Film Form

by Sergei Eisenstein

  However, before this inner “defeat,” he excites in the girl Roberta such a feeling of alarm that, when he leans toward her, already defeated inwardly and ready “to take everything back,” she recoils from him in horror. The boat, off-balance, rocks. When, in trying to support her, he accidentally knocks his camera against her face, she finally loses her head and in her terror stumbles, falls, and the boat overturns.

  For greater emphasis we show her rising to the surface again. We even show Clyde trying to swim to her. But the machinery of crime has been set in motion and continues to its end, even against Clyde’s will: Roberta cries out weakly, tries to retreat from him in her horror, and, not being able to swim, drowns.

  Being a good swimmer Clyde reaches the shore and, coming to his senses, continues to act in accordance with the fatal plan he had prepared for the crime—from which he had deviated only for a moment in the boat.

  The psychological and tragic deepening of the situation in this form is indubitable. Tragedy is heightened to an almost Grecian level of “blind Moira—fate” that, once conjured into existence, will not relax her hold on the one who summoned her. Heightened to a tragic, racking “causality” that, once it claims its rights, drives on to a logical conclusion whatever has been brought to life through the pitiless course of its processes.

  In this crushing of a human being by a “blind” cosmic principle, by the inertia of the progress of laws over which he has no control, we have one of the basic premises of antique tragedy. It mirrors the passive dependence of the man of that day on the forces of nature. It is analogous to what Engels, in connection with another period, wrote of Calvin:

  His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers. . . .10

  An ascent to the atavism of primitive cosmic conceptions, seen through an accidental situation of our day, is always a means of racking a dramatic scene to the heights of tragedy. But our treatment was not limited by this. It was pregnant with meaningful sharpnesses along the whole further course of the action.

  In Dreiser’s book, “for the sake of preserving the honor of the family,” Clyde’s rich uncle supplies him with the “apparatus” of defense.

  The defense lawyers have no essential doubt that a crime was committed. None the less, they invent a “change of heart” experienced by Clyde under the influence of his love and pity for Roberta. Simply invented on the spur of the moment, this is pretty good.

  But this is made far more evil when there really was such a change. When this change comes from quite different motives. When there really was no crime. When the lawyers are convinced that there was a crime. And with a downright lie, so near the truth and at the same time so far from it, they endeavor in this slanderous way to whitewash and save the accused.

  And it becomes still more dramatically evil when, in the adjacent moment, the “ideology” of your treatment disturbs the proportions and, in another place, the epic indifference of Dreiser’s narrative.

  Almost the whole of the second volume is filled with the trial of Clyde for the murder of Roberta and with the hunting down of Clyde to a conviction, to the electric chair.

  As part of the background of the trial it is indicated that the true aim of the trial and prosecution of Clyde, however, has no relation to him whatsoever. This aim is solely to create the necessary popularity among the farming population of the state (Roberta was a farmer’s daughter) for the prosecuting District Attorney Mason, so that he may win the necessary support for his nomination as judge.

  The defense take on a case which they know to be hopeless (“at best ten years in the penitentiary”) on the same plane of political struggle. Belonging to the opposite political camp, their primary aim is to exert their utmost strength in defeating the ambitious prosecutor. For one side, as for the other, Clyde is merely a means to an end.

  Already a toy in the hands of “blind” Moira, fate, “causality” á la greque, Clyde also becomes a toy in the hands of the far from blind machinery of bourgeois justice, machinery employed as an instrument of political intrigue.

  Thus is tragically expanded and generalized the fortunes of the particular case of Clyde Griffiths into a genuinely “American tragedy in general”—a characteristic story of a young American at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  The whole tangle of design within the trial itself was almost entirely eliminated in the script’s construction, and was replaced by the pre-election bidding, visible through the manipulated solemnity of the courtroom, being used as nothing more than a drill-ground for a political campaign.

  This fundamental treatment of the murder determines the tragic deepening and the strengthened ideological sharpness of yet another part of the film and another figure: the mother.

  Clyde’s mother runs a mission. Her religion is a purblind fanaticism. She is so convinced of her absurd dogma that her figure inspires one’s involuntary respect and grows almost monumental; one detects the glow of a martyr’s aureole.

  Even in spite of the fact that she is the first embodiment of the guilt of American society in relation to Clyde: her teachings and principles, her aim towards Heaven rather than training her son for work were the initial premises for the ensuing tragedy.

  Dreiser shows her fighting to the last for her son’s innocence, working as a trial-reporter for a newspaper in order to be near her son, touring America (like the mothers and sisters of the Scottsboro boys) with lectures, to collect enough money to appeal the verdict in Clyde’s case. She definitely acquires the self-sacrificial grandeur of a heroine. In Dreiser’s work this grandeur radiates sympathy for her moral and religious doctrines.

  In our treatment Clyde, in his death-cell, confesses to his mother (rather than to the Reverend McMillan, as in the novel) that, though he did not kill Roberta, he had planned to do so.

  His mother, for whom the word is the deed, and the thought of sin equivalent to its execution, is stunned by his confession. In a way exactly opposite to the grandeur of the mother in Gorky’s novel, this mother also becomes her son’s betrayer. When she goes to the Governor with a petition for her son’s life, she is startled by his direct question: “Do you yourself believe in your son’s innocence?” At this moment that is to decide the fate of her son—she is silent.

  The Christian sophism of an ideal unity (of deed and thought) and a material unity (de facto), a parody of dialectics, leads to the final tragic denouement.

  The petition is disregarded, and the dogma and dogmatism of its bearer are alike discredited. The mother’s fatal moment of silence cannot even be washed away by her tears when she takes leave forever of the son whom she has, with her own hands, delivered into the jaws of the Christian Baal. The more poignant these last scenes become in sadness, the more bitterly do they lash at the ideology that brought this sadness.

  In my opinion our treatment succeeded in ripping some of the masks—though not all—from the monumental figure of the mother.

  And Dreiser was the first to salute all that had been brought to his work by our treatment.

  In our treatment the tragedy within the framework of the novel was consummated far earlier than in these final scenes. This end—the cell—the electric chair—the brightly polished spittoon (which I saw myself at Sing-Sing) at his feet—all this is no more than an end to one particular embodiment of that tragedy which continues to be enacted every hour and every minute in the United States, far outside the covers of novels.

  The choice of such a “dry” and “hackneyed” formula of social treatment affords more than a sharpening of situations and a deepening revelation of images and characters.

  Such a treatment profoundly acts also upon purely formal methods. It was thanks particularly to this and out of this that was conclusively f
ormulated the concept of the “inner monologue” in cinema, an idea that I had carried in my mind for six years previously. Before the advent of sound made possible its practical realization.

  As we have seen, one needed an extraordinarily differentiated sharpness of exposition of what was taking place within Clyde before that moment of the boat’s “accident,” and we realized that to develop an outer presentation of this would not solve our problem.

  The whole arsenal of knitted brows, rolling eyes, hard breathing, contorted postures, stony faces, or close-ups of convulsively working hands, was inadequate for the expression of those subtleties of the inner struggle in all its nuances.

  The camera had to penetrate “inside” Clyde. Aurally and visually must be set down the feverish race of thoughts, intermittently with the outer actuality—the boat, the girl sitting opposite him, his own actions. The form of the “inner monologue” was born.

  These montage sketches were wonderful.

  Even literature is almost powerless in this domain. It is limited either to the primitive rhetoric used by Dreiser to describe Clyde’s inner murmurings* or to the worse pseudoclassic tirades of O’Neill’s heroes in Strange Interlude who tell the audience, in “asides,” what they are thinking, to supplement what they say to each other. In this the theater limps more than does orthodox literary prose.11

  Only the film-element commands a means for an adequate presentation of the whole course of thought through a disturbed mind.

  Or, if literature can do it, it is only a literature that breaks through the limits of its orthodox enclosure. Literature’s most brilliant achievement in this field has been the immortal “inner monologues” of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. When Joyce and I met in Paris, he was intensely interested in my plans for the inner film-monologue, with a far broader scope than is afforded by literature.

  Despite his almost total blindness, Joyce wished to see those parts of Potemkin and October that, with the expressive means of film culture, move along kindred lines.

  The “inner monologue,” as a literary method of abolishing the distinction between subject and object in stating the hero’s re-experience in a crystallized form, is first observed by research-workers in literary experiment as early as 1887, in the work of Edouard Dujardin, pioneer on the “stream of consciousness,” Les lauriers sont coupés.12

  As theme, as world-perception, as “sensation,” as description of an object, but not as method, one can find it, of course, even earlier. “Slipping” from the objective into the subjective, and back again, is a characteristic of the writings of the romantics—E. T. A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Gerard de Nerval.13 But as a method of literary style, rather than as an inter-lacing in the story, or a form of literary description, we first find it used by Dujardin, as a specific method of exposition, as a specific method of construction; its absolute literary perfection is achieved by Joyce and Larbaud, thirty-one years later.

  It finds full expression, however, only in the cinema.

  For only the sound-film is capable of reconstructing all phases and all specifics of the course of thought.

  What wonderful sketches those montage lists were!

  Like thought, they would sometimes proceed with visual images. With sound. Synchronized or non-synchronized. Then as sounds. Formless. Or with sound-images: with objectively representational sounds . . .

  Then suddenly, definite intellectually formulated words—as “intellectual” and dispassionate as pronounced words. With a black screen, a rushing imageless visuality.

  Then in passionate disconnected speech. Nothing but nouns. Or nothing but verbs. Then interjections. With zigzags of aimless shapes, whirling along with these in synchronization.

  Then racing visual images over complete silence.

  Then linked with polyphonic sounds. Then polyphonic images. Then both at once.

  Then interpolated into the outer course of action, then interpolating elements of the outer action into the inner monologue.

  As if presenting inside the characters the inner play, the conflict of doubts, the explosions of passion, the voice of reason, rapidly or in slow-motion, marking the differing rhythms of one and the other and, at the same time, contrasting with the almost complete absence of outer action: a feverish inner debate behind the stony mask of the face.

  How fascinating it is to listen to one’s own train of thought, particularly in an excited state, in order to catch yourself, looking at and listening to your mind. How you talk “to yourself,” as distinct from “out of yourself.” The syntax of inner speech as distinct from outer speech. The quivering inner words that correspond with the visual images. Contrasts with outer circumstances. How they work reciprocally. . . .

  To listen and to study, in order to understand structural laws and assemble them into an inner monologue construction of the utmost tension of the struggle of tragic re-experience. How fascinating!

  And what scope for creative invention and observation. And how obvious it becomes that the material of the sound-film is not dialogue.

  The true material of the sound-film is, of course, the monologue.

  And how unexpectedly, in its practical embodiment of an unforeseen, particular, concrete case to be expressed, it calls across to the theoretically long foreseen “last word” on montage form in general. That the montage form, as structure, is a reconstruction of the laws of the thought process.

  Here the particularity of treatment, fertilized by a new and not a former formal method, leaves its limits and generalizes in new theoretical scope and in principle the theory of montage form as a whole.

  (However, this does not by any means imply that the thought process as a montage form must necessarily have the process of thought as its subject!)

  The notes for this 180° advance in sound film culture—languished in a suitcase at the hotel and were eventually buried Pompeii-like, beneath a mass of books, and while they waited for realization . . .

  An American Tragedy was given to Josef von Sternberg to film, and he directly, literally, discarded everything on which our treatment had been based, and restored everything that we had discarded.

  As for an “inner monologue,” it didn’t occur to him. . . .

  Sternberg confined his attention to the studio’s wishes—and filmed a straight detective case.

  The old gray lion Dreiser battled for our “distortion” of his work, and brought Paramount, who had filmed a formally and outwardly correct version of his story, into court.

  Two years later O’Neill’s Strange Interlude was “adapted” for the screen, and we were given double and triple explanatory voices around the silent face of the hero, giving additional tonnage to the playwright’s cuneiform dramaturgy. A bloody mockery of what might be achieved with correct montage principles—in the inner monologue!

  Work of a similar type. Solution by treatment of the work in hand. Estimation by treatment. But of greatest significance, a constructively artistic and formally fruitful rôle for this “boring,” “obligatory,” “imposed” ideology and ideological restraint.

  Not a schematic realization but a living organism of production—this is the fundamental work facing the direction collective of the Third Course at the State Cinema Institute. And with all methods we shall seek the themes for this work in the many-sided thematic ocean all around us.

  [1932]

  Film Language

  Creation is a concept which we writers use all too freely, though we hardly possess the right to do so. Creation is a degree of tension reached in the work of the memory at which the speed of its working draws from the reserves of knowledge and impressions the most salient and characteristic facts, pictures, details, and renders them into the most precise, vivid and intelligible words. Our young literature cannot boast of possessing this quality. The stock of impressions, the sum of knowledge of our writers is not large, and there is no sign of any special anxiety to extend or enrich it.

  MAXIM GORKY1

  GORKY’S SPEECH on the langua
ge of literature must be acknowledged—and considering the state of film language, we in films should feel called upon most of all to respond to it.

  Film language, to a certain extent, is commonly associated with my works and my commentaries on them. And for this reason I shall take the initiative, by sniping at myself.

  I do not propose to talk of the talking film—or, more exactly, of its talking portions. It speaks for itself. It even screams. And its quality, even before cinematically appraising it, contains so much poverty of a purely literary sort that its film claims may be put aside, for the moment.

  In any case, it is not of this language I want to speak. (With my reputation as a literary stylist it would be laughable for me to do so.) I want to talk about the lack of culture in fundamentally cinematic diction that we may observe on the screen today.

  In this matter of cinematic diction our cinema has accomplished a great deal for the world’s film culture. And this accomplishment has been considerably deeper than mere fashion.

  It is true that much that is specifically ours in the development of film expressiveness has been entrenched abroad no more deeply than as a passing fashion. Snippets of film, spliced together with nothing more reasonable than film cement, appear on the film-menu as “Russian cutting,” “russischen Schnitt,” very much in the way that restaurants use the term “Salade russe” for a certain dish of chopped and seasoned vegetables.

  Fashion. Fashions pass—culture remains. Occasionally the culture behind the fashion is not noticed. Occasionally a cultural achievement is thrown out with the bath-water of fashion.

  Negro sculpture, Polynesian masks, the Soviet manner of editing films have all been, for the West, merely exotica.

  Of the extraction of general cultural values—of the mastery of principles—of the use of these accomplishments by the people who, in principle, move culture forward . . . but, of course, conversations on such themes are so passé.