
In the mid 1990s, I made a trip to Riga and wandered the streets taking photographs. The photograph above shows detail from a Jugendstil building in Elisavetes iela. The building was designed by the architect Mikhail Eisenstein (1867 - 1921) - you can find better, more recent images of the same building on his Wikipedia page.
Mikhail Eisenstein was the father of the Soviet film maker Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1898 - 1948) who began his career as a student of architecture, but parted ways with his father during the Russian Revolution.
Looking at the enormous heads atop the building in Elisavetes iela, I imagined that despite their political differences, the son owed to his father the idea of using - in
Battleship Potemkin and other films - images of vast and sometimes grotesque heads.
(Republished from an old Blog to answer someone's question)
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