爱森斯坦被认为是电影最伟大的革命者之一。不太为人所知的是，他也是一位多产的平面艺术家，作为表达自己想法的一种手段，他用的是强制手段。
按时间顺序排列，《纸上的艾森斯坦》分成六章，每一章都是关于每一个不同时期的图形作品，以及艾森斯坦自己的文章和日记的摘录相互交织。1930年，Eisenstein前往美国和墨西哥，在那里他创作了数百幅受古代和当代墨西哥艺术影响的画作。1932年被迫回到俄罗斯时，Eisenstein受到了共产主义政府的审查，在没有政治干预的情况下，努力拍摄更多的电影，再次为艺术自由画草图。尽管在他的一生中完成了相对较少的电影，但Eisenstein做了几千幅画。这本书是与俄罗斯国家艺术与文学档案馆开创性合作的产物，也是对不可思议的图形天才的致敬。

One of the iconic figures of the twentieth-century cinema, Sergei Eisenstein is best known as the director of The Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevskii and Ivan the Terrible. His craft as director and film editor left a distinct mark on such key figures of the Western cinema as Nicolas Roeg, Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Peckinpah and Akiro Kurosawa.This comprehensive volume of Eisenstein's writings is the first-ever English-language edition of his newly discovered notes for a general history of the cinema, a project he undertook in 1946-47 before his death in 1948. In his writings, Eisenstein presents the main coordinates of a history of the cinema without mentioning specific directors or films: what we find instead is a vast genealogy of all the media and of all the art forms that have preceded cinema's birth and accompanied the first decades of its history, exploring the same expressive possibilities that cinema has explored and responding to the same, deeply rooted, "urges" cinema has responded to. Cinema appears here as the heir of a very long tradition that includes death masks, ritual processions, wax museums, diorama and panorama, and as a medium in constant transformation, that far from being locked in a stable form continues to redefine itself. The texts by Eisenstein are accompanied by a series of critical essays written by some of the world's most qualified Eisenstein scholars.