This same principle—giving birth to concepts, to emotions, by juxtaposing two disparate events—led to:
IV. Liberation of the whole action from the definition of time and space. My first attempts at this were in October.
Example 1: a trench crowded with soldiers appears to be crushed by an enormous gun-base that comes down inexorably. As an anti-militarist symbol seen from the viewpoint of subject alone, the effect is achieved by an apparent bringing together of an independently existing trench and an overwhelming military product, just as physically independent.
Example 2: in the scene of Kornilov’s putsch, which puts an end to Kerensky’s Bonapartist dreams. Here one of Kornilov’s tanks climbs up and crushes a plaster-of-Paris Napoleon standing on Kerensky’s desk in the Winter Palace, a juxtaposition of purely symbolic significance.
This method has now been used by Dovzhenko in Arsenal to shape whole sequences, as well as by Esther Schub in her use of library footage in The Russia of Nikolai II and Lev Tolstoy.
I wish to offer another example of this method, to upset the traditional ways of handling plot—although it has not yet been put into practice.
In 1924–1925 I was mulling over the idea of a filmic portrait of actual man. At that time, there prevailed a tendency to show actual man in films only in long uncut dramatic scenes. It was believed that cutting (montage) would destroy the idea of actual man. Abram Room established something of a record in this respect when he used in The Death Ship uncut dramatic shots as long as 40 meters or 135 feet. I considered (and still do) such a concept to be utterly unfilmic.
Very well—what would be a linguistically accurate characterization of a man?
His raven-black hair . . .
The waves of his hair . . .
His eyes radiating azure beams . . .
His steely muscles . . .
Even in a less exaggerated description, any verbal account of a person is bound to find itself employing an assortment of waterfalls, lightning-rods, landscapes, birds, etc.
Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects? Language is much closer to film than painting is. For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents—as an element—the greatest difficulty in manipulation. So why not rather lean towards the system of language, which is forced to use the same mechanics in inventing words and word-complexes?
On the other hand, why is it that montage cannot be dispensed with in orthodox films?
The differentiation in montage-pieces lies in their lack of existence as single units. Each piece can evoke no more than a certain association. The accumulation of such associations can achieve the same effect as is provided for the spectator by purely physiological means in the plot of a realistically produced play.
For instance, murder on the stage has a purely physiological effect. Photographed in one montage-piece, it can function simply as information, as a sub-title. Emotional effect begins only with the reconstruction of the event in montage fragments, each of which will summon a certain association—the sum of which will be an all-embracing complex of emotional feeling. Traditionally:
A hand lifts a knife.
The eyes of the victim open suddenly.
His hands clutch the table.
The knife is jerked up.
The eyes blink involuntarily.
Blood gushes.
A mouth shrieks.
Something drips onto a shoe . . .
and similar film cliches. Nevertheless, in regard to the action as a whole, each fragment-piece is almost abstract. The more differentiated they are the more abstract they become, provoking no more than a certain association.
Quite logically the thought occurs: could not the same thing be accomplished more productively by not following the plot so slavishly, but by materializing the idea, the impression, of Murder through a free accumulation of associative matter? For the most important task is still to establish the idea of murder—the feeling of murder, as such. The plot is no more than a device without which one isn’t yet capable of telling something to the spectator! In any case, effort in this direction would certainly produce the most interesting variety of forms.
Someone should try, at least! Since this thought occurred to me, I have not had time to make this experiment. And today I am more concerned with quite different problems. But, returning to the main line of our syntax, something there may bring us closer to these tasks.
While, with I, II, and III, tension was calculated for purely physiological effect—from the purely optical to the emotional, we must mention here also the case of the same conflict-tension serving the ends of new concepts—of new attitudes, that is, of purely intellectual aims.
Example 1 (in October): Kerensky’s rise to power and dictatorship after the July uprising of 1917. A comic effect was gained by sub-titles indicating regular ascending ranks (“Dictator”—“Generalissimo”—“Minister of Navy—and of Army”— etc.) climbing higher and higher—cut into five or six shots of Kerensky, climbing the stairs of the Winter Palace, all with exactly the same pace. Here a conflict between the flummery of the ascending ranks and the “hero’s” trotting up the same unchanging flight of stairs yields an intellectual result: Kerensky’s essential nonentity is shown satirically. We have the counterpoint of a literally expressed conventional idea with the pictured action of a particular person who is unequal to his swiftly increasing duties. The incongruence of these two factors results in the spectator’s purely intellectual decision at the expense of this particular person. Intellectual dynamization.
Example 2 (in October): Kornilov’s march on Petrograd was under the banner of “In the Name of God and Country.” Here we attempted to reveal the religious significance of this episode in a rationalistic way. A number of religious images, from a magnificent Baroque Christ to an Eskimo idol, were cut together. The conflict in this case was between the concept and the symbolization of God. While idea and image appear to accord completely in the first statue shown, the two elements move further from each other with each successive image (see Figure 10). Maintaining the denotation of “God,” the images increasingly disagree with our concept of God, inevitably leading to individual conclusions about the true nature of all deities. In this case, too, a chain of images attempted to achieve a purely intellectual resolution, resulting from a conflict between a preconception and a gradual discrediting of it in purposeful steps.
Step by step, by a process of comparing each new image with the common denotation, power is accumulated behind a process that can be formally identified with that of logical deduction. The decision to release these ideas, as well as the method used, is already intellectually conceived.
The conventional descriptive form for film leads to the formal possibility of a kind of filmic reasoning. While the conventional film directs the emotions, this suggests an opportunity to encourage and direct the whole thought process, as well.
These two particular sequences of experiment were very much opposed by the majority of critics. Because they were understood as purely political. I would not attempt to deny that this form, is most suitable for the expression of ideologically pointed theses, but it is a pity that the critics completely overlooked the purely filmic potentialities of this approach.
In these two experiments we have taken the first embryonic step towards a totally new form of film expression. Towards a purely intellectual film, freed from traditional limitations, achieving direct forms for ideas, systems, and concepts, without any need for transitions and paraphrases. We may yet have a
synthesis of art and science.
This would be the proper name for our new epoch in the field of art. This would be the final justification for Lenin’s words, that “the cinema is the most import
ant of all the arts.”
Moscow, April 1929
The Filmic Fourth Dimension
EXACTLY a year ago, on August 19, 1928, before the montage of Old and New had been begun, I wrote, in connection with the visit to Moscow of the Kabuki theater:
In the Kabuki . . . a single monistic sensation of theatrical “provocation” takes place. The Japanese regards each theatrical element, not as an incommensurable unit among the various categories of affect (on the various sense-organs), but as a single unit of theatre. . . . Directing himself to the various organs of sensation, he builds his summation [of individual “pieces”] to a grand total provocation of the human brain, without taking any notice which of these several paths he is following.
My characterization of the Kabuki theater proved prophetic. This method became the basis for the montage of Old and New.
Orthodox montage is montage on the dominant. I.e., the combination of shots according to their dominating indications. Montage according to tempo. Montage according to the chief tendency within the frame. Montage according to the length (continuance) of the shots, and so on. This is montage according to the foreground.
The dominating indications of two shots side by side produces one or another conflicting interrelation, resulting in one or another expressive effect (I am speaking here of a purely montage effect).
This circumstance embraces all intensity levels of montage juxtaposition—all impulses:
From a complete opposition of the dominants, i.e., a sharply contrasting construction, to a scarcely noticeable “modulation” from shot to shot; all cases of conflict must therefore include cases of a complete absence of conflict.
As for the dominant itself, to regard it as something independent, absolute and invariably stable is out of the question. There are technical means of treating the shot so that its dominant may be made more or less specific, but in no case absolute.
The characteristics of the dominant are variable and profoundly relative. A revelation of its characteristics depends on that combination of shots which itself depends on the dominant!
A circle? An equation of two unknown quantities? A dog chasing its tail? No, this is simply an exact definition of a film law. A fact.
If we have even a sequence of montage pieces:
A gray old man,
A gray old woman,
A white horse,
A snow-covered roof,
we are still far from certain whether this sequence is working towards a dominating indication of “old age” or of “whiteness.”
Such a sequence of shots might proceed for some time before we finally discover that guiding-shot which immediately “christens” the whole sequence in one “direction” or another. That is why it is advisable to place this identifying shot as near as possible to the beginning of the sequence (in an “orthodox” construction). Sometimes it even becomes necessary to do this with—a sub-title.
These considerations completely exclude a non-dialectic statement of the question concerning the single-meaningness of a frame within itself. The film-frame can never be an inflexible letter of the alphabet, but must always remain a multiple-meaning ideogram. And it can be read only in juxtaposition, just as an ideogram acquires its specific significance, meaning, and even pronunciation (occasionally in diametric opposition to one another) only when combined with a separately indicated reading or tiny meaning—an indicator for the exact reading—placed alongside the basic hieroglyph.
In distinction from orthodox montage according to particular dominants, Old and New was edited differently. In place of an “aristocracy” of individualistic dominants we brought a method of “democratic” equality of rights for all provocations, or stimuli, regarding them as a summary, as a complex.
The point is that the dominant (with all these recognized limitations on its relativity) appears to be, although the most powerful, far from the only stimulus of the shot. For example: the sex appeal of a beautiful American heroine-star is attended by many stimuli: of texture—from the material of her gown; of light—from the balanced and emphatic lighting of her figure; of racial-national (positive for an American audience: “a native American type,” or negative: “colonizer-oppressor”—for a Negro or Chinese audience); of social-class, etc. (all brought together in an iron-bound unity of its reflex-physiological essence). In a word, the central stimulus (let it be, for instance, sexual as in our example) is attended always by a whole complex of secondary stimuli.
What takes place in acoustics, and particularly in the case of instrumental music, fully corresponds with this.
There, along with the vibration of a basic dominant tone, comes a whole series of similar vibrations, which are called overtones and undertones. Their impacts against each other, their impacts with the basic tone, and so on, envelop the basic tone in a whole host of secondary vibrations. If in acoustics these collateral vibrations become merely “disturbing” elements, these same vibrations in music—in composition, become one of the most significant means for affect by the experimental composers of our century, such as Debussy and Scriabin.
We find the same thing in optics, as well. All sorts of aberrations, distortions, and other defects, which can be remedied by systems of lenses, can also be taken into account compositionally, providing a whole series of definite compositional effects (employing lens-openings from 28 to 310).
In combinations which exploit these collateral vibrations— which is nothing less than the filmed material itself— we can achieve, completely analogous with music, the visual overtonal complex of the shot.
The montage of Old and New is constructed with this method. This montage is built, not on particular dominants, but takes as its guide the total stimulation through all stimuli. That is the original montage complex within the shot, arising from the collision and combination of the individual stimuli inherent in it.
These stimuli are heterogeneous as regards their “external natures,” but their reflex-physiological essence binds them together in an iron unity. Physiological in so far as they are “psychic” in perception, this is merely the physiological process of a higher nervous activity.
In this way, behind the general indication of the shot, the physiological summary of its vibrations as a whole, as a complex unity of the manifestations of all its stimuli, is present. This is the peculiar “feeling” of the shot, produced by the shot as a whole.
This makes the shot as a montage-piece comparable to the separate scenes within the Kabuki method. The basic indication of the shot can be taken as the final summary of its effect on the cortex of the brain as a whole, irrespective of the paths by which the accumulated stimuli have been brought together. Thus the quality of the totals can be placed side by side in any conflicting combination, thereby revealing entirely new possibilities of montage solutions.
As we have seen, in the power of the very genetics of these methods, they must be attended by an extraordinary physiological quality. As in that music which builds its works on a two-fold use of overtones. Not the classicism of Beethoven, but the physiological quality of Debussy and Scriabin.
The extraordinary physiological quality in the affect of Old and New has been remarked by many of its spectators. The explanation for this is that Old and New is the first film edited on the principle of the visual overtone. This method of montage can be interestingly verified.
If in the gleaming classical distances of the cinematography of the future, overtonal montage will certainly be used, simultaneously with montage according to the dominant indication, so as always at first—the new method will assert itself in a question sharpened in principle. Overtonal montage in its first steps has had to take a line in sharp opposition to the dominant.
There are many instances, it is true—and in Old and New, too—where “synthetic” combinations of tonal and overtonal montage may already be found. For example, in Old and New, the climax of the religious procession (to pray for relief from the drought), and the sequence of the grasshopper
and the mowing-machine, are edited visually according to sound associations, with an express development which exists already in their spatial “similarity.”
Of particular methodological interest, of course, are constructions that are wholly a-dominant. In these the dominant appears in the form of a purely physiological formulation of the task. For example, the montage of the beginning of the religious procession is according to “degrees of heat saturation” in the individual shots, or the beginning of the state-farm sequence is according to a line of “carnivorousness.” Conditions outside cinematographic discipline provide the most unexpected physiological indications among materials that are logically (both formally and naturally) absolutely neutral in their relations to each other.
There are innumerable cases of montage joinings in this film that make open mockery of orthodox, scholastic montage according to the dominant. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to examine the film on the cutting table. Only then can one see clearly the perfectly “impossible” montage joinings in which Old and New abounds. This will also demonstrate the extreme simplicity of its metrics, of its “dimensions.”
Entire large sections of certain sequences are made up of pieces perfectly uniform in length or of absolutely primitively repeated short pieces. The whole intricate, rhythmic, and sensual nuance scheme of the combined pieces is conducted almost exclusively according to a line of work on the “psycho-physiological” vibrations of each piece.
Film Form Page 7