Film Form

by Sergei Eisenstein

  I have sought here to show the direction in which I am now working on these problems, and I think this is the right road of investigation. If we now look back at the intellectual cinema, we shall see that the intellectual cinema did one service, in spite of its sclf-reductio ad absurdum when it laid claim to exhaustive style and exhaustive content.

  This theory fell into the error of letting us have not a unity of form and content, but a coincidental identity of them, because in unity it is complicated to follow exactly how an affective embodiment for ideas is built. But when these things become “telescoped” into “one,” then was discovered the march of inner thinking as the basic law of construction of form and composition. Now we can use the laws thus discovered already not along the line of “intellectual constructions,” but along the line of completely manifold constructions, both from story and image viewpoints, since we already know some “secrets,” and fundamental laws of construction of form and affective structure generally.

  From what I have elucidated along the lines of the past and along the lines on which I am now working, one more qualitative difference appears:

  It is this, that when in our various “schools” we proclaimed the paramount importance of montage, or of the intellectual cinema, or of documentalism or some such other fighting program, it bore primarily the character of a tendency. What I am now trying briefly to expound about what I am now working on has an entirely different character. It bears a character not specifically tendentious (as futurism, expressionism or any other “program”)—but delves into the question of the nature of things and here questions are already not concerned with the line of some given stylization, but with the line of search for a general method and mode for the problem of form, equally essential and fit for any genre of construction within our embracing style of socialist realism. Questions of tendentious interests begin to spread over into a deepened interest in the whole culture itself of the medium in which we work, i.e., the tendentious line here takes a turn towards the researchacademic line. I have experienced this not merely creatively, but also biographically: at the moment at which I began to interest myself in these basic problems of the culture of form and the culture of cinema, I found myself in life not in film production, but engaged in creation of an academy of cinematography, the road to which has been laid down by my three years’ work in the All-Union State Cinema Institute, in Moscow, and which is only now developing. Moreover, it is of interest that the phenomenon noted above is not at all isolated, this quality is not at all exclusively characteristic of our cinematography. We can perceive a whole series of theoretical and tendentious routes ceasing to exist as original “currents,” and beginning by way of transmutation and gradual change to be included in questions of methodology and science.

  It is possible to point to such an example in the teaching of Marr, and the fact that his teaching, which was formerly a “japhetic” tendency in the science of languages, has now been revised from the viewpoint of Marxism and entered practice no longer as a tendency but as a generalized method in the study of languages and thinking. It is not by chance that on almost all fronts around us there are now being born academies; it is not by chance that disputes in the line of architecture are no longer a matter of rival tendencies (Le Corbusier or Zheltovski); discussion proceeds no longer about this question, but controversy is about a synthesis of “the three arts,” the deepening of research, the nature itself of the phenomenon of architecture.

  I think that in our cinematography something very similar is now occurring. For, at the present stage, we craftsmen have no differences of principle and disputes about a whole series of program postulates such as we had in the past. There are, of course, individual shades of opinion within the comprehensive conception of the single style: Socialist Realism.

  And this is in no way a sign of moribundity, as might appear to some—“unless they fight, they’re stiffs”—quite the contrary. Precisely here, and precisely in this, I find the greatest and most interesting sign of the times.

  I think that now, with the approach of the sixteenth year of our cinematography, we are entering a special period. These signs, to be traced today also in the parallel arts as well as being found in the cinema, are harbingers of the news that Soviet cinematography, after many periods of divergence of opinion and argument, is entering into its classical period, because the characteristics of its interests, the particular approach to its series of problems, this thirst for synthesis, this postulation of and demand for complete harmony of all the elements from the subject matter to composition within the frame, this demand for fullness of quality and all the features on which our cinematography has set its heart—these are the signs of highest flowering of an art.

  I consider that we are now on the threshold of the most remarkable period of classicism in our cinematography, the best period in the highest sense of the word. Not to participate creatively in such a period is no longer possible. And if for the last three years I have been completely engrossed in scientific-investigatory and pedagogical work (a side of which is very briefly related above), then now I undertake simultaneously once again to embark upon production,* in order to strive for a classicism that will contain some part of the huge endowment left us.

  [1935]

  The Structure of The Film

  This is an Art

  Which does mend Nature: change it rather, but

  The Art itselfe, is Nature.

  SHAKESPEARE, The Winter’s Tale

  All is in man—all is for man.

  GORKY1

  LET US say that grief is to be represented on the screen. There is no such thing as grief “in general.” Grief is concrete; it is always attached to something; it has conveyors, when your film’s characters grieve; it has consumers, when your portrayal of grief makes the spectators sorrow, too.

  This latter result is not always obligatory for your portrayal of grief: the grief of an enemy, after his defeat, arouses joy in the spectator, who identifies his feelings with those of the conqueror on the screen.

  Such considerations are obvious enough, yet beneath them lies one of the most difficult problems in constructing works of art, touching the most exciting part of our work: the problem of portraying an attitude toward the thing portrayed.

  One of the most active means of portraying this attitude is in composition. Though this attitude can never be shown by composition alone. Nor is it the sole task of composition.

  I wish to take up in this essay this particular question: how far the embodiment of this attitude can be achieved within narrowly compositional means. We have long since realized that an attitude to a portrayed fact can be embodied in the way the fact is presented. Even such a master of “attitude” as Franz Kafka recognized physical viewpoint as critical:

  The diversity of ideas which one can have, say, of an apple: the apple as it appears to the child who must stretch his neck so as barely to see it on the table, and the apple as it appears to the master of the house who picks it up and lordily hands it to his guest.2

  At once the question arises: with what methods and means must the filmically portrayed fact be handled so that it simultaneously shows not only what the fact is, and the character’s attitude towards it, but also how the author relates to it, and how the author wishes the spectator to receive, sense, and react to the portrayed fact.

  Let us look at this from the viewpoint of composition alone, and there examine an instance where this task, of embodying the author’s relation to a thing, is served primarily by composition, here understood as a law for the construction of a portrayal. This is extremely important for us, for though little enough has been written on the rôle of composition in cinema, the features of composition that we speak of here have been left unmentioned in film literature.

  The object of imagery and the law of structure, by which it is represented, can coincide. This would be the simplest of cases, and the compositional problem in such an aspect more or less takes care of itself. Thi
s is the simplest type of structure: “sorrowful sorrow,” “joyful joy,” “a marching march,” etc. In other words: the hero sorrows, and in unison with him sorrows nature, and lighting, sometimes the composition of the shot, and (more rarely) the rhythm of the montage—but most often of all, we just add sad music to it. The same thing happens when we handle “joyful joy,” and other similar simplicities.

  Even in these simplest cases it is perfectly evident what nourishes composition and from where it derives its experience and material: composition takes the structural elements of the portrayed phenomena and from these composes its canon for building the containing work.

  In doing this composition actually takes such elements, first of all, from the structure of the emotional behavior of man, joined with the experienced content of this or that portrayed phenomenon.

  It is for this reason that real composition is invariably profoundly human— be it the “leaping” rhythmic structure of gay episodes, the “drawn-out monotonal” montage of a sad scene, or the “joyful sparkling” tone of a shot.

  Diderot deduced the theory that compositional principles in vocal, and later in instrumental, music derived from the basic intonations of living emotional speech (as well as from sound phenomena perceived by our ancestors in surrounding nature).

  And Bach—master of the most intricate compositional forms—maintained a similarly human approach to the fundamentals of composition as a direct pedagogical premise. In describing Bach’s teaching methods, Forkel writes:

  He considered his voices as if they were persons who conversed together like a select company. If there were three, each could sometimes be silent and listen to the others dll it again had something to the purpose to say.3

  It is exactly thus, on a base of interplaying human emotions, on a base of human experience, that the cinema must also build its structural approaches and its most difficult compositional constructions.

  Take, for example, one of the most successful scenes in Alexander Nevsky— the attack by the German wedge on the Russian army at the beginning of the Battle on the Ice.

  This episode passes through all the shades of an experience of increasing terror, where approaching danger makes the heart contract and the breathing irregular. The structure of this “leaping wedge” in Alexander Nevsky is, with variations, exactly modeled on the inner process of such an experience. This dictated all the rhythms of the sequence—cumulative, disjunctive, the speeding up and slowing down of the movement. The boiling pulsing of an excited heart dictated the rhythm of the leaping hoofs: pictorially—the leap of the galloping knights; compositionally—the beat to the bursting point of an excited heart.

  To produce the success of this sequence, both the pictorial and compositional structures are fused in the welded unity of a terrifying image—the beginning of a battle that is to be a fight to the finish.

  And the event, as it is unfolded on the screen according to a timetable of the running of this or that passion, thrown back from the screen, involves the emotions of the spectator according to the same timetable, arousing in him the same tangle of passions which originally designed the compositional scheme of the work.

  This is the secret of the genuinely emotional affect of real composition. Employing for source the structure of human emotion, it unmistakably appeals to emotion, unmistakably arouses the complex of those feelings that gave birth to the composition.

  In all the media of art—and in film art most of all, no matter how neglected by this medium—it is by such means, primarily, that is achieved what Lev Tolstoy said of music:

  Music carries me immediately and directly into that mental condition in which the man was who composed it.4

  That—from the simplest to the most complicated cases—is one of the possible types of construction to be considered.

  But there is also another case, when, instead of a resolution of the “joyful joy” type, the author is forced to find the compositional vessel for, say, the theme of “life-affirming death.”

  What would happen here?

  Apparently, the law of constructing works of art in such a case cannot be nourished exclusively by elements issuing directly from the natural and habitual emotions, conditions, and sensations of man, attendant on such a phenomenon.

  Yet the law of composition remains unchanged in such a case.

  Such schemes of composition will have to be sought not so much among the emotions attached to the portrayed thing, but primarily among the emotions attached to the author’s relationship to the thing portrayed.

  Strictly speaking, this also is a factor in the above example of the “wedge” in Alexander Nevsky, only with this peculiarity, that there the emotion of the portrayed thing coincides with the emotion of the author’s relationship to the portrayed thing.

  But such a case is rather rare and is by no means obligatory for all cases. In such cases there commonly arises a quite curious and often unexpected picture of a transferred phenomenon, constructed in a way unusual in “normal” circumstances. Literature abounds in such examples of all degrees, often touching the primary elements of compositional development, such as an imagist structure, resolved possibly through a system of similes.

  The pages of literature offer us models of completely unexpected compositional structures, in which are presented phenomena that “in themselves” are quite ordinary. These structures are not in the least determined, nourished, or brought into being by formalist excesses or extravagant researches.*

  The examples I have in mind come from realistic classics—and they are classical because with these means the examples embody with maximum clarity a maximum clear judgment of a phenomenon, a maximum clear relation to the phenomenon.

  How often in literature do we encounter descriptions of “adultery”! No matter how varied the situations, circumstances, and imagist comparisons in which this has been portrayed—there is hardly a more impressive picture than the one where “the sinful embrace of the lovers” is imagistically compared with—murder.

  She felt so guilty, so much to blame, that it only remained for her to humble herself and ask to be forgiven; but she had no one in the world now except him, so that even her prayer for forgiveness was addressed to him. Looking at him, she felt her humiliation physically, and could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer must feel when looking at the body he has deprived of life. The body he had deprived of life was their love, the first period of their love. There was something frightful and revolting in the recollection of what had been paid for with this terrible price of shame. The shame she felt at her spiritual nakedness communicated itself to him. But in spite of the murderer’s horror of the body of his victim, that body must be cut in pieces and hidden away, and he must make use of what he has obtained by the murder.

  Then, as the murderer desperately throws himself on the body, as though with passion, and drags it and hacks it, so Vronsky covered her face and shoulders with kisses.

  She held his hand and did not move. Yes! These kisses were what had been bought by that shame! “Yes, and this hand, which will always be mine, is the hand of my accomplice.”5

  In this passage from Anna Karenina the imagist structure of its simile throughout the whole magnificently ferocious scene is resolved from the most profound relation of its author to the phenomenon, rather than from the feelings and emotions of its participants (as is this same theme, for example, in infinite variations, solved by Zola throughout the Rougon-Mac-quart cycle).

  On Anna Karenina Tolstoy placed an epigraph from the Epistle to the Romans: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” In a letter to Veresayev (23 May 1907) Mikhail Sukhotin quoted what Tolstoy meant by this epigraph, which had moved Veresayev:

  . . . I must repeat, that I chose this epigraph to express the idea that whatever is evil, whatever man does, brings bitter consequences, not from people, but from God and from what Anna Karenina experiences herself.6

  It is in the second part of the novel, from which our passage
is taken, that Tolstoy assumes the particular task of demonstrating “whatever is evil, whatever man does.”

  The temperament of the writer forces him to feel in the forms of the highest level of evil—in crime. The temperament of the moralist forces him to appraise this evil on the highest level of crime against a person—murder. And finally, the temperament of the artist forces this estimate of the behavior of his character to be presented with the help of all expressive means available to him.

  Crime—murder—is established as the basic expressive relation of the author to the phenomenon, and is simultaneously established as the determinant of all basic elements for the compositional treatment of the scene.

  It dictates the images and the similes:

  He felt what a murderer must feel when looking at the body he has deprived of life. The body he had deprived of life was their love. . . .

  as well as the images of the characters’ behavior, prescribing the fulfillment of actions, peculiar to love, in forms peculiar to murder:

  . . . as the murderer desperately throws himself on the body, as though with passion, and drags it and hacks it, so Vronsky covered her face and shoulders with kisses.

  These absolutely exact “directives,” defining the shading of behavior, were chosen from thousands of possibilities for the reason that they correspond identically with the relation of the author himself to the phenomenon.