Film Form

by Sergei Eisenstein

  The following may be observed as a criterion of the “pictorialism” of the montage-construction in the broadest sense: the conflict must be resolved within one or another category of montage, without allowing the conflict to be one of differing categories of montage.

  Real cinematography begins only with the collision of various cinematic modifications of movement and vibration. For example, the “pictorial” conflict of figure and horizon (whether this is a conflict in statics or dynamics is unimportant). Or the alternation of differently Ht pieces solely from the viewpoint of conflicting light-vibrations, or of a conflict between the form of an object and its illumination, etc.

  We must also define what characterizes the affect of the various forms of montage on the psycho-physiological complex of the person on the perceiving end.

  The first, metric category is characterized by a rude motive force. It is capable of impelling the spectator to reproduce the perceived action, outwardly. For example, the mowing contest in Old and New is cut in this way. The different pieces are “synonymous”—containing a single mowing movement from one side of the frame to the other; and I laughed when I saw the more impressionable members of the audience quietly rocking from side to side at an increasing rate of speed as the pieces were accelerated by shortening. The effect was the same as that of a percussion and brass band playing a simple march tune.

  I have designated the second category as rhythmic. It might also be called primitive-emotive. Here the movement is more subtly calculated, for though emotion is also a result of movement, it is movement that is not merely primitive external change.

  The third category—tonal—might also be called melodic-emotive. Here movement, already ceasing to be simple change in the second case, passes over distinctly into an emotive vibration of a still higher order.

  The fourth category—a fresh flood of pure physiologism, as it were—echoes, in the highest degree of intensity, the first category, again acquiring a degree of intensification by direct motive force.

  In music this is explained by the fact that, from the moment that overtones can be heard parallel with the basic sound, there also can be sensed vibrations, oscillations that cease to impress as tones, but rather as purely physical displacements of the perceived impression. This particularly refers to strongly pronounced timbre instruments with a great preponderance of the overtone principle. The sensation of physical displacement is sometimes also literally achieved: chimes, organ, very large Turkish drums, etc.

  In some sequences Old and New succeeds in effecting junctions of the tonal and overtonal lines. Sometimes they even collide with the metric and rhythmic lines, as well. As in the various “tangles” of the religious procession: those who fall on their knees beneath the ikons, the candles that melt, the gasps of ecstasy, etc.

  It is interesting to note that, in selecting the pieces for the montage of this sequence, we unconsciously furnished ourselves with proof of an essential equality between rhythm and tone, establishing this gradational unity much as I had previously established a gradational unity between the concepts of shot and montage.

  Thus, tone is a level of rhythm.

  For the benefit of those who are alarmed by such reductions to a common denominator, and the extension of the properties of one level into another for purposes of investigation and methodology, I recall Lenin’s synopsis of the fundamental elements of Hegelian dialectics:

  These elements may be presented in a more detailed way thus:. . .

  10) an endless process of revealing new aspects, relationships, etc.

  11) an endless process of deepening human perception of things, appearances, processes and so on, from appearance to essence and from the less profound to the more profound essence.

  12) from co-existence to causality and from one form of connection and interdependence to another, deeper, more general.

  13) recurrence, on the highest level, of known traits, attributes, etc. of the lowest, and

  14) return, so to say, to the old (negation of the negation) . . .2

  After this quotation, I wish to define the following category of montage—a still higher category:

  Intellectual montage is montage not of generally physiological overtonal sounds, but of sounds and overtones of an intellectual sort: i.e., conflict-juxtaposition of accompanying intellectual affects.

  The gradational quality is here determined by the fact that there is no difference in principle between the motion of a man rocking under the influence of elementary metric montage (see above) and the intellectual process within it, for the intellectual process is the same agitation, but in the dominion of the higher nerve-centers.

  And if, in the cited instance, under the influence of “jazz montage,” one’s hands and knees rhythmically tremble, in the second case such a trembling, under the influence of a different degree of intellectual appeal, occurs in identically the same way through the tissues of the higher nerve systems of the thought apparatus.

  Though, judged as “phenomena” (appearances), they seem in fact different, yet from the point of view of “essence” (process), they are undoubtedly identical.

  Applying the experience of work along lower lines to categories of a higher order, this affords the possibility of carrying the attack into the very heart of things and phenomena. Thus, the fifth category is the intellectual overtone.

  An example of this can be found in the sequence of the “gods” in October, where all the conditions for their comparison are made dependent on an exclusively class-intellectual sound of each piece in its relation to God. I say class, for though the emotional principle is universally human, the intellectual principle is profoundly tinged by class. These pieces were assembled in accordance with a descending intellectual scale—pulling back the concept of God to its origins, forcing the spectator to perceive this “progress” intellectually.*

  But this, of course, is not yet the intellectual cinema, which I have been announcing for some years! The intellectual cinema will be that which resolves the conflict-juxtaposition of the physiological and intellectual overtones. Building a completely new form of cinematography—the realization of revolution in the general history of culture; building a synthesis of science, art, and class militancy.

  In my opinion, the question of the overtone is of vast significance for our film future. All the more attentively should we study its methodology and conduct investigation into it.

  Moscow—London, Autumn 1929

  A Course In Treatment

  Stephen. (Looks behind.) So that gesture, not music, not odours, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm.

  JAMES JOYCE1

  DISCUSSIONS ON “amusement” vs. “entertainment” irritate me. Having spent no small number of man-hours in the matter of the “enthusiasm” and “involvement” of the audience in a united and general impulse of absorption, the word “amusement” sounds opposed, alien and inimical to me. Whenever it is said that a film must “entertain,” I hear a voice: “Help yourself.”

  When the worthy Ivan Ivanovich Pererepenko “treats you to snuff, he always first licks the lid of his snuff-box with his tongue, and then taps it with his finger, presenting it to you, and if you are an acquaintance, says: “Shall I dare, my dear sir, to ask you to help yourself?’ And if you aren’t acquainted with him, he says: “Shall I dare, my dear sir, although I have not the honor of knowing your rank, name and patronymic, to ask you to help yourself?’” But when Ivan Nikiforovich Dovgochkhun treats you to snuff, he “puts the snuff-box straight into your hand, and says only: “Help yourself.’”2

  I’m for Ivan Nikiforovich, with his direct “help yourself.”

  The film’s job is to make the audience “help itself,” not to “entertain” it. To grip, not to amuse. To furnish the audience with cartridges, not to dissipate the energies that it brought into the theater. “Entertainment” is not really an entirely innocuous term:
beneath it is a quite concrete, active process.

  But amusement and entertainment must be understood precisely as only a quantitative empowering of the inner thematic material itself, and not in any sense as a qualitative power.

  While we had films that “gripped,” we did not speak of entertainment. We had no time to be bored. But then this gripping was lost somewhere. The skill of constructing films that gripped was lost. And we began to talk of entertainment.

  It is impossible to realize this latter aim, without first mastering the former method.

  The slogan in favor of entertainment was regarded by many as countenancing a certain retrogressive element and, in the worst sense, as a perversion of understanding in relation to the ideological premises of our films.

  We must once more command a method, a directive guide to embody in stirring works of art. No one can help us in this. We must do it ourselves.

  It is on the subject of how to do this,—at least how to get ready to do it, that I wish to speak.

  To rehabilitate the ideological premise is not something to be introduced from without “at the pleasure of Repertkom,”* but must be thought of as a basic, vivifying, powerful process, fertilizing nothing less than the most thrilling element in the creative work of film direction—the director’s “treatment.” That is the task of the present essay.

  And there is a quite concrete occasion for this—namely, in connection with the formulation of pedagogical work in the third, or graduating, class of the directors’ course in the State Cinema Institute where, according to the teaching program, the students must now walk out into creative mastery of directorial work.

  The Talmudists of method—the academic high-Marxists—may berate me, but I wish to approach this theme and this teaching simply, as life—as work. For, actually, no one as yet knows concretely how to master this, whether screening oneself behind academic citations or not.

  For some time, for years, I worried about those certain supernatural powers, transcending common sense and human reason, that seemed indispensable for the comprehension of the “mysteries” of creative film direction.

  To dissect the music of creative film direction!

  To dissect, but not as a corpse (in Salieri’s manner*), the music of creative film direction—that was to be our work with the graduating students of the Institute.

  We approach this problem simply, and not from a preconceived position of scholastic methods. And it won’t be in the corpses of worn-out film works that we’ll examine the processes of producing our own works. The anatomical theater and dissection slab are the least suitable trying grounds for the study of the theater. And the study of cinema must proceed inseparably with the study of theater.

  To build cinematography, starting from “the idea of cinematography,” and from abstract principles, is barbarous and stupid. Only by a critical comparison with the more basic early forms of the spectacle is it possible to master critically the specific methodology of the cinema.

  Criticism must consist in comparing and contrasting a given fact, not with an idea, but with another fact; for this purpose it is only important that both facts, as far as possible, be carefully investigated, and that they both present, in relation to one another, different moments of development.3

  We shall study this matter in the living creative process. And it will be done by us in this way, primarily.

  We must build simultaneously a working process and a method. And we shall proceed not in the Plekhanov manner, from preconceived positions of “method in general” to the concrete particular case, but through given concrete work on particular materials we expect to arrive at a method of cinematographic creation for the director.

  For this purpose we must bring out into the open the “intimate” creative process of the director in all its phases and twistings, and stand it before the audience, “in full view.”

  Many surprises are in store for the youth who is filled with illusions.

  In one connection may I, for a moment, list to the side of “entertainment”? Let us cite one of the greatest of all “entertainers”—Alexandre Dumas père, for whom his son, Dumas fils, apologized: “My father is a great baby of mine—born when I was quite a little child.”4

  Who has not been enchanted by the classic harmony in the labyrinthine structure of The Count of Monte Cristo! Who has not been struck by the deadly logic that weaves and interweaves the characters and events of the novel, as if these interrelationships had existed from its very conception. Who has finally not imagined that ecstatic moment when suddenly in the brain of that “fat black” Dumas there flashed the future architecture of the novel in all its details and subtleties, with the title, Le Comte de Monte Cristo, blazing across the façade. And this vision has its usual echo, “Oh, how could I ever achieve that!” And how pleasantly bracing it is to recognize by tasting that cooking, how such a remarkable composition was really brought together and given body. How the fabrication of this book came with savage diligence—not in a divine flash.

  It is the work of a Negro, but toiling as hard as he would have under the whip of an overseer. Dumas was actually of Negro descent, and he was born in Haiti, as was Toussaint L’Ouverture, the hero of a film I want to make, The Black Consul.* The nickname of Dumas’s grandfather—General Thomas Alexandre—was the “Black Devil.” And Dumas himself was called “fat black” by his envious contemporaries and rivals. A certain humbly-named Jacquot, concealed behind the loftier sound of “Eugène de Mirecourt,” published an attack entitled Fabrique de Romans: Maison Alexandre Dumas et Cie, in which he linked the origins and methods of Dumas:

  Scratch M. Dumas’ hide and you will find the savage. . . . He lunches on potatoes taken burning hot from the ashes of the hearth and devours them without removing the skins—a Negro! [As he needs 200,000 francs a year,] he hires intellectual deserters and translators at wages that degrade them to the condition of Negroes working under the lash of a mulatto!5

  “Your father was black!” someone hurled in his face. “My grandfather was a monkey,” he replied. He seems to have been more sensitive to the “factory” charge.

  On one day only Dumas was truly grieved. Béranger, whom he really loved, wrote asking him to include an interesting exile “in the number of miners whom he employed to dig out the mineral which he transformed into sterling bullion”; and Dumas replied: “Dear old friend, My only miner is my left hand which holds the book open, while my right works twelve hours a day.”

  He was exaggerating. He had collaborators, “but as Napoleon had generals.”6

  It is difficult enough to find oneself working with such frenzy. But it is even more difficult to achieve anything adequate without this frenzy.

  Miracles of composition—this is merely a question of persistence and the expenditure of time during the “training period” of one’s autobiography.

  From a viewpoint of productivity this period of romanticism is distinguished for the dizzying speed of its creative tempi: In eight days (from September 17 to September 26, 1829) Victor Hugo wrote 3,000 lines of Hernani, which stood the classic theater on its head, Marion Delorme in 23 days, Le Roi s’Amuse in 20 days, Lucrèce Borgia in 11 days, Angelo in 19 days, Marie Tudor in 19 days, Ruy Bias in 34 days. This is echoed quantitatively, as well. The literary heritage of Dumas pere numbers 1,200 volumes.

  The same opportunity of creating such works is equally accessible to all.

  Let us examine The Count of Monte Cristo in particular. Lucas-Dubreton gives us the history of its composition:

  In the course of a Mediterranean cruise, Dumas had passed near a little island, where he had not been able to land because “it was en contumace.” It was the island of Monte-Cristo. The name struck him at the time. A few years later, in 1843, he arranged with an editor for the publication of a work to be called Impressions de Voyage dam Paris, but he needed a romantic plot. Then one day by good luck he read a story of twenty pages, Le Diamant et la Vengeance, which was laid in the period of the
second Restoration and was included in Peuchet’s volume, La Police Devoilée. It caught his fancy. Here was the subject of which he had dreamed: Monte-Cristo should discover his enemies hidden in Paris!

  Then Maquet had the idea of telling the story of the love-affair of Monte-Cristo and the fair Mercedes and the treachery of Danglars; and the two friends started off on a new track—Monte-Cristo, from being travel impressions in the form of a romance turned into romance pure and simple. The Abbé Faria, a lunatic born at Goa whom Chateaubriand saw vainly trying to kill a canary by hypnotizing it, helped to increase the mystery; and the Château d’If began to appear on the horizon. . . .7

  This is how things are really put together. And to re-experience this as it takes place, and to participate in it oneself, seems to me a most useful and productive process for a student.

  The “method-ists” who preach otherwise and approve other “recipes” are simply wasting our precious time. But “chance” here is far less important than it might appear, and the “regularity” within the creative process is perceived and detected. There is method. But the whole villainy lies in this, that from preconceived methodological positions, nothing grows. And a tempestuous stream of creative energy, unregulated by method, yields even less.

  Such analysis of the building of works of art, step by step, will clarify the most severe regularity, governing each support of the super-structure, with which they arise from basic social and ideological premises.

  And the gold fever of money-making and self-enrichment of the Louis-Philippe epoch is no less a determining factor for the gilded legend of the fabulous wealth of the former sailor who becomes an omnipotent count, no less determining than Dumas’s childhood memories of Scheherazade and the treasures of Ali Baba. And the very fact that a sailor could become a count, meant that “anyone” might.