Film Form

by Sergei Eisenstein

  XI. A new sharp thematic turn. A jump, repeating that of V-VI, with new intensity. The vertical up-throw of the arm in the preceding shot is echoed by the vertical sail. In this the vertical of this sail rushes past in a horizontal line. A repetition of the theme of VI in greater intensity. And a repetition of the composition of II with this difference, that the horizontal theme of the moving yawls and the verticals of the motionless columns are here molded into a single horizontal movement of the vertical sail. The composition repeats the sequence’s theme of an identity between the yawls and the people on the shore (before moving on to the concluding theme of this reel, the fusion of the yawls and the battleship).

  XII. The sail of XI is broken up into a multitude of vertical sails, scudding along horizontally (a repetition of piece I with increased intensity). The little sails move in a direction opposite to that of the large single sail.

  XIII. Having been broken up into small sails, the large sail is newly re-assembled, but now not as a sail, but as the flag flying over the Potemkin. There is a new quality in this shot, for it is both static and mobile,—the mast being vertical and motionless, while the flag flutters in the wind. Formally, piece XIII repeats XI. But the change from sail to banner translates a principle of plastic unification to an ideological-thematic unification. This is no longer a vertical, a plastic union of separate elements of composition,—this is a revolutionary banner, uniting battleship, yawls and shore.

  XIV. From here we have a natural return from the flag to the battleship. XIV repeats VII, with a lift in intensity. This shot introduces a new compositional group of interrelationships between the yawls and the battleship, distinguished from the first group, yawls and shore. The first group expressed the theme: “the yawls carry greetings and gifts from the shore to the battleship.” This second group will express the fraternization of yawls and battleship.

  The compositional dividing-point, and simultaneously the ideological uniter of both compositional groups, is the mast with the revolutionary banner.

  Piece VII, repeated by the first piece of the second group, XIV, appears as a sort of foreshadowing of the second group and as an element linking the two groups together, as though the latter group had sent out a “patrol” into the territory of the first group. In the second group this role will be played by shots of waving figures, cut into scenes of the fraternization between yawls and battleship.

  It should not be thought that the filming and montage of these pieces were done according to these calculations, drawn up a priori. Of course not. But the assembly and distribution of these pieces on the cutting table was already clearly dictated by the compositional demands of the film form. These demands dictated the selection of these particular pieces from all those available. These demands also established the regularity of the alternation of these pieces. Actually, these pieces, regarded only for their plot and story aspects, could be rearranged in any combination. But the compositional movement through them would hardly prove in that case quite so regular in construction.

  One cannot therefore complain of the complexity of this analysis. In comparison with analyses of literary and musical forms my analysis is still quite descriptive and easy.

  Setting aside for the present the question of rhythmic examination, in our analysis we have also analyzed the alternations of sound and word combinations.

  An analysis of the very lenses employed in filming these shots, and their use along with camera-angles and lighting, all deriving from the demands of the style and the character of the film’s content, would serve as an exact analogy to an analysis of the expressiveness of phrases and words and their phonetic indications in a literary work.

  Of course the spectator, least of all, is able to verify with calipers the conformity to rule of the successive shot compositions within the montage. But in his perception of a fully realized montage composition the same elements are contributed that stylistically distinguish a page of cultured prose from the pages of “Count Amori,” Verbitzkaya or Breshko-Breshkovsky.*

  At present Soviet cinematography is historically correct in entering the campaign for the story. Along this path are still many difficulties, many risks of falsely understanding the principles of story-telling. Of these the most terrible is the neglect of those possibilities given us now and again to liberate from the old traditions of the story:

  The possibility of principally and newly re-examining the foundations and problems of the film-story.

  And to go ahead in a cinematographically progressive movement, not “back to the story,” but “to the story ahead of us.” There is not yet clear artistic orientation on these ways, although separate positive influences are already becoming visible.

  In one way or another we approach the moment when we shall master clearly the realized principles of Soviet story films, and we must meet that moment with all the weapons of faultless purity and culture of film language and speech.

  Our great masters of literature from Pushkin and Gogol to Mayakovsky and Gorky are valued by us not only as storytelling masters. We value in them the culture of masters of speech and word.

  It is time with all sharpness to pose the problem of the culture of film language. It is important that all the film-workers speak out in this cause. And before all else, in the language of the montage and shots of their own films.

  [1934]

  Film Form: New Problems

  EVEN THAT old veteran Heraclitus observed that no man can bathe twice in the same river. Similarly no esthetic can flourish on one and the same set of principles at two different stages in its development. Especially when the particular esthetic concerned happens to relate to the most mobile of the arts, and when the division between the epochs is the succession of two Five Year periods in the mightiest and most notable job of construction in the world—the job of building the first Socialist state and society in history. From which it is obvious that our subject is here the esthetic of film, and in particular the esthetic of film in the Soviet land.

  During the last few years a great upheaval has taken place in the Soviet cinema. This upheaval is, first and foremost, ideological and thematic. The peak of achievement in the blossoming of the silent cinema was attained under the broadly expansive slogan of mass, the “mass-hero” and methods of cinematographic portrayal directly derivative therefrom, rejecting narrowly dramaturgical conceptions in favor of epos and lyrism, with “type” and episodic protagonists in place of individual heroes and the consequently inevitable principle of montage as the guiding principle of film expressiveness. But during the last few years—the first years, that is, of the Soviet sound-cinema—the guiding principles have changed.

  From the former all-pervading mass imagery of movement and experiences of the masses, there begin at this stage to stand out individual hero-characters. Their appearance is accompanied by a structural change in those works where they appear. The former epical quality and its characteristic giant scale begin to contract into constructions closer to dramaturgy in the narrow sense of the word, to a dramaturgy, in fact, of more traditional stamp and much closer to the foreign cinema than those films that once declared war to the death against its very principles and methods. The best films of the most recent period (Chapayev, for example) have none the less succeeded in partially preserving the epical quality of the first period of Soviet cinema development, with larger and happier results. But the majority of films have almost completely lost that luggage, comprised of principle and form, which determined in its day the specific and characteristic quality of face of the Soviet cinema, a quality not divorced from the newness and unusualness it bore as reflection of the unusual and never-heretofore-existing land of the Soviets, its strivings, aims, ideals and struggles.

  To many it seems that the progressive development of the Soviet cinema has stopped. They speak of retrogression. This is, of course, wrong. And one important circumstance is underestimated by the fervent partisans of the old silent Soviet cinema, who now gaze bewilderedly as ther
e appears Soviet film after film which in so many respects is formally similar to the foreign cinema. If in many cases there must indeed be observed the dulling of that formal brilliance to which the foreign friends of our films had become accustomed, this is the consequence of the fact that our cinematography, in its present stage, is entirely absorbed in another sphere of investigation and deepening. A measure of suspension in the further development of the forms and means of film expressiveness has appeared as an inevitable consequence of the diversion of investigation into another direction, a diversion recently and still obtaining: into the direction of deepening and broadening the thematic and ideological formulation of questions and problems within the content of the film. It is not accidental that precisely at this period, for the first time in our cinematography, there begin to appear the first finished images of personalities, not just of any personalities, but of the finest personalities: the leading figures of leading Communists and Bolsheviks. Just as from the revolutionary movement of the masses emerged the sole revolutionary party, that of the Bolsheviks, which heads the unconscious elements of revolution and leads them towards conscious revolutionary aims, so the film images of the leading men of our times begin during the present period to crystallize out of the general-revolutionary mass-quality of the earlier type of film. And the clarity of the Communist slogan rings more definitely, replacing the general-revolutionary slogan.

  The Soviet cinema is now passing through a new phase—a phase of yet more distinct Bolshevization, a phase of yet more pointed ideological and essential militant sharpness. A phase historically logical, natural and rich in fertilizing possibilities for the cinema, as most notable of arts.

  This new tendency is no surprise, but a logical stage of growth, rooted in the very core of the preceding stage. Thus one who is perhaps the most devoted partisan of the massepical style in cinema, one whose name has always been linked to the “mass”-cinema—the author of these lines—is subject to precisely this same process in his penultimate film —Old and New, where Marfa Lapkina appears already as an exceptional individual protagonist of the action.

  The task, however, is to make this new stage sufficiently synthetic. To ensure that in its march towards new conquests of ideological depths, it not only does not lose the perfection of the achievements already attained, but advances them ever forward toward new and as yet unrealized qualities and means of expression. To raise form once more to the level of ideological content.

  Being engaged at the moment on the practical solution of these problems in the new film Bezhin Meadow, only just begun, I should like to set out here a series of cursory observations on the question of the problem of form in general.

  The problem of form, equally with the problem of content at the present stage, is undergoing a period of most serious deepening of principle. The lines which follow must serve to show the direction in which this problem is moving and the extent to which the new trend of thought in this sphere is closely linked in evolution to the extreme discoveries on this path made during the peak period of our silent cinema.

  Let us start at the last points reached by the theoretical researches of the stage of Soviet cinema above referred to (1924–1929).

  It is clear and undoubted that the ne plus ultra of those paths was the theory of the “intellectual cinema.”

  This theory set before it the task of “restoring emotional fullness to the intellectual process.” This theory engrossed itself as follows, in transmuting to screen form the abstract concept, the course and halt of concepts and ideas—without intermediary. Without recourse to story, or invented plot, in fact directly—by means of the image-composed elements as filmed. This theory was a broad, perhaps even a too broad, generalization of a series of possibilities of expression placed at our disposal by the methods of montage and its combinations. The theory of intellectual cinema represented, as it were, a limit, the reductio ad paradox of that hypertrophy of the montage concept with which film esthetics were permeated during the emergence of Soviet silent cinematography as a whole and my own work in particular.

  Recalling the “establishment of the abstracted concept” as a framework for the possible products of the intellectual cinema, as the basic foundation of its film canvasses; and acknowledging that the movement forward of the Soviet cinema is now following other aims, namely, the demonstration of such conceptual postulates by agency of concrete actions and living persons as we have noted above, let us see what can and must be the further fate of the ideas expressed at that time.

  Is it then necessary to jettison all the colossal theoretical and creative material, in the turmoil of which was born the conception of the intellectual cinema? Has it proved only a curious and exciting paradox, a fata morgana of unrealized compositional possibilities? Or has its paradoxicality proved to lie not in its essence, but in the sphere of its application, so that now, after examining some of its principles, it may emerge that, in new guise, with new usage and new application, the postulates then expressed have played and may still continue to play a highly positive part in the theoretical grasping and understanding and mastering of the mysteries of the cinema?

  The reader, doubtless, has already guessed that this is precisely how we incline to consider the situation, and all that follows will serve to demonstrate, perhaps only in broad outline, exactly what we understand by it, and use now as a working basis, and which, as a working hypothesis in questions of the culture of film form and composition, is fortified more and more into a complete logical conception of everyday practice.

  I should like to begin with the following consideration:

  It is exceedingly curious that certain theories and points of view which in a given historical epoch represent an expression of scientific knowledge, in a succeeding epoch decline as science, but continue to exist as possible and admissible not in the line of science but in the line of art and imagery.

  If we take mythology, we find that at a given stage mythology is nothing else than a complex of current knowledge about phenomena, chiefly related in imagery and poetic language. All these mythological figures, which at the best we now regard as the materials of allegory, at some stage represented an image-compilation of knowledge of the cosmos. Later, science moved on from imagery narratives to concepts, and the store of former personified-mythological nature-symbols continued to survive as a series of pictorial images, a series of literary, lyrical and other metaphors. At last they become exhausted even in this capacity and vanish into the archives. Consider even contemporary poetry, and compare it with the poetry of the eighteenth century.

  Another example: take such a postulate as the a-priority of the idea, spoken of by Hegel in relation to the creation of the world. At a certain stage this was the summit of philosophical knowledge. Later, the summit was overthrown. Marx turns this postulate head over heels in the question of the understanding of real actuality. However, if we consider our works of art, we do in fact have a condition that almost looks like the Hegelian formula, because the idea-satiation of the author, his subjection to prejudice by the idea, must determine actually the whole course of the art-work, and if every element of the art-work does not represent an embodiment of the initial idea, we shall never have as result an art-work realized to its utmost fullness. It is of course understood that the artist’s idea itself is in no way spontaneous or self-engendered, but is a socially reflected mirror-image, a reflection of social reality. But from the moment of formation within him of the viewpoint and idea, that idea appears as determining all the actual and material structure of his creation, the whole “world” of his creation.

  Suppose we take another field, Lavater’s “Physiognomy.” This in its day was regarded as an objective scientific system. But physiognomy is now no science. Lavater was already laughed at by Hegel, though Goethe, for example, still collaborated with Lavater, if anonymously. (To Goethe must be assigned the authorship of, for example, a physiognomical study devoted to the head of Brutus.) We do not attribute to physiogn
omy any objective scientific value whatsoever, but the moment we require, in course of the all-sided representation of character denoting some type, the external characterization of a countenance, we immediately start using faces in exactly the same way as Lavater did. We do so because in such a case it is important to us to create first and foremost an impression, the subjective impression of an observer, not the objective co-ordination of sign and essence actually composing character. In other words, the viewpoint that Lavater thought scientific is being “exhausted” by us in the arts, where it is needed in the line of imagery.

  What is the purpose of examining all this? Analogous situations occur sometimes among the methods of the arts, and sometimes it occurs that the characteristics which represent logic in the matter of construction of form are mistaken for elements of content. Logic of this kind is, as a method, as a principle of construction, fully permissible, but it becomes a nightmare if this same method, this logic of construction, is regarded simultaneously as an exhaustive content.

  You will perceive already whither the matter is tending, but I wish to cite one more example, from literature. The question relates now to one of the most popular of all literary genres—the detective story.

  What the detective story represents, of which social formations and tendencies it is the expression, this we all know. On this subject Gorky recently spoke sufficiently at the Congress of Writers. But of interest is the origin of some of the characteristics of the genre, the sources from which derives the material that has gone towards creation of the ideal vessel of the detective story form in embodying certain aspects of bourgeois ideology.