Picture a world-famous filmmaker at the Texas-Mexico border, luggage searched, customs agents finding sketchbooks of explicit satirical drawings, with a half-finished epic behind him and Joseph Stalin suspecting him of desertion. This episode explores the life of Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet pioneer of film editing, born in Riga in 1898 to a divided family, trained as an engineer like his architect father, and radicalized in the Red Army during a civil war that put him and his father on opposite sides.

We explain how studying Japanese kanji in Minsk gave him his theory of collision, how he built his 1925 naval mutiny epic and its famous staircase massacre out of shots stacked like bricks, and why Soviet censors soon found his work too complex. Then we follow his failed $100,000 Paramount contract, the chaotic Mexican moving fresco funded b ...