#TBT In the winter of 2000, the Drawing Center exhibited the first U.S. museum exhibition of drawings by the influential Russian filmmaker Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1898-1948), who revolutionized the world of cinema with such renowned films as The Battleship Potemkin (1925). "The Body of the Line: Eisenstein’s Drawings" offered a rare opportunity to view striking works on paper by one of the seminal figures of early motion-picture direction. The exhibition consisted of over one hundred works on paper that date from 1914 to 1948 and range from the first student sketchbooks, to the exuberant Mexican pictures, to the later drawings. The purpose of the exhibit was to foreground Eisenstein's graphic practice and to see his drawings as separate, yet related to his creative work in film. Given the increasing importance of film imagery in contemporary visual art, "The Body of Line: Eisenstein’s Drawings" addressed the interaction of both media: drawing as a gesture of the hand versus t...