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50 free Sergei Eisenstein trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01In which city, then part of the Russian Empire, was Sergei Eisenstein born in 1898?
Riga
His father was an architect; the family later moved to Saint Petersburg in the year of the 1905 Revolution.
Q 02Eisenstein is considered a pioneer of which theory and practice of film editing?
Montage
He believed the 'collision' of two independent shots could create meaning and manipulate the audience's emotions.
Q 03The mutiny dramatised in Battleship Potemkin took place in which year?
1905
The film was commissioned for the 20th anniversary of that first Russian revolution and premiered at the Bolshoi in December 1925.
Q 04What sets off the mutiny aboard the Potemkin in the film?
Maggoty meat rations
The ship's doctor insists the maggots are merely insects that can be washed off, and the crew refuse the borscht.
Q 05Battleship Potemkin's most famous sequence, endlessly imitated, shows Cossacks firing on a crowd where?
On a giant staircase in Odessa
Cossacks march down the steps firing into the crowd; the real staircase in Odesa now bears the film's name.
Q 06Which of these films pays homage to Potemkin's staircase massacre with its own runaway pram?
The Untouchables
Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith are also listed among the tributes.
Q 07Why did Eisenstein hand-tint the mutineers' flag red in 108 frames of Battleship Potemkin?
The film stock made real red look black
Orthochromatic stock rendered red as black, so a white flag was used and coloured by hand for the premiere.
Q 08Until which year was Battleship Potemkin banned in the United Kingdom for its revolutionary zeal?
1954
It was then X-rated until 1987; France and Japan also banned it, and Germany cut the violence.
Q 09At which 1958 event was Battleship Potemkin named the greatest film of all time?
The Brussels World's Fair
Whose written introduction was cut from Soviet prints after he fell out with Stalin? Trotsky's.
Q 10Which sailor's body is displayed in a tent in Odessa with a sign reading 'For a spoonful of borscht'?
Vakulinchuk
He led the uprising and was killed as the sailors overwhelmed their officers.
Q 11What was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film, released in 1925?
Strike
It began as one entry in a proposed seven-part series called 'Towards Dictatorship of the Proletariat'.
Q 12The climax of Eisenstein's first feature cross-cuts the crushing of the workers with footage of what?
Cattle being slaughtered
Animal metaphors run through the film, with police spies given the identities of beasts.
Q 13October: Ten Days That Shook the World was commissioned to mark which anniversary of the 1917 revolution?
The tenth
Its international title came from John Reed's 1919 book, and it earned Eisenstein a roasting from Soviet critics for formalism.
Q 21Which two Mexican artists did Eisenstein mix with socially, inspiring him to call his films 'moving frescoes'?
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
He had secured 500 soldiers, 10,000 guns and 50 cannons from the Mexican Army for the never-shot Soldadera episode.
Q 22Who sent the film's American backer a telegram worrying that Eisenstein had become a 'deserter' during the Mexican shoot?
Joseph Stalin
Sinclair shut down production, and US customs then found pornographic sketches in the trunk of his brother-in-law.
Q 23Which suppressed 1937 Eisenstein film, long thought destroyed, was based on the story of the boy 'martyr' Pavlik Morozov?
Q 14Which experimental Soviet artistic institution did Eisenstein work for when he began his career in Moscow theatre in 1920?
Proletkult
He also worked as a designer for Vsevolod Meyerhold and wrote his first theoretical article for the journal LEF in 1923.
Q 15Which Japanese theatrical form, encountered while stationed in Minsk, did Eisenstein cite as an influence on his pictorial development?
Kabuki
He also studied Japanese and learned some 300 kanji characters.
Q 16What did Eisenstein study in Petrograd before joining the Red Army in 1918?
Architecture and engineering
It was his father's profession; his father backed the anti-Bolshevik side and ended up in Germany.
Q 17How much was Eisenstein's short-term 1930 contract with Paramount Pictures worth?
$100,000
He proposed a Basil Zaharoff biopic, Shaw's Arms and the Man and Sutter's Gold before Paramount suggested a Dreiser adaptation.
Q 18Which Theodore Dreiser novel did Eisenstein script for Paramount, only for the studio to reject it?
An American Tragedy
An anti-communist campaign by Major Pease helped end the contract 'by mutual consent' in October 1930.
Q 19Which American socialist author bankrolled Eisenstein's Mexican film through the 'Mexican Film Trust'?
Upton Sinclair
Charlie Chaplin had recommended the meeting; the contract stipulated a 'non-political' film shot in three to four months.
Q 20What was the title of Eisenstein's unfinished Mexican project?
¡Que viva México!
Sol Lesser later cut Thunder Over Mexico and Death Day from the footage; Eisenstein never saw them.
Bezhin Meadow
Its title comes from a Turgenev story; Eisenstein publicly recanted the film as an error after the government halted it.
Q 24Which head of the Soviet film industry halted the Pavlik Morozov film, and was later denounced, tried and shot in 1938?
Boris Shumyatsky
Stalin decided the fiasco was the fault of the executives supervising Eisenstein rather than the director himself.
Q 25Which 1938 film, an allegory warning against Nazi Germany, was Eisenstein's first sound film?
Alexander Nevsky
It was started, finished and distributed within a single year and won him the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize.
Q 26Which composer wrote the scores for Eisenstein's sound films of 1938 and the 1940s?
Sergei Prokofiev
Eisenstein repaid him by designing sets for his opera War and Peace while both were evacuated to Alma-Ata.
Q 27Which invaders does the prince defeat in the 1938 film's climactic Battle of the Ice?
The Teutonic Knights
They had taken Pskov with help from the traitor Tverdilo and were marching on Novgorod.
Q 28Which actor played the title roles in both of Eisenstein's historical epics of 1938 and 1945?
Nikolay Cherkasov
He was 39 when cast as Ivan and played the tsar from the ages of 17 to 53.
Q 29To which Central Asian city was Eisenstein evacuated in 1941, where he first conceived Ivan the Terrible?
Alma-Ata
Most of the film was shot there in black and white; the colour scenes were filmed in Moscow.
Q 30Who commissioned Ivan the Terrible in January 1941, intending the tsar to be shown in a positive light?
Joseph Stalin
Stalin admired Ivan as a 'great and wise' ruler and wanted parallels drawn between them.