Jay Leyda was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film historian, noted for his work on U.S, Soviet and Chinese Cinema. His The Melville Log (1951) was a day to day compilation of documents which he had painstakingly collected on the life of Herman Melville. He was a member of the Workers Film and Photo League in the early 1930s. He participated in the filming of Sergei Eisenstein's lost film Bezhin Meadow (1935–37).[1] In the 1940s he translated Eisenstein's writings. He was awarded the Eastman Kodak Gold Medal Award in 1984.