Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein will always be known for The Battleship Potemkin, the film that swept its young director to international fame in 1926, and made cinema seem dangerously powerful by revealing this new dynamic art born of the October Revolution. But Eisenstein was much more than a great film-maker: he was a precocious caricaturist and lifelong draughtsman; a theatre designer and director; a teacher, scholar and polemicist.

Omnibus visits the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, where an exhibition - now at the Hayward Gallery in London - unfolds, revealing original material never before seen in the West. All this helps us to reappraise the 'little boy from Riga', as Eisenstein always thought of himself, and see him as a truly 20th-century Renaissance man.

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