Eisenstein’s engagement with psychology can be most productively unpacked by acknowledging his lifelong collaboration with two Russian psychologists, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Alexander Luria (1902-1977), both of whom were among the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, and both of whom were among those few whose influence is likely to endure well into the 21st. Vygotsky’s legacy is associated primarily with his cultural-historical theory. This theory provided a powerful paradigm with which to address the emergence and development of thought, language and consciousness as culturally and historically specific phenomena. His collaborator Luria was instrumental in creating the field of neuropsychology, or cognitive neuroscience, by extending the cultural-historical theory to address the mechanics of the brain. This all but unexplored collaboration between Eisenstein, Vygotsky and Luria is not only highly pertinent to the problematics of cinematic thinking, but deserves renewed attention in the current context of more general debates in cinema theory, which, it can be argued, are encumbered by three main factors: the digital revolution, the shift beyond postmodernism, and the so-called ‘crisis’ in current film theory.