisenstein study and later credit as an influence on his films?
Kabuki
Kabuki was one Japanese passion; the written language was another, and it gave him an idea he never dropped: characters that fuse two pictures into one new meaning work just as a film cut does.
Q 15What did Eisenstein study in Petrograd before joining the Red Army in 1918?
Architecture and engineering
Architecture and engineering was his father's trade, and the Civil War set the two against each other: Sergei built defences for the Red Army while his father backed the other side and ended up in Germany.
Q 16The unedited reels of Eisenstein's abandoned Mexican film were kept for years by which New York museum?
The Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art held the footage long after Eisenstein's death. Only in 1979, three decades too late for him to see it, was a version cut that followed his own outline.
Q 17Which Theodore Dreiser novel did Eisenstein script for Paramount, only for the studio to reject it?
An American Tragedy
An American Tragedy reached the screen a year later with another director and a tamer script. Dreiser, who had backed Eisenstein's version, went to court to try to stop the film, and lost.
Q 18Which American socialist author bankrolled Eisenstein's Mexican film through the 'Mexican Film Trust'?
Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair, his wife and a few friends put up the money on the promise of a short, non-political film in three or four months. More than a year later, with the budget spent, they shut the production down.
Q 19What was the title of Eisenstein's unfinished Mexican project?
¡Que viva México!
¡Que viva México! was taken out of his hands. The reels stayed in America, where others cut them into films such as Thunder Over Mexico, and Eisenstein never edited a frame of what he had shot.
Q 20Which Mexican muralist, whom Eisenstein met in Moscow in 1927, fired his wish to make a film about Mexico?
Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera, in Moscow as a guest of the Soviet state's tenth birthday, told him Battleship Potemkin reminded him of his own murals. Eisenstein later wrote that Rivera's stories planted the seed of the journey.
He was arrested and shot
He was arrested and shot within a year or so. The director whose film he had stopped fared better: Eisenstein was soon back behind the camera, making the film that restored his standing.
Q 24Which 1938 film, an allegory warning against Nazi Germany, was Eisenstein's first sound film?
Alexander Nevsky
Alexander Nevsky was pulled from cinemas in 1939, the moment Moscow signed its pact with Hitler, and rushed back onto screens two years later when Germany invaded.
Q 25Which composer wrote the scores for Eisenstein's sound films of 1938 and the 1940s?
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev and Eisenstein worked in both directions: some scenes were scored to the finished pictures, and for others the film itself was cut to fit music he had already written.
Q 26In Eisenstein's 1938 epic, which invaders does the prince defeat in the climactic Battle of the Ice?
The Teutonic Knights
The Teutonic Knights charge across a winter that was pure illusion: the battle was filmed in the heat of summer, with ice and snow faked from melted glass and chalk.
Q 27The Battle of the Ice that crowns Eisenstein's 1938 epic was fought in 1242 on which frozen lake?
Lake Peipus
Lake Peipus, on today's border between Estonia and Russia. The film's most famous image, the ice cracking under the invaders' weight, is Eisenstein's own: no chronicle of the battle mentions it.
Q 28Moscow's film studios were evacuated in 1941 to which city, where Eisenstein went on to shoot Ivan the Terrible?
Alma-Ata
Alma-Ata became the wartime home of Soviet cinema: the Moscow and Leningrad studios were merged there for the duration, and Eisenstein filmed his tsar's palaces thousands of kilometres from the front.
Q 29Stalin complained that Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible resembled Hamlet: which fault did he mean?
Indecision
Indecision. Summoned to the Kremlin at eleven at night, Eisenstein was told that his tsar let everybody tell him what to do, when Stalin wanted an Ivan who was cruel for good reasons.
Q 30Ivan the Terrible, Part II, banned in 1946, finally reached cinemas in 1958 under which Soviet leader?
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin two years earlier, and the film Stalin banned could at last be shown. Eisenstein never saw it released: he had died ten years before.