This essay investigates how the proliferation of both popular and scholarly representations of Haitian culture and history in the 1920s and 30s may have occasioned their notable configuration in Eisenstein’s precepts of Soviet cinema in the 1930s and 40s. By examining this imbrication from both sides—the literature and visualization pertaining to Haiti (often reproducing their racialized representations in Europe, North America, and Russia) and the particular aesthetic imperatives of Soviet artists during Stalinist times—I delve specifically into (1) the divergent portrayals of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s speech in popular narratives and (2) ethnographic reports on the Haitian musical instrument, and I demonstrate how these, coupled with the need for a coherent approach to sound cinema in the Soviet Union, shed light on Eisenstein’s conception of a distinctly Soviet sound cinematography in his lessons on filmmaking.