Mei Lan Fang, Sergei Tretykov and Sergei Eisenstein

In 1927 Eisenstein wanted to make a fictional film about China, based on a libretto of his friend Sergei Tretyakov, and shoot a series of educational films on Chinese theater and painting, the village and the factory, religion and the family. But the project had been turned down, since hard currency was in short supply and the situation in China was unstable. Eisenstein retained the fascination of Chinese culture and collected books on Chinese art, symbolism and customs. In 1946 he wrote a chapter on the representation of landscape in classical Chinese painting and analyzed the principles Ying and Yan in the composition of Japanese woodcuts, Russian icons and European caricatures.