Film Form

by Sergei Eisenstein

  What are fashions for? Tomorrow the magnates of mode—Patou, Worth, Mme. Lanvin, from their various yards, launch a new fashion. From somewhere in the Congo some “novelty” is brought—something carved from the ivory tusks of elephants by colonial slaves. Somewhere in the ravines of Mongolia a discovery is made—some patinized bronze sculptures created by the slaves of a long dead chieftain in a long dead epoch. All is well. It’s all to the good. It all pays off.

  The growth of culture? Who cares about that? It would seem that such relations to culture and to cultural achievements had long since been altered among us here by the October Revolution. One can’t force one’s way into museums on a free day. A worker with his wife and children stands in line to go through the Tretyakov Galley. One can’t squeeze into the reading-rooms—too crowded. Readings, lectures—all overcrowded. Everywhere one finds attention, interest, thrift—an economical mastery of pre-revolutionary achievements.

  Only in films is there a purely bourgeois absence of economy. Not only in budget. But thoughtlessness. And not only in schedule. But a total illiteracy and neglect of all that which in the Soviet period, with Soviet hands, on Soviet materials, and by Soviet principles, has been brought into and created in film culture.

  Splendid: “We mastered the classics.” (Splendid or not—this is a quite different question, and a debatable one, at that!) We are noting assets.

  But this does not dismiss my question. Why must we therefore toss into oblivion all the expressive means and potentialities of cinematography, in which these classics have been flashed on the screen?

  “We have mastered actors from the theater.” (Better than classics.) Splendid!

  There’s another question, in Krylov’s words: “Is auntie holding on to the tail?” Even if this auntie is such a fine actress as Tarasova!* Or is there a danger of film culture not profiting, but being harmed bv the excellence of her acting?

  As for the shots—“rubbish.” And the composition of the shots—“you’re just making trouble.” And montage is obviously—“jumpy.”

  With the result, looking at the screen, that you feel a sweetish sensation, as if your eye had been lifted by sugar-tongs and oh-so-gently turned first to the right, then to the left, and finally whirled in a full circle, in order to push it back into a confused orbit. They say: “It’s not our fault that you have such eyes.” “That’s not important to the spectator.” “The spectator doesn’t notice such things.” “I don’t hear the spectator screaming.” Quite true. Nor does the reader scream. What is needed is not a scream, but a thundering shout. The authoritative shout of Gorky, to make literature notice where it is coming undone, how it is unraveling. The reader will not die of “trouble-making.” He doesn’t see how “rubbish” can bring him death. And he isn’t pushed into his grave by a negligence towards literary language.

  Nevertheless it has been considered necessary to unite behind literature to defend the reader. In what way does the vision of the reader become worse when he enters a film-theater?

  In what way is his ear worse when, united with his eye, it is present at some audio-visual catastrophe, pretending to be audio-visual counterpoint?

  Characteristically, films have become known exclusively as “sound-films.” Must this mean that what you see while you’re listening does not deserve your attention? But this is apparently so.

  At this point some viper must be hissing: “Aha! the old devil is going to gallop about montage again.”

  Yes, montage.

  For many film-makers montage and leftist excesses of formalism—are synonymous. Yet montage is not this at all.

  For those who are able, montage is the most powerful compositional means of telling a story.

  For those who do not know about composition, montage is a syntax for the correct construction of each particle of a film fragment.

  And lastly, montage is simply an elementary rule of film-orthography for those who mistakenly put together pieces of a film as one would mix ready-made recipes for medicine, or pickle cucumbers, or preserve plums, or ferment apples and cranberries together.

  Not only montage . . . I should like to see the expressive activity of man’s hand freed from these lesser portions of his toilette, away from these supporting aggregates.

  One encounters in films individually fine shots, but under these circumstances the value of the shot and its independent pictorial quality contradict one another. Out of tune with the montage idea and composition, they become esthetic toys and aims in themselves. The better the shots, the closer the film comes to a disconnected assemblage of lovely phrases, a shopwindow full of pretty but unrelated products, or an album of post-card views.

  I do not stand, by any means, for the “hegemony” of montage. The time has passed, when with the aims of pedagogy and training, it was necessary to perform tactical and polemical twists, in order to free montage broadly as an expressive means of cinema. But we must face the question of literacy in film-diction. And we must demand that the quality of montage, of film-syntax and film-speech not only never fall back behind the level of previous work, but that these go beyond and surpass their predecessors—this is why we should be deeply concerned in the struggle for a high quality of film culture.

  It’s easier for literature. In criticizing it, one can stand classics alongside it. Its heritage and achievement have undergone a great deal of investigation and study, down to the most delicate microscopic detail. The analysis of the compositional and imagery structure of Gogol’s prose, made by the late Andrei Belyi, stands as a living reproach before any literary flippancy.2

  And, by the way, Gogol has been brought also into films. Up till now burdened with formless film treatment, he has at last flashed with all the purity of montage form into the soundfilm almost as if a Gogol text had been directly transposed into visual material.

  Under the splendid visual poem of the Dnieper in the first reel of Ivan [1932], Dovzhenko, I believe, could successfully recite Gogol’s description of the “wonderful Dnieper,” from his Terrible Revenge.

  The rhythm of the moving camera—floating by the shores. The cutting in of immobile expanses of water. In the alternation and shifting of these is the legerdemain and wizardry of Gogol’s imagery and turns of speech. All this “neither stirs nor thunders.” All this “you see and you do not know whether its immense breadth is moving or not . . . and it is enchanted, as if it had been poured glass,” and so on. Here literature and cinema provide a model of the purest fusion and affinity. And this sequence also recalls—Rabelais. His poetic anticipation of the “imaging” of the theory of relationship is in his description of the isle “en laquelle les chemins cheminent”:

  . . . and he further informed us that Seleucus [a Roman mathematician of the first century] had been of the opinion that the earth really revolved around the poles, rather than the heavens, although the contrary seems to us to be the truth—just as, when we are on the river Loire, the trees along the bank appear to be moving, whereas it is not the trees at all, but ourselves upon the boat, who are in motion.3*4

  We paused on this example, for it seems like the swan-song for the purity of film language on our contemporary screen. For Ivan, as well. Its latter reels at no point ascend to the perfection of this fragment.

  I hear someone object, saying that the “wonderful Dnieper” is a poem. The core of the matter is not in this. Based on this it would have to be assumed that the structure of prose, that of Zola for example, must certainly display “naturalistic chaos.”

  And yet, in the progress of a study being made of his work, I chanced to see pages of Germinal broken up into the strophes of an epic poem—they could be recited with no less severity than Homeric hexameters.

  These pages contained the episodes, leading up to the sinister scene when, during the uprising before the arrival of the gendarmes, the women destroy the shop of the usurer and rapist Maigrat. When the infuriated women, under the leadership of La Brûlé and Mouquette, mutilate the corpse of the h
ated shopkeeper, who had slipped in his escape over the roof and broken his skull on the curbstone. When the bleeding “trophy” is hoisted on a stick and carried at the head of a procession . . .

  “What is it they have at the end of that stick?” asked Cécile, who had grown bold enough to look out.

  Lucie and Jeanne declared that it must be a rabbit-skin.

  “No, no,” murmured Madame Hennebeau, “they must have been pillaging a pork butcher’s, it seems a remnant of a pig.”

  At this moment she shuddered and was silent. Madame Grégoire had nudged her with her knee. They both remained stupefied. The young ladies, who were very pale, asked no more questions, but with large eyes followed this red vision through the darkness.5

  This scene, as well as the preceding scene, where this same crowd of women attempts to give a public flogging to Cécile, is a stylized transplanting, obviously, of an episode that struck Zola in the annals of the French Revolution.

  The incident of Cécile’s encounter with the women reproduces the well-known episode of the attack on Théroigne de Méricourt.

  The second scene involuntarily forces a recollection of a less known and less popular episode recorded in the materials gathered by Mercier. When the crowd’s hatred of the Princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette’s closest intimate, burst at the gates of the prison of La Force, and the people’s wrath obtained satisfaction from her, one of the participants “lui coup a la partie virginale et s’en fit des moustaches.”6

  A pointing finger, indicating the consciously used earlier source for these stylized adaptations, that could not possibly have been accidentally selected, is provided by the title itself, chosen from the calendar of this earlier epoch—Germinal. If this appeal for temperament and pathos to a previous pathetic epoch was made largely in the explicitly rhythmic clarity of form of his literary diction, this expanded treatment of little episodes is not amongst his most fortunate passages.

  With an analogous image our film October also suffered in the sequence of the July uprising. For we had no intention to give, in the authentic incident of the murder of a Bolshevik worker by a brutalized bourgeois, any “note” of the Paris Commune’s aftermath. Seen in context, the scene of the lady stabbing the worker with her parasol is completely apart in spirit from the general feeling of the pre-October days.

  This is, by the way, an observation that may not be unhelpful. As literary heirs, we frequently make use of the cultural images and language of previous epochs. This naturally determines a large part of our works’ color. And it is important to note failures in the use of such decided models.

  To return anew to the question of purity of film form, I can easily counter the usual objection that the craft of film diction and film expressiveness is very young as yet, and has no models for a classic tradition. It is even said that I find too much fault with the models of film form at our disposal, and manage with literary analogies alone. Many even consider it dubious that this “half-art” (and you would be surprised to know how many, in and out of films, still refer to the cinema in this way) deserves such a broad frame of reference.

  Forgive me. But this is the way things are.

  And yet our film language, though lacking its classics, possessed a great severity of form and film diction. On a certain level our cinema has known such a severe responsibility for each shot, admitting it into a montage sequence with as much care as a line of poetry is admitted into a poem, or each musical atom is admitted into the movement of a fugue.

  There are plenty of examples that may be brought in from the practice of our silent cinematography. Not having the time to analyze other specimens for this present purpose, I may be allowed to bring here a sample analysis from one of my own works. It is taken from material for the conclusion of my book Direction* (Part II—Mise-en-cadre) and concerns Potemkin. In order to show the compositional dependence between the plastic side of each of the shots, an example has been intentionally chosen not from a climax, but from an almost accidentally hit-upon place: fourteen successive pieces from the scene that precedes the fusillade on the Odessa steps. The scene where the “good people of Odessa” (so the sailors of the Potemkin addressed the population of Odessa) send yawls with provisions to the side of the mutinous battleship.

  This sending of greetings is constructed on a distinct crosscutting of two themes.

  1. The yawls speeding towards the battleship.

  2. The people of Odessa watching and waving.

  At the end the two themes are merged. The composition is basically in two planes: depth and foreground. Alternately, the themes take a dominant position, advancing to the foreground, and thrusting each other by turns to the background.

  The composition is built (i) on a plastic interaction of both these planes (within the frame) and (2) on a shifting of line and form in each of these planes from frame to frame (by montage). In the second case the compositional play is formed from the interaction of plastic impressions of the preceding shot in collision or interaction with the following shot. (Here the analysis is of the purely spatial and linear directions: the rhythmic and temporal relations will be discussed elsewhere.)

  The movement of the composition takes the following course:

  I. The yawls in movement. A smooth, even movement, parallel with the horizontals of the frame. The whole field of vision is filled with theme 1. There is a play of small vertical sails.

  II. An intensified movement of the yawls of theme 1 (the entrance of theme 2 contributes to this). Theme 2 comes to the foreground with the severe rhythm of the vertical motionless columns. The vertical lines foreshadow the plastic distribution of the coming figures (in IV, V, etc.). Interplay of the horizontal wakes and the vertical lines of both sails and columns. The yawl theme is thrust back in depth. At the bottom of the frame appears the plastic theme of the arch.

  III. The plastic theme of the arch expands into the entire frame. The play is effected by the shift in the frame’s content—from vertical lines to the structure of the arch. The theme of verticals is maintained in the movement of the peopie—small figures moving away from the camera. The yawl theme is thrust completely into the background.

  IV. The plastic theme of the arch finally moves into the foreground. The arc-formation is transposed to a contrary solution: the contours of a group are sketched, forming a circle (the parasol emphasizes the composition). This same transition in a contrary direction also takes place within a vertical construction: the backs of the small figures moving towards the depth are replaced by large standing figures, photographed frontally. The theme of the yawls in movement is maintained by reflection, in the expression of their eyes and in their movement in a horizontal direction.

  V. In the foreground is a common compositional variant: an even number of persons is replaced by an uneven number. Two replaced by three. This “golden rule” in shifting the mise-en-scène is supported by a tradition that can be traced back to the principles of Chinese painting as well as to the practice of the Commedia dell’arte. (The directions of the glances also cross.) The arch motive is again bent, this time in a contrary curve. Repeating and supporting it is a new parallel arch-motif in the background: a balustrade—the yawl theme in movement. The eyes gaze across the whole width of the frame in a horizontal direction.

  VI. Pieces I to V give a transition from the yawl theme to the watcher’s theme, developed in five montage pieces. The interval from V to VI gives a sharp returning transition from the watchers to the yawls. Strictly following the content, the composition sharply transforms each of the elements in an opposite direction. The line of the balustrade is brought swiftly into the foreground, now as the line of the boat’s gunwale. This is doubled by the adjacent line of the water’s surface. The basic compositional elements are the same, but counterposed in treatment. V is static; VI is drawn by the dynamics of the boat in motion. The vertical division into “three” is maintained in both frames. The central element is texturally similar (the woman’s blouse, and the canv
as of the sail). The elements at the sides are in sharp contrast: the dark shapes of the men beside the woman, and the white spaces beside the central sail. The vertical distribution is also contrasted: three figures cut by the bottom horizontal are transformed into a vertical sail, cut by the upper horizontal of the frame. A new theme appears in the background— the side of the battleship, cut at the top (in preparation for piece VII).

  VII. A sharply new thematic turn. A background theme—the battleship—is brought forward into the foreground (the thematic jump from V to VI serves somewhat as an anticipation of the jump from VI to VII). The viewpoint is turned 180°: shooting from the battleship towards the sea—reversing VI. This time the side of the battleship in the foreground is also cut—but by the lower horizontal of the frame. In the depth is the sail theme, developed in verticals. The verticals of the sailors. The static gun-barrel continues the line of the boat’s movement in the preceding shot. The side of the battleship would seem to be an arch, bent into an almost straight line.

  VIII. A repetition of IV with heightened intensity. The horizontal play of eyes is transformed into vertically waving hands. The vertical theme has moved from the depth into the foreground, repeating the thematic transfer to the watchers.

  IX. Two faces, closer. Speaking generally, this is an unfortunate combination with the preceding shot. It would have been better to have brought between VIII and IX a shot of three faces, to have repeated V with a heightened intensity. This would have produced a 2:3:2 structure. Moreover, the repetition of the familiar groups of IV and V, ending with the new IX, would have sharpened the impression of the last shot. This error is somewhat remedied by the slight change in plane, coming closer to the figures.

  X. The two faces change to a single, closer face. The arm is thrown very energetically up and out of the frame. A correct alternation of faces (if the suggested correction were made between VIII and IX)—2:3:2:1. A second pair of shots with a correct enlargement of the dimensions in relation to the first pair (a proper repetition with a qualitative variation). The line of odd numbers differs both in quantity and quality (differing in the dimensions of the faces and differing in their quantities, while retaining the common direction of the odd numbers).