In this essay the celebrated Soviet filmmaker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein turns his attention not to cinematic montage, his signature concept, but to questions of staging and sequencing a film before its assembly in montage. Coining the expressions "mise en jeu" and "mise en geste", describing the work of actors and their gestures, he devised a novel theory of cinematic staging unlike any other and unlike. This is the only English translation of this rare view of an Eisenstein unfamiliar to us.