Mr Bergan's description of their tortuous passage through the Soviet bureaucracy can only enhance Eisenstein's reputation, although there is certainly much more information about him still hidden in the Soviet archives.

ECONOMIST: Film��s great might-have-been

Eisenstein's sexuality has long been a matter of conjecture and Mr Bergan, perhaps too cautiously, comes to no clear conclusions about whether the drawings reflected the way Eisenstein lived and behaved.

ECONOMIST: Film��s great might-have-been

Mr Bergan's lucid book is a reminder of both how great a director Eisenstein was and how much greater his achievement might have been, by showing the gap that existed between the magisterial wreckage of his surviving work and the even more astonishing concept of cinema which he was never fully permitted to realise.

ECONOMIST: Film��s great might-have-been

As Mr Bergan movingly recounts, Eisenstein developed a curious mixture of audacity and cunning, always pushing his films towards an ideal state which he must have known could never be realised, for political or economic reasons, yet managing to remain employed and to launch yet another project after the previous one had collapsed or been compromised or sabotaged.

ECONOMIST: Film��s great might-have-been