Mikhail Eisenstein and Sergei Eisenstein: Father and Son

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)