Sergei Eisenstein is a brilliant film theorist many consider to be the father of modern film theory. His work has inspired thinking from the early days of cinema and is still one of the most respected and drawn upon arguments about film today. His essays, more than any other theorist, attempts to create a set of tools that film viewers can use to read films as texts. Eisenstein was a forward thinker about film as a textual medium with meaning beyond the literal level. He draws on many literary elements to explain how we should read film, but his work with the Haiku is the metaphor that resonates most with me. Haiku is juxtapositional poetry, as is film in the brilliant mind of Eisenstein. I think film belongs in an english classroom, and I think that Eisenstein is the ticket to take film from a movie day break in the schedule where kids come to class and zone out from the work they have been doing recently, to something rigorous, challenging, and inspiring.