In perspective: Sergei Eisenstein, film director 1898-1948 - page 2
Early development of film art
Although Eisenstein is widely credited as the 'father of montage' - a form of editing technique - he wasn't strictly the first director to cut film in order to construct scenes. Early film makers such as George Méliès and the Lumière brothers had lifted existing theatrical methods for the screen wholesale, with little or no adaptation to the new medium. A stationary camera, the equivalent of a static audience, was placed at a fixed distance from the actors, where it passively recorded the basic mise-en-scène (literally, 'putting into the scene',20 the composition of all the elements within the individual frame). Scenes were shot in their entirety with no zooming or tracking of camera and no close ups of the actors, rendering them completely self contained in time and space.
One of Thomas Edison's cameramen, Edwin S Porter, then revolutionised film narrative by constructing a story film, The Life Of An American Fireman, from previously shot material in 1902. By cutting from one scene of incomplete action to another - from the firemen arriving at an actual burning building to the studio scene of the mother and child trapped inside - Porter was able to create the illusion of continuous story development. 'It implied that the meaning of a shot was not necessarily self-contained but could be modified by joining the shot to others'.21 Eisenstein insisted that the shot was the basic unit of montage and not, as director Lev Kuleshov had insisted, merely an element of it. Because these units were small and manageable, directors were freed from the tyranny of theatricality.
However, Porter still filmed everything in long shot, maintaining a constant distance from the object. The American director D W Griffith, considered by Eisenstein to be (despite his politics) the first great storyteller in film, took Porter's parallel montage technique and introduced different camera lengths, giving us the close up and the extreme long shot. Instead of Porter's objective distancing from the action, Griffith pulled the spectator into the scene through the subjective close up and different viewpoints, controlling what the spectator saw and manipulating their emotional and intellectual response. In his seminal films, Intolerance and The Birth Of A Nation (1915), Griffith not only utilised close ups for emotional emphasis, he also used flashbacks and dissolves, maximising tension and excitement by increasing the pace of cutting towards the climax. Eisenstein traced the origins of montage back to literature. Parallel montage - cutting away to simultaneous action - can be summed up simply by the literary device, 'Meanwhile, back at the ranch...' As for the close up, Eisenstein cites Dickens, who opened The Cricket On The Hearth with a Griffith-esque close up: 'The kettle began it...'22
Lillian Gish in The Birth Of A Nation, D.W. Griffith (1915)
However, Eisenstein's appreciation of Griffith was not uncritical. Eisenstein took him to task for political and ideological reasons. The notorious racist depiction of the blacks and the heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth Of A Nation made Griffith 'an open apologist for racism'.23 Neither did Griffith's support for the Dry Law (alcohol prohibition) in The Struggle or 'the metaphysical philosophy of the eternal origins of Good and Evil'24 in Intolerance go down well. Eisenstein detected:
...the inseparable link between the cinema and the industrial development of America. We know how production, art and literature reflect the capitalist breadth and construction of the United States of America. And we also know that American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema.25
The Birth Of A Nation, D.W. Griffith (1915)
Meanwhile, back in Russia, the young revolutionary directors - including V I Pudovkin, Lev Kuleshov and Eisenstein - studied the old masters and then resolved to step up the director's degree of control over his material:
They planned, by means of new editing methods, not only to tell stories but to interpret and draw intellectual conclusions from them...[they] saw themselves as propagandists and teachers rather than as conventional entertainers. As such, their task was twofold: to use the film medium as a means of instructing the masses in the history and theory of their political movement; and to train a young generation of film-makers to fulfil this task.26
Pudovkin rationalised Griffith's practical work and then developed his theoretical explanation further. The close ups of significant details that Griffith used to heighten the drama were, to Pudovkin, the very stuff of the film story. His contention, that each new shot must make a new and specific point rather than merely punctuating long shots of actors acting, was supported by Kuleshov whose experiments found that juxtaposition gave meaning to hitherto neutral shots. Depending on whether the same neutral close up of the actor Mosjukhin was joined with shots of a plate of soup, a shot of a dead woman in a coffin, or a child playing, the audience:
...raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.27
The Russians had discovered that emotions and ideas could be stimulated simply through the juxtaposition of pieces of film. Pudovkin wrote that 'Kuleshov maintained that the material in filmwork consists of pieces of film, and that the composition method is their joining together in a particular, creatively discovered order'.28
Eisenstein took the process a crucial stage further so that conventional narrative was all but abandoned, and individual characters and their motivation left undeveloped. He wanted to lead 'towards a purely intellectual film, freed from traditional limitations, achieving direct forms for ideas, systems and concepts, without any need for transitions and paraphrases'.29 But whereas Pudovkin argued that the most effective scene is made through linkage - smoothly linking a series of selected details from the scene's action - Eisenstein insisted that film continuity should progress through collision - a series of shocks arising out of conflict between spliced shots: '...the juxtaposition of two shots by splicing them together resembles not so much the simple sum of one shot plus another - as it does a creation'.30
In his essay, 'A Dialectic Approach to Film Form', Eisenstein sets out his stall with a quote from Goethe: 'In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it'.31 Eisenstein cites Marx and Engels, for whom the dialectical method was only the conscious reproduction of the dialectic of the external events of the world. He then explains that existence is in a state of constant evolution resulting from the interaction of two contradictory opposites. For Eisenstein, the basis of every art is this sort of dialectical conflict, 'an "imagist" transformation of the dialectical principle',32 dynamically yielding new concepts in the form of a constantly developing argument of opposites. 'In the realm of art this dialectic principle of dynamics is embodied in CONFLICT as the fundamental principle for the existence of every work and art form'.33
Eisenstein developed his cinematographic theory which he would put into practice in making his films. Not only should there be conflict between shots, there should also be conflict within the frame at every level: conflict of graphic directions (lines - either static or dynamic: eg calming horizons broken by energised verticals of trees or walls; the dead boy lying 90 degrees against the strong diagonals of the steps in The Battleship Potemkin Odessa Steps sequence), scales (large and small), volumes (eg the full sails of the Odessa flotilla greeting the Potemkin), masses (volumes filled with various intensities of light) and depths. Also necessary was conflict of close and long shots; conflict of tempo (activity within the frame); light conflict (pieces of darkness and pieces of lightness). And 'conflicts between an object and its dimension - and conflicts between an event and its duration',34 and so on. Eisenstein was building a cinematic art with a painter's eye and the method of an engineer. In him, music, literature, painting and science all converged.
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© 1998 Anna Chen