ABSTRACT
Eisenstein’s attendance at the Congress of Independent Film-Makers, held in the rather unlikely setting of the château of La Sarraz in Switzerland in September 1929, is well known but not well documented. We know that he was accompanied by his assistant Grigori Alexandrov and the cameraman Eduard Tisse and that the Congress was also attended by Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Béla Bálazs, Léon Moussinac, Ivor Montagu and Alberto Cavalcanti among others. We know that one of the highlights of the Congress was the impromptu production of a film, The Storming of La Sarraz, a rather light-hearted allegory depicting the triumph of independent cinema over commercial dominance.1
