ON  EISENSTEIN

( 1 8 9 8  -  1 9 4 8 )

 

by Viktor Shklovsky

(1893-1984)

 

(Moscow: Sovietskii Pisatel'-- 1964)

 

 

Translator: Benjamin Sher

 

[Copyright by Benjamin Sher-- 1991]

 

[PUBLIC DOMAIN]

 

 

beach sand

 

          "We thought we were shaping life and cinematography," said  Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, "but, as it turned out, life was shaping both us and cinematography."

          Life shapes us into what we are as we grow in consciousness.  It lifts us as a storm lifts the broad, hard wings of a glider and draws them to itself.

          Man comes to know necessity, comes to understand the truth and the truth makes him free.

          Sergei was young and robust when I first met him (sometime in 1922).  A towering forehead, long, straight eyebrows, a large mouth, a quiet smile -- everything about him was radiant.  He smiled at the world, at youth, like a man who believes in himself.

          He made great motion pictures.  He was so prolific that his complete works, written in a compact and spare hand, will fit into a dozen volumes only with great effort.

          Sergei knew how to look ahead and how to look over his shoulder.

          He had experienced a lot in his life.  He saw the world clearly, in its infinite variety.

          He was born at the close of the last century.

          Sergei could remember his very first "close-ups": He was three or four years old at the time and living on the Riga coastline in Latvia -- or rather, in a suburb of Riga, on a sandy avenue along the gulf that washes against the shore.

          The river had deposited a sandbar.  It was therefore separated from the sea by a sandbank.  Pine trees grew on the sandbank, with flower gardens nearby.  All around villas gleamed with windows that had been thoroughly scrubbed.

          Old Riga was a city frozen in time during Eisenstein's childhood.  It was also, however, a city of a throughly modern character.  The old ditches had by then been transformed into parks, while large, pleasant-looking housing complexes with spacious apartments rose up everywhere.  Their facades, plastered with stucco to resemble stone, were daubed with old-fashioned decorations in the modern style.

          Next to them stood the old city with its four-meter slits and with facades that were hardly visible.  The narrow buildings, their shoulders pressing against each other, just barely managed to pull in their chests from the slit that was the street.

          Old churches alternated with warehouses.  You could still see the old pulleys in those warehouses.  They had once been used to haul cargo off the boats entering the city from the river.  The river has been filled in and forgotten long ago.

          The city of Riga boasts large gardens and well-kept cemeteries.  It is -- as they say -- covered with a rich cultural layer.

          This wealthy, polyglot city has its traditions.  They come from Latvia, Russia and Germany.  Riga is the home of Herder, the great art theoretician, who was friend and mentor of Goethe.  It is here that were to be found old bookstores and churches with tall steeples visible from far at sea.

          The city makes its way to the open sea by way of its port and sandbars.  The latter meander along for dozens of kilometers.

  A flat sea that looks like an aluminum tray turned upside down lies along the gently sloping beaches.  On its blue and pink surface you could catch the reflection of seagulls.

          This is a child's sea.  Eisenstein reminisces: "My first impression as a child was of a while lilac swaying back and forth over my crib."

          With a memory that was remarkably accurate, Eisenstein adds: "No, it was not a crib.  It was a small, white bed.  It rolled on black nickel balls and had a white mesh between the rails to keep me from falling."

          The lilac bough was not real. It had been sketched, painted and embroidered.

 

It was a luxuriant, convex bough.  Little birds flew above it. Beyond this bough -- through it -  you could see the painted details of a traditional Japanese landscape . . . The bough was no longer a close-up.  The bough represented a typical Japanese foreground through which the distance was silhouetted.

 

          An artist knows how to scrutinize, weigh, remember and hunt down the sources of his understanding in that which he once saw through the meshes of his bed.

          Tenacity, a keen eye, a room and books -- that's how Eisenstein's life began.  The books are already, so to speak, in the cradle with him.

          Sergei Eisenstein's memory alternated between these books and his first impressions.  By the time he was ten years old he had already devoured Daumier's art.  At the boy's request, his governess had bought him one of his books.

          An artist remembers his life by organizing it into "shots," and he is right to do so, because to remember is to sort out one's fund of memory.  He is also wrong, however, in that he no longer feels his remembrances.

          Sergei swam away from the world of books.  He may have been raised indoors, but no one swam farther in the sea of life than he did.

          He swam past the briny ocean.

          He loved books, but he swam off into an indescribable future.

          From early childhood Eisenstein longed to enter the world of art.  Not necessarily through the front door, though.  As a matter of fact, he entered it instead through the side windows, landing in rooms devoid of furniture, rooms suspended in mid-air without a foundation beneath.

          A certain English novelist once confessed that, of all the countries he knew, the ones he hoped to visit someday were those he had once seen but which never really existed: He dreamt of a journey to Robinson Crusoe's island, to Ali Baba's mountain and to the oceans of Sinbad the Sailor.  These oceans, washing over a flat earth -- in accordance with the science of the time -- pull away from the earth like a hanging storm.  They stay that way in mid-air, frozen by the horror of the extraordinary.

          Eisenstein traveled not only to places which had never existed but even to places which no one had ever invented before him.

 

theater of parodies

 

          In 1918 Eisenstein took wing, travelling to faraway lands and seas.  He then entered the edifice whose foundation was laid by the Revolution.        

          He abandoned his studies at the Institute of Civil Engineering, joined the Red Army, built fortifications and painted posters.

          I first met Eisenstein on what is now Kalinina but was formerly called Vozdizhenka Street.

          It was on Vozdvizhenka Street that a merchant by the name of Morozov had once built for himself a sumptuous "nest" modelled after the palaces of Portugal.  This palace shimmered with many colors. Its interior and facade, woven from the recollections of a journey, were adorned with interlaced ropes.  It was crammed with antiquated ornaments like a Commisar's store. This palace was home at the time to the Proletarian Culture Project (Proletkult).  And it was here that Sergei, a young graphic artist and, chiefly, a theatrical director and student of Meyerhold, first staged his parody of plays by Ostrovsky and Tretyakov.

          Tall, with an elongated face, Tretyakov had rectilinear, schematic features.  Yet, he was fiercely direct as a person.  He wrote plays about China and about the abolition of the family.

          Sergei Eisenstein needed to be swept off his feet by a certain unexpectancy: Enter Tretyakov like a whirlwind.  Soon thereafter Eisenstein staged a production in the halls of the Proletkult.  Its title recalled Ostrovsky's Enough Simplicity In Every Sage.

          It was as if Yesterday had come to an end, as if it had fallen from the edge of the world only to freeze as parody.  The Revolution had not yet appropriated Yesterday for the future or for the coming millenium.  The Revolution was like a flash in the chronicler's camera:  The world had been crushed to smithereens.  Eisenstein may have been a great artist, but he too saw the old world in its fragmented state.

          Eisenstein saw the world as a fly or bee sees it, i.e. with its thousand eyes.

          The world then seemed to many artists like Fellini's world today: it was a newsreel that frothed like spilled milk gleaming with millions of eye-bubbles from the saucepan.

          Everything in Fellini is fragmented and annihilated.  Even the ocean can only spit up an immense incline with a sick, blind eye.

          Yet, Eisenstein's world was a cheerful one, because Eisenstein was a revolutionary.  He rejoiced in the superiority of his day over Yesterday.  Fellini's world is, I admit, ingenious, but it is also asthmatic and sad.

          Ostrovsky's play was torn to pieces, set aflame and destroyed.  Splash water on a stove and you'll see drops of water rolling along the hot iron rod.  They are annihilated one by one like small compact balls.

          Happy confusion reigned on the stage.  Glizer climbed up a pole.  Why? I guess because she was acting out the expression "to kick against the pricks."  Then young Alexandrov walked the wire.  In addition, a certain General Zhoffre took part in the performance.  His name was announced in bold letters -- twice! -- on the actor's rear end, i.e. on his colored trousers.

          The fragmented world became whole again, as did the segmented drops -- all because the artist transcended his own laughter.

          The production included a short cinematic scene depicting the hero's flight through a residential house. ["Glumov's Diary," a fragment interpolated into Ostrovsky's play -- Trans.]

These were Eisenstein's first movie frames.

In those days we were free from career and money worries.  The Revolution swept us along like a storm that swells a sail.  And our vessel shook and trembled.

          We grew up very fast then, dumping the Old, dumping it notoriously, nervously.  We really overdid it.  We dismissed the past like a woman we still love.  We cursed and we laughed as we ran away, afraid to return.  For a while, at least, the halls of the Proletcult rang with gaiety.  Everything was collapsing before our eyes only to turn into laughter.

          It was through laughter that these artists were throwing off their

passion for the past.

 

potemkin -- sister to aurora

 

          Eisenstein described his first picture in the following words:

                  

          Strike just released.  Preposterous.  Jarring.  Reckless.  Too abrupt.  Swarming with all sorts of premature forms that need time to grow before they can appear in a mature work.

 

          Not only was Strike jarring.  It was also clumsy and incoherent.

          We see a naturalistic May day outing alternating with an interrogation scene: a town on strike suddenly takes on a country air.  This is followed by outlandish scenes of hooligans living in barrels and of mounted police stationed on the upper floor of the workers' barracks.

          A deep pathos pervades Strike.  It does show talent, but it is poorly crafted.

          Battleship Potemkin took the world with great suddenness.  In it art seems to have overcome irony forever.

          Potemkin was, is and shall likely remain forever the greatest silent (and not only silent) film ever made.

          It was proposed that the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution be commemorated with a film.  Several directors were recruited for the task, resulting in two films:  Potemkin and Mother.  Mother was released sometime later but these two films are really two birds of a feather.

          The proposal called for filming the events of the year 1905.  The Party's directive was quite brief: Avoid a pessimistic ending.  The 1905 Revolution was to be shown as a harbinger of the October Revolution of 1917.

          Through the prism of the first revolution, the spectator, it was hoped, would perceive the reality, the contemporaneity, of the later revolution that was then hardly ten years old.

          To the best of my knowledge, Eisenstein and Tisse began shooting in Leningrad.  They filmed the strike of 1905, when the lamp-posts of Leningrad were blown out, when Nevsky Prospect was illuminated by projectors suspended from the tower of the Admiralty Building.  The avenue was chopped up by the light into strips of fear.

          I heard all of this from others.

          Sergei Eisenstein, Edward Tisse and Grigory Aleksandrov took off for Odessa.  When they arrived, they inspected the port, the convex pivot of the pier, the wide open sea, the seagulls and the overpasses within the city.

          All they had to do was shoot one scene for Potemkin.

          As they tackled their task, the truth came more and more into focus.

          Pushkin said:

 

                             Only vaguely did I discern

                             The vista of my formless novel

                             Through the crystal magic.

                                                         

                                                Yevgenyi Onegin, Part VIII, Stanza 50

 

          Many an observer has commented on the magic crystal ball consulted by the clairvoyants of the time and on this brief allusion to an image familiar to Pushkin's contemporaries.  They were apparently not talking about the magic growth of a real crystal ball.

          The novel and the screenplay come into being in order that the reader may come to know them.  We pack them with leitmotifs.  We juxtapose inventions of our mind.  As their meaning becomes clear, they coalesce into a crystal ball of knowledge. 

          Potemkin is a fine, intelligent film that tells how an ordinary, hard-working, carefree, frivolous city came to love the revolutionary battleship S.S. Potemkin and how this love was branded on its soul by the human destinies crushed on the bloody Odessa steps.

          Is it really possible that this could be misunderstood?  The flight of stairs, leading down to the sea, had already felt the grinding of people's shoes on its landings and steps.  Now people clambered up these same stairs to wave to the S.S. Potemkin.  They all met with a harsh fate.  Each struggled in vain.  Each died in his or her particular way.

          The destiny of Vakulinchuk the sailor, the murdered officers and of the Revolution itself became linked with the destiny of Odessa.  The city took the tragedy to its bosom and became its  guardian.

          Here there are no actors, only the destinies of men and women.

          In Potemkin the plot is the structure.  Far from being a parody, its concepts are subordinated to a logic founded on pathos.  These concepts are unprecedented in the history of art.

          I remember when the movie was screened.  The rumors about it had been unfavorable.  One of the directors, whose name -- out of courtesy -- I shall pass over in silence, had already seen the picture.  Considering it a failure, he sought to explain it all away with the words: "Not bad for an amateur!"

          We put aside our preconceptions when we sat down to watch Potemkin.  We watched without great expectations but at the same time with our customary appreciation for Eisenstein's intelligence.

          All of a sudden, the first waves swept over the screen.  Then the morning burst in with seagulls.  Some people contended that seagulls don't fly as a rule in the morning, that they spend the early hours among the reeds and rushes or in their rookeries or then again asleep on the waves.

          Here, however, the seagulls represent a poetic concept.  True, this poetic concept may encompass the fact that seagulls feed on fish or that if you toss them a piece of bread, they'll catch it in the air.  Nonetheless, the seagulls of screen or literature are different from the seagulls of nature.  Their flight is utterly different.  They carry a whole new cargo on their realistic wings.

          Edward Tisse filmed the seagulls coming out of a fog and then reinterpreted the scene as daybreak.

          The film proceeds with shots of people grieving over the body of the murdered sailor.  They sail up to the battleship only to face death head-on.

          A new kind of motion picture was born.

          The shooting had to be completed on schedule.  To save money, filmmakers in those days shot very sparingly.  Still, they never held back when inspired.

          After rising up in arms in 1905, after sweeping past the Imperial fleet, its red flag fluttering above its masts, the S.S. Potemkin found itself trapped within the confines of the Black Sea.  It then headed for Rumania, whence the sailors dispersed all over the world.  Those who returned to Russia were sentenced to years of hard labor or were executed.  The battleship itself, now disgraced, was at first renamed and then destroyed outright.  Not a single piece of the battleship has ever, it seems, been recovered. 

          The S.S. Potemkin had a twin sister by the name of the S.S. Twelve Apostles.  This old battleship had been withdrawn from active service long before.  She had been lying in anchor in a distant cove,  where she was used as a storage ship for mines.  Since it would have taken too long to unload the mines, it was decided to make the movie with the mines on board.  The ghost of the S.S. Twelve Apostles lay chained to a rocky shore in one of the most remote coves of Sevastopol Bay.  It was fastened to a sandy bottom by heavy anchors.

          The battleship had to be shot at sea, yet it lay chained in perpetuity to the sandy bottom.  It was Pomerzh Lesha Kryukov, Eisenstein recounts, who figured out a way out of this dilemma, too.

         

          “When its powerful hulk is turned around ninety degrees, the battleship assumes a perpendicular position vis-a-vis the shore.  In this way, the ship's bow lines up precisely against the cleft in the surrounding crags.  It is thus silhouetted against the pure blue of the sky.”

 

          The battleship seems to be sailing in the open sea.

          Some scenes, however, needed to be shot broadside.   To accomplish this feat, workmen set up a prop side of a ship in a small studio at the Film Factory on Bryansky Street, where today no one, not even an apprentice, would think of shooting.  To crown it all, men and women crawled along the floor while the sails which they carried on their backs drew alongside this new S.S. Potemkin.  These sailboats carried gifts to the battleship from the shore.

          Scenes on board the S.S. Potemkin were shot on the deck of the S.S. Twelve Apostles.  Meanwhile, underneath the decrepit, steel deck slumbered  mines.  We were constantly reminded of the presence of real danger.

          In addition, the battleship had to be shot from above.  A model was built and filmed in the pool of the Sandunovsky Bathhouses.  But on the screen you see the battleship S.S. Potemkin.

          This greatest of motion pictures, which launched the cinema as an art form, was shot under the most difficult conditions. 

          At the time of the shooting the city of Odessa was covered by fog.  As a result, the film crews operating in the city laid down their tools.  Eisenstein  and Tisse, however, got into a boat, sailed along the shoreline and started looking around.  Tisse, who had his movie camera with him, shot the thick fog and the city coverd by it.  He shot it all without knowing the precise role which the given fragment might play in the completed film.  The fog drifted on slowly.

 

          “The fog, like patches of lint, is pierced here and there by rays of sunshine.  These rare shafts of light lend a golden pink to the fog, a burning tint that makes it look warm and vivid."

 

          Eisenstein, Tisse and Aleksandrov sailed their boat into the fog as if they were drifting into a mist of blooming golden apples.

          The film called for Odessa to show its grief at the unexpected arrival of the sailor's body.  When the words "The dead man is appealing to you!" (written by Sergei Tretyakov) appear on the screen, -- Eisenstein needed a "tailpiece", whose pathos would express the sailors' plaint.  The fog serves as a kind of "overture" that links (and separates) the tragedy of the battleship with the tragedy of the city.

          Thus did Eisenstein construct his film from visual elements integrated into a new kind of dramaturgy.   The documentary became drama.

          As Vakulinchik's death takes on new meaning for Odessa, the battleship responds by raising the red banner.  The insurrection has turned into revolution.

          The city of Odessa takes up the S.S. Potemkin's call.  Innocent men and women, cityfolk with children, climb up the Odessa steps to welcome the revolution.  This was the most successful crowd-scene in the history of world cinema.  Not only did Eisenstein know how to assemble this crowd.  He knew how to scrutinize each and every one of its members.

          He rode the crest of his time, was at home in the world of painting and harnessed world culture to the spirit of the Revolution.  He was a true lyricist who loved mankind.

          The Odessa steps do not descend directly to the sea.  They are intersected by landings at certain intervals.

          A detachment of soldiers, marching in step and in obedience to orders from above, shows up at the top of the stairs shooting.  Their guns spray innocent men and women standing below.

          What follows is an analytic depiction of death.  A mother pushing a carriage with a baby perishes in the gunfire.  The carriage itself rolls down the stairs.  Charging forward, then slowing down, it hurtles on towards death.

          If you want to make an act of human cruelty, i.e. wanton cruelty, intelligible, it is not enough to show millions of dead victims on the screen.  You need to spotlight those who are to be pitied, so that this pity could then turn into outrage.

          Eisenstein captured the horror of this massacre by filming the baby carriage as it falls down the stairs to be smashed against the stone below.  Bystanders -- amongst whom is a woman teacher in crushed pince-nez -- she was no doubt reading Korolenko -- are trying to stop the shooting.  The teacher meanwhile attempts to explain the outrageousness of it all to those near her.  Then she too perishes.

          The S.S. Potemkin responds to this senseless act of cruelty on the part of the authorities by opening fire on the city.

          How do you show this?  Revenge may be indispensable, but how do you isolate the guilty from among all these houses?  Where is the military  governor's palace?  Where are the soldiers' barracks?  Where is the home of the officer who ordered the massacre?

          Somewhere in the Crimea there is a staircase that goes down from the Alupkinsky Palace to the sea.  On it sit several pairs of marble lions that betray a conscientious, though rather mechanical, manner of execution.  The lions assume different poses: some are thoroughly tame, others look agitated, while still others are getting up with a roar.

          Though made of marble, Eisenstein arranged these lions in such a way that they seem to be leaping up and growling in indignation.  That's how he released the tension that had been building up during the scene.    The massacre on the Odessa steps did in fact take place.  However, in Eisenstein's hands this scene represents something more than a single, isolated crime by the Tsar.  Eisenstein writes:

 

          “The scene on the Odessa steps fuses the events of the Bakinsky slaughter and of Bloody Sunday (January 9, 1905) when the impulses of the credulous people, assembled to rejoice in the freedom in the vernal air, were mercilessly crushed by the boots of Reaction.  It was also at this time that an unruly mob of Black Hundred pogromers [sic] set the Tomsky Theater, where a meeting had been slated, brutally afire.”

 

          The marble lions, roused by the shots of the Revolution, did not so much symbolize as appeal to our revolutionary consciousness.  It was as if the spectator himself had risen up in indignation from his seat.

          The denouement of this motion picture comes when the S.S. Potemkin successfully evades a squadron of the Imperial Navy.

          The squadron sailors hail their mutinous battleship with shouts of joy.  This is an apotheosis, but it also speaks of the bitterness of a failed revolution -- a peasant revolution -- before a clear-cut organization was in place and before the general mood for revolution could be channeled into victory.

          In Eisenstein's film information and current events are transformed into a work of art with its own extraordinarily rigorous laws.   

          Potemkin is as calculated in its effects as a great epic poem.

          It is often thought that "montage" refers to and is of interest only to the director.  However, thanks to its montage, the silent Potemkin becomes almost audible.

          In this film the object is first shown by chance, then it is presented as a fragment of some duration.  Only after the fragment has come to be known by the viewer does it play a serious role in the film's action.

          All of this is common practice nowadays in the cinema of the world.

          The more cinematography progresses, the more its successes recall the success of Potemkin.  Incidents and intrigue, exploited by world drama for millennia, may admittedly be necessary in a work of art.  But this is not always so.  A plot may be constructed in which relationships, in the traditional sense, are lacking.  Instead, new relationships may emerge representing a new artistic ideology and logic.

          In Potemkin we witness a stunning fusion of the semantic and graphic in movie-making.  Besides, nowhere does the work seem to involve any sequences put together from static fragments.  The film advances with unexpectedly smooth "collisions."

          I remember the movie theater on Arbat Square.  Potemkin had already been privately screened at the Bolshoi Theater.  Now the time had come for the full-scale public premiere.

          The entire film crew -- except for Eisenstein -- donned sailors' uniforms.  With flags flying everywhere, the sea seemed to have made its way into the theater.

          We watched as the waves rose from the sea.  We watched life splashing on the screen.  We saw slices of life.  It was a poetic cinema, the thoughts of a director who juxtaposes enormous chunks of life.

          I remember Sergei Eisenstein as he stood outside the movie theater on Arbat Square.  He was hatless as the wind blew through his thin hair.  He was young, with a happy smile on his face.  Tisse was standing next to him.  I believe this vignette was preserved on the newsreels.  Someone had taken it down.

          If memory serves me right, Eisenstein was living at the time in a modest room on Chistiye Pruda.  After seeing the picture, the governing board of his apartment complex assigned him two rooms on its premises of its own free will.

          Sergei showed me his two rooms.  I saw colorful straw blinds hanging from the windows.  He demonstrated to me how the proportions of the room could be altered by raising or lowering the blinds.

          Eisenstein's fame spread everywhere.  He was called to Berlin, and the movie began its journey around the globe.

          The cinema was changing.  Directors who had earlier settled for just movies were now dreaming of expressing themselves and their times on the screen.

          Men and women were walking proud and tall, as if they had made this picture together.

          I'm speaking of us, the cinematographers.

          Potemkin owed its appearance to the following: Intrigue, the offspring of Roman comedy, had become defunct, an event which then continued evolving for thousands of years.  The flower metamorphosed into a fruit with seeds.

          A new plot emerged which distributed the "moments" differently.  The absence of traditional relationships was not perceived as an absence of artistic logic. 

          Eisenstein's achievement was very great.  In addition, he prepared the way for great achievements by others.

          He found it impossible for a long time to create a new planned plot structure.  The stunning semantic and graphic structures of the frame often made his films sequences of static fragment clusters that moved by jolts. 

          It was as if cinema were quoting painting and the graphic arts.

          Eisenstein loved these quotations.  Of course, he also feared chains of quotations that resembled the cars of a train.  His quotations were different: They were ironic as, for example, in The General Line (Old and New), where the tribal bull is shown copulating next to the wedding site,  and where the bull's death is counterpointed by little aerial balls soaring to the sky.  There are inscriptions on these balls that speak of irony and pathos.

          He was right because that's how he saw it.  But he was also wrong because he himself was dissatisfied with his irony.

 

 

montage of attractions

 

          From the heights of his towering forehead Eisenstein had seen everything there was to see.  Lyrical in a restrained sort of way, he had a flair for relating everything compositionally.  Eisenstein was, at first, a man in a hurry.

          I've already spoken above of the water drops which turn into little corpuscles on a red-hot burner.  Eisenstein called them "attraction."  Every attraction has its emotion and its theme.  However, when part of a montage, they look like ballerinas in an abstract ballet.

          Very early in his career Eisenstein began making use of the concept of "montage of attractions."

          What is an "attraction"?

          In a variety show and in the circus an attraction stands for a specific trick entailing a specific solution, that is, a specific [theatrical] effect.  For example: a man lifting a heavy weight or tossing on a trampoline.

          An attraction may develop as a series of leaps or as a series of weight-liftings.  Nonetheless, it produces a unified impression on the spectator.  While associated, as it were, with the viewer's feeling, an attraction is also separated from the attractions contiguous to it.

          An attraction is an item on the program which can also be rearranged for the convenience of a public performance.

          Eisenstein endowed this term with a new significance.  An attraction, according to him, is a short, self-expressive, visually affecting structure that has a physiological impact on the spectator.  Its content, known in the old poetics by the term "plot," was conveyed in the past by the interrelationship of episodes.

          Attractions do not correspond to words.  They are concepts, primordial concepts, linked with sensations as if inseparable from them.  They are not a signal for emotion but the emotion itself.

          Eisenstein introduced the concept of fragmentariness, of documentariness, into the phrase "montage of attractions."  In this respect he followed mistakenly in the footsteps of many.  Still, he saw a lot farther than they ever did.

          I think I was right to assert in my Literature and Cinematography  (1923) that plot is nothing more than an imaginary union of effects, a thread weaving the individual attractions together like beads on a string. Corpuscles of primordial sensations -- that was the main thing.  Or so we thought.  We considered a word, first and foremost, as a "self-woven, self-purposeful entity," rather than as bearer of a concept in its relation to other words.

          But a word exists and changes in its relationship with contiguous words.  A word can no more be taken in isolation than color can.  I had better clarify my meaning.

          A human being thinks not with sensations but with concepts, with concepts invented by him and singled out from the surrounding world.  These concepts persist even when we turn away from the world, when the world ceases to impose its contours on us in the form of concepts.  The ability to analyze or to integrate, to see things large and things small, to measure out concepts in space -- which becomes a concept too when it is experienced as thought -- this ability is a great attribute, an achievement of the human brain.

          During the thirties many artists were carried away by detail.  In the theater the play had become a kind of pretext for the creation of stage situations, while in poetry a line or a couplet or a stressed word singled out by rhyme held dominance over the general plot structure.

          Sometimes the plot structure would be repeated.  For example, Mayakovsky repeated the following sequence of events a number ot times:  A man is born, dies, is resurrected and returns to a changed world.

          This is the schema for  A Cloud in Pants, Mystery-Bouffe, Man, War and the World and About That.

          The individual fragments are remarkably diverse and accomplished, while the plot structure is conventionally lyrical.

          That's how it appears at first.  However, in poetry the juxtapositions of the parts are very complex and anticipated by the whole history of art.  The juxtaposition of high and low (of which we shall speak later) along with artistic irony (understood in a lofty sense) transform the individual semantic utterances.

          The cinema was young then.  It had just discovered multiple levels of structure, not to mention the capacity to arbitrarily change the very scale of our conceptual apparatus.   The ability to isolate the principal element from the general, to bring out the principal element if only by means of close-ups and to lay the foundation for visual associations played an even greater role in cinema than tropes did in poetry.       

          The concept of "attraction" emerged spontaneously, it seems, from the concept of a close-up.  Very often this concept was tinged with irony.  This was due to the choice of object to be shot.

          In speaking of "montage of attractions" I do not wish to imply that we are dealing here with nothing but a series of mistakes.  On the contrary, it represented an advance of enormous significance.  The word not only stands for an object.  It replaces this object in thought.

          Thought is verbal and poetry is the juxtaposition of words.  Yet, behind this juxtaposition stands life itself.  What a difficult achievement: Through mere appearance -- perception; through analysis -- the designating of an object -- getting at the essence of a thing -- the objective of art.  All of human history may be said to consist of changes in the meaning of words.

          The changes in poetic styles are called forth not by the vagaries of fashion nor by any desire to trade in wide trousers for narrow ones but by the fact that people want to see themselves and the world in which they live.

          Literature is not only one way of organzing words, one particular mode of verbal realization.  It is also an arena in which man wrestles with words in the name of the sensuousness of the world.  The philosophical practice of reflecting the world hierarchically is often ignored.

          In his Philosophical Notebooks Lenin summarized Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophic formulations:

 

“The existential and the conceptual are distinguished in Hegel more or less as follows: a fact (existence) taken in isolation, torn out of its context and, on the other hand, the context itself, the relationship (the concept), the correlation, the linkage, the law, necessity.”

 

          It should not be assumed that in having a notion we have thereby gained possession of the thing itself.

          We think in words.  They in turn express essentially only the general.

          Lenin put it this way:

 

“Details about the following: Language expresses in essence only the general, while thought is always individual and particular.  This is why thoughts can never be expressed in language.”

 

          Here Lenin has appended the note: "Language deals only with the general."

          In this conflict between the laws of language and the world of phenomena many an attempt has been made to define the process by which we take possession of the concrete.  Moreover, the attempt has also been made to prove that the concrete cannot for the most part be known.

          Mr. Verli, in his General Introduction to Literary Criticism (Moscow, 1957) propounds the following commonly-held but erroneous idea (taken up by many since):

 

“As early as the time of Herder it has been well known that each word represents in essence an artistic concept, and that poetry represents a unique way of playing on a totally predetermined keyboard of grammatical systems.”

 

          Many have never advanced beyond such exercises.

          The montage of attractions sought to expand and, indeed, replace the keyboard, to introduce new sounds into the world, in short, to bring art closer to the particular without losing the general.

          A new keyboard was introduced.  The montage of attractions attempted to replace the laws governing the succession of frames with a direct collision of attractions.

          These collisions were selected on the basis of their artistic-affective expressiveness.

          The keys between the attractions were left out.  The path leading to the the object as essence was thereby lost.

          The conventionality of language was augmented by the conventionality of montage.

          Eisenstein wanted none of this.  His thinking was as follows:

Man needs facts in order to see the material out of which the world was made.  With the help of the word, man has turned his back on instinct, on direct contact with the world.  In conquering words, music, cinema and art, he shall return to a sensuous apprehension of a coherent world.  The parts of this world must never be arbitrarily torn asunder again.

          An attraction, in Eisenstein's sense of the word, may be defined as an immediate, spontaneous emotion corresponding to qualitatively hetero-

geneous phenomena.  This is the world as if liberated from the word, silent yet producing words anew.

          The world which Eisenstein longed to express announced its presence only in a manner calculated to astonish or shock.  When, however, he had to talk about the more ordinary things of this world, he fell silent.

          Furthermore, it became necessary to isolate, to find a cinematic equivalent for the word.  Eisenstein believed that he had found such an equivalent in the semantic completeness of the frame.  He therefore ascribed great significance to the close-up.

          In Eisenstein a close-up is not just a detail singled out by the camera that closes in on it.  It is at the same time an artistically isolated, seman-tic principal detail.

          We witness here not only a conscious appreciation for the technique of the cinema but also a transformation of this technique.

 

          Technically speaking, the close-up was born in American cinema.  Only, in American film practice, it was really more of a "close-up" than a "power-up" [“krupnyi plan” in Russian means “close-up”. The word "krupny" normally means "powerful" or "big."- Trans.] The camera simply closed in on an object.  The term "close-up" had a purely technical meaning.

 In Soviet cinematography, on the other hand, a close-up does not designate merely a closing-in on the subject.  It stands for the juxtaposition of objects or subjects that have been directly isolated. Here "close-up" has a relational meaning. Objects in juxtaposition or scenes set off against each other in a montage give rise to new semantically charged emotions which are once again subordinated to the artist's will.

          That's why a montage of attractions is a such dangerous business.  It could easily degenerate into a "revue" if involving a juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements.  The truth of an object cannot be unknown when it is not objects but the variety of their presentations that are juxtaposed.

          In the latter case a kind of burlesque takes over: a parody of change of dress.

          A revue featuring glass sequins, a female body masked in hundred-foot columns of naked legs -- there is no erotic sensation here.  On the contrary, only a massive loss of sensation.

          Let us speak of great men and women.  Let us record not what they failed to accomplished but what they actually did.  For who would reproach travellers for not having circumnavigated and mapped out the entire globe? In Eisenstein the "thing" holds dominance over a "relationship of things."

          Sergei Eisenstein had a number of passions.  He was strongly drawn to Zola, whom he considered a great writer.  Zola was a materialist.  He loved to enumerate objects.

          I would dare say that Zola does not juxtapose objects.  Instead, he seems to deliberately scorn their interrelationships.  In Zola we feel that we have landed in a great bazaar where the products of unliberated human labor are sold.

          "Ladies and Gentlemen! On your right you'll find fish, on your left there is lots of meat, and don't forget the cheese right around the corner!"

          The objects are arranged for the benefit of the consumer. 

          The French master has expanded the meaning of the beautiful and, thereby, the concept of what is suitable for artistic representation.

          On the other hand, he has littered his novels with objects.  He often failed to "edit" or juxtapose his material attractions.  Nor did he show man through the interrelationships of things. 

          An artist needs these relationships.  He would starve without them, much as a city dweller would perish without oxygen.  In searching for real rather than traditional relationships,  Zola became enamored of the laws of heredity and depicted them in his novels as fate hanging over humanity.  The genealogical tree and the genetic table allowed him to whip up a kind of unity in his novels by organizing their scenes into a system.  Zola didn't venture beyond this point.  It's as if he had succeeded only in creating a womb for the new art. 

the history of a certain majolica

 

          Eisenstein's world was spacious but insulated.  It took quite some time for the filmmaker to break out of this situation, to seek the wide-open vistas of the changing world.

          Meanwhile, the world around him was becoming infinitely richer and more various.  There was so much more for our senses to perceive, and this perception took the path of recognition rather than irony.

          When the Winter Palace was under assault, one of the soldiers cut out a tile from a majolica picture.  Nothing valuable -- neither the picture nor the gold nor the statue was lost in the shuffle.  The soldier simply took the tile as s souvenir, not knowing that this was part of the artifact.

          Years passed.  By this time the Winter Palace was crammed with things confiscated from the rich of every part of Russia.  Rooms sprang up in the palace devoted to china, to metalcraft and to furniture.

          On Sundays old women began frequenting the spic-and-span rooms of the former palace.  They would sit upright, their hands -- marked by bulging veins -- resting on their clean dresses.  They would look at the transparent cases housing the china, at the cunningly wrought armor, at the thoroughly washed panes of glass and at the Neva River.  The river flowed leisurely past the palace only to expire peacefully in the gulf after catching a glimpse of splendid Leningrad.

          Waves do not die.  They are transformed.  The snows of yesteryear also do not die.  They swirl in the hot sun and then stream across the wilderness towards the Neva.

          The women were resting quietly in the tall chairs  of their palace, as if they were on a leave of absence for an eternity.

          One of these women noticed a yellow square tile on a majolica panel.  She came back to the palace time and again.  Then, one day, she brought a majolica tile with her and presented it to the museum curator.  Her face beamed:

 

          “It's been lying around in our kitchen all this time.  Upside down!  It was used as a support for the iron.  Everybody forgot about it except for me.  Then, one day, I decided to turn it over to see what it looked like.  Yes, this is the tile that was removed from the palace at the time of the Revolution.”

 

          The Revolution immediately began planting the seeds of many forests, combining them, restoring past losses, coming up with new solutions by reinterpreting the old.

          There is nothing in the whole world as swift as our revolution.  It carries on its shoulders the whole sea of mankind.

          In their approach to art, the people of this Revolution created a new reality of such scope that irony became for it something both alien and superfluous.

irony and inspiration

 

          Pathos has not always succeeded in overcoming irony.

          Inspiration, by its very nature, can flow along a number of different channels.  These channels may either issue from or merge into one stream.

          Perhaps art lies in the land between two channels.

          Hegel spoke of the aesthetic significance of irony in art.  But then Hegel was engaged at the time in a polemic against Schlegel, and for the latter irony was the highest principle in art.

          Irony isn't always self-destructive.  It is rather close to the comic.  Not playing a fundamental role in art, irony runs parallel to the artist's new attitude to the object.

          Irony is associated with the new juxtaposition.  In "The Prophet" Pushkin rejects the prophet's world as it exists before the onset of his inspiration.  Yet, "The Prophet" is not an ironic poem.  The world becomes transparent for the poet.  He sees into the depths of the transparent sea, and the sound of the sprouting vine whispers in his ear.

          There is an irony in Eugene Onegin.  It is the irony of a poet who listens  to a different drummer, that is, who follows a path different from the one  his hero felt compelled to follow.

          Gogol spoke of the terrifying storm of inspiration.  But Gogol too is not ironic.  He overcomes his irony with a lofty pathos, a dream of the future.  In comparison with this dream today is nothing but a boring night stay at  an inn where horses are in short supply, where the only sound is that of the rain beating on the window outside.

          Irony does not have to affirm itself.  It need not be an end in itself, for its own sake.

          An artist who laughs up his sleeve cannot create a great work of art, that is, a work that moves us deeply.

          It's true that Dante treats the papacy ironically, but, on the other hand, he spares the lovers in the fires of hell from this same irony.

          Elements of irony pervade much of the work of early Soviet artists.  Even the violation of the proportions inhering among the elements of an artifact was an expression of irony.

october

 

          Eisenstein kept on making films.  Crowned by glory, he sailed under the Potemkin's red flag.  He saw himself as a conqueror and he was a conqueror.

          I shall not attempt to write his biography here -- I am not up to it.  Once Eisenstein was asked by his students to teach them "how to become an Eisenstein."  He refused to give an answer.  There is only one thing, I believe, that can be taught: Avoid repeating the ways of the past or, at the very least, its mistakes.

          October was overdone.  It dealt with the capture of the Winter Palace in 1917.  Yet, through a blunder of sorts, the Winter Palace itself and its objects became the heroes of this movie.  Statues, vessels, innumerable clocks, gods and goddesses of every description, statues on the roof, precious stones, objets d'art treated as parodies -- these were the protagonists of this motion picture.  The artifacts were symbolic of an alien culture which had not yet been completely subdued.

          Eisenstein continued down his earlier path, when in art there are no straight lines --  There are only the arches of bridges, stretching from one abutment to the next.

          Eisenstein wanted to film the raising of the Winter Palace drawbridge.  It was