Eisenstein

Film Form
By: Sergie Eisenstein


"Through Theater to Cinema" 


Eisenstein retraces the paths of Russia's early filmmakers to their "creative beginnings," or attempts to.  He compares the art of film to other types of art. For example, composition:  "A chord, or even three successive notes, seems to be an organic unit. Why should the combination of three pieces of film in montage be considered as a three-fold collision, as impulses of three successive images?" (4). 


He continues this comparison by saying that cinema is able "to disclose the process that goes on microscopically in all other arts," but only after saying that "the shot...is more resistant than granite," which in these days is false (5). 


He then follows his own creative course, beginning with The Mexican, saying that "the first sign of a cinema tendency is one showing events with the least distortion, aiming at the actual reality of the fragments" (6). 


Typage- a performance technique of Soviet Montage cinema whereby an actor seeks to represent or characterize a social class or other group. 


Eisenstein says that October was pure typage. The typage tendency may be rooted in theater, for "it presents possibilities for excellent stylistic growth, in a broad sense-as an indicator of definite affinities to real life through the camera" (9). 


He says that in his revolt against theater, he did away with a very vital element of theater--the story. He continues: "At that time this seemed natural. We brought collective and mass action onto the screen, in contrast to individualism and the 'triangle' drama of the bourgeois cinema. Discarding the individualist conception of the bourgeois hero, our films of this period made an abrupt deviation--insisting on an understanding of the mass as hero" (16). 


He says that now (1934), he understands that individuality within the collective is what cinema should represent. 


"The Unexpected"


Eisenstein, impressed by the Kabuki when it comes through Russia, states that "it is this conventionalism that prevents our thorough use of all that may be borrowed from the Kabuki" (19). He says that the sharpest distinction between Kabuki and our theater is in a monism of ensemble (sound, movement, space, costume, and voice function as elements of equal significance). 


"The first association that occurs to one experiencing Kabuki is soccer, the most collective, ensemble sport" (21). 


In Kabuki, one hears movement and sees sound. Japanese poetry is also a layered art form, with the handwriting mattering more than the content. 


The juxtaposition that Eisenstein wanted to create the entire time finally comes to the front when he compares the "non-differentiated" provocations of Kabuki to the "acme of montage thinking" (27).  


"The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram" 


Eisenstein compares the Japanese language to montage; the haiku to a shot list. He says that "absolute realism is by no means the correct form of perception. It is simply the function of a certain form of social structure" (35). 


Montage is conflict, collision, cinematography, and (remarkably) Japanese culture. 


The essay ends with this: "To understand and apply her cultural peculiarities to the cinema, this is the task of Japan! Colleagues of Japan, are you really going to leave this for us to do?" (44).