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]
"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
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
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
This wealthy,
polyglot city has its traditions. They
come from
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.
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
I first met
Eisenstein on what is now Kalinina but was formerly called
It was on
Tall, with an
elongated face, Tretyakov had rectilinear, schematic features. Yet, he was fiercely direct as a person. He wrote plays about
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.
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
I heard all of
this from others.
Sergei
Eisenstein, Edward Tisse and Grigory Aleksandrov took off for
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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
The city of
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
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
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
“The scene on the
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
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
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
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 (
“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.
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
Years
passed. By this time the
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
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
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:
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.
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.
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
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