Film Form

by Sergei Eisenstein

  This moment can be thought of as symbolic of the whole production both in form and in execution: intensity of action everywhere “flew” beyond the limits of the accepted norm of representation, forcing the action with an unusual degree of tension to jump beyond the limits of the accepted measure and the accepted dimension.

  In another part of the play we needed a “tense” scene. Glumov’s diary is stolen by Golutvin and handed over to Mamayeva.

  “Tension” was taken beyond the frame of a tense performance of the dialogue: we introduced a new measure of tension into the scene—a tight-rope. Golutvin, balancing and running along it, spoke his lines. The tension of such an “act on wire” extends the conventional tension of acting and transfers it into a new level of real physical tension.

  Throughout the production there was a continuity of theatrical playing, but at the slightest “rise in temperature,” this theatrical “play” leaped over into circus “work”: a running jump from quality to quality.

  A gesture turns into gymnastics, rage is expressed through a somersault, exaltation through a salto-mortale, lyricism on “the mast of death.” The grotesque of this style permitted leaps from one type of expression to another. . . .*

  The method worked in comedy, for the leap—a dynamic characteristic in a successive process—always proceeds from inside a static condition—of a forced external observance of simultaneity (i.e., of the same dimension).

  The “new quality” was treated as if it were the old—the “preceding” quality. This is in itself one of the means of achieving comic effects. How amusing it is, for example, when the latest stage of conveyance is forced to be dependent on the conveyance of an earlier epoch—when an automobile is harnessed to . . . oxen (as in Little Red Devils) or to mules (as in Le dernier milliardaire).

  It is important that the author himself, in this case, while accomplishing the leap from theater to cinema, also accomplished an inner leap in understanding the method: in practice he understood that the method of the leap, comical under conditions of static appearance, works pathetically under conditions of a dynamic process. But this is something to be discussed in more detail on another occasion.

  It is sufficient in the present essay to say that the connection between my eccentric theater work and my pathetic cinema work is more sequential and organic than one might have supposed at first glance!

  A NOTE:

  Sometimes it seems strange that in matters of practice in the sound-film, that I should resemble the last to arrive at the wedding! Youngest of our directors at the time of its inauguration, and last to take part in its work. But on closer examination this is not quite so.

  My first work in the sound-film was . . . in 1926. And in connection with (again!) Potemkin.

  Potemkin— at least in its foreign circulation—had a special score written for it. The composer was Edmund Meisel, who wrote music for other silent films, both before and after his work on Potemkin. But there was nothing particularly extraordinary in this fact—for the history of silent films is sprinkled with such special scores. Music had even been used within the filming of certain films—for example, Ludwig Berger had filmed Ein Walzertraum to the music of Strauss.

  Less usual, perhaps, was the way the Potemkin score was composed. It was written very much as we work today on a sound-track. Or rather, as we should always work, with creative friendship and friendly creative collaboration between composer and director.

  With Meisel this took place in spite of the short time for composition that he was given, and the brevity of my visit to Berlin in 1926 for this purpose. He agreed at once to forego the purely illustrative function common to musical accompaniments at that time (and not only at that time!) and stress certain “effects,” particularly in the “music of machines” in the last reel.

  This was my only categorical demand: not only to reject customary melodiousness for this sequence of “Meeting the Squadron,” relying entirely on a rhythmic beating of percussion, but also to give substance to this demand by establishing in the music as well as in the film at the decisive place a “throwing over” into a “new quality” in the sound structure.

  So it was Potemkin at this point that stylistically broke away from the limits of the “silent film with musical illustrations” into a new sphere—into sound-film, where true models of this art-form live in a unity of fused musical and visual images,* composing the work with a united audio-visual image. It is exactly owing to these elements, anticipating the potentialities of an inner substance for composition in the sound-film, that the sequence of “Meeting the Squadron” (which along with the “Odessa steps” had such “crushing” effect abroad) deserves a leading place in the anthology of cinema.

  It is especially interesting for me that the general construction of Potemkin (a leap into a new quality) maintained in the music everything that pierced the pathetic construction—the condition of a qualitative leap which we have seen in Potemkin was inseparable from the organism of the theme.

  Here the “silent” Potemkin teaches the sound-film a lesson, emphasizing again and again the position that for an organic work a single law of construction must penetrate it decisively in all its “significances,” and in order to be not “off-stage,” but stand as an organic part of the film, the music must also be governed, not only by the same images and themes, but as well by the same basic laws and principles of construction that govern the work as a whole.

  To a considerable degree I was able to accomplish this in the sound-film proper—in my first sound-film, Alexander Nevsky. It was possible to accomplish this, thanks to the collaboration with such a wonderful and brilliant artist as Sergei Prokofiev.12

  Achievement

  NEW INTELLECTUAL content, new forms for the embodiment of this content, new methods of theoretical comprehension—these are what startled foreign audiences of the Soviet cinema.

  Though not always complete in their thematic solutions, nor perfected in their formal embodiment, and far from conclusive in theoretical knowledge and comprehension (all of which was critically perceived by ourselves), our films came as a revelation in the capitalist countries.

  What an unexpected intellectual shock came to America and Europe with the appearance of films in which social problems were suddenly presented with all the dots on all the “i’s”—to audiences that had heretofore seen only the rarest and vaguest hints of even an undotted “i” on their screens.

  But that in itself was not enough. In this first formally imperfect period, our films, though novel in theme, aroused little more than curiosity.

  I recall a half-ironical, half-fastidious appraisal (in, I believe, Filmkurier) at the time Palace and Fortress, one of our first exported films, was shown in Berlin:

  This eye-scratching imperfection of harsh lighting, plus the crudeness of the whole treatment, does have a certain appeal and even piquancy for our jaded vision. . . .

  And how deeply the emotions of the foreign spectator were scratched when, after Potemkin, our films charged down on him!

  Born of new intellectual demands, and of the desire to live up to these demands and to be adequate to them, the formal singularities of our films astonished these audiences no less than had their themes and ideas.

  Often preceding official, diplomatic recognition of our country, our films successfully forced their way across frontiers, despite the obstacles of censorship, and with their art enlisted friends even among those who could not immediately realize the scope of our ideals.

  So it was our cinema—youngest in years, but the most vigorous, vital and rich in emotion and depth of idea—that very soon took the lead of its older sister arts on the other side of the barriers around us.

  And its influence abroad was immense.

  If in our beginnings we were more than a little indebted to American film-makers, it may also be said that this debt has been repaid with interest.

  When I arrived in New York in 1930 I was literally swamped with clippings referring to
Milestone’s film version of All Quiet on the Western Front, which had just appeared. There was not one review that did not mention our influence on the making of this film!

  If Raisman had happened to arrive simultaneously with the appearance of King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread, he would doubtless have seen similar references to The Soil Is Thirsty.

  Sternberg’s Shanghai Express was called to life by Ilya Trauberg’s China Express, and the obligation of Wild Boys of the Road to Road to Life is generally admitted.

  The German film industry considered Unser Emden a direct reply to Potemkin, while it may be said that Viva Villa reflected the influence of all Soviet film-makers, including October— not to mention our unfinished Mexican film, Que Viva Mexico! Mamoulian’s first film, Applause, was completely enslaved by “symbolism of objects,” so typical of our films of the 1920’s.

  This influence of the Soviet cinema is many-sided—with countless indirect instances for each of the cited direct examples. It is sometimes revealed in attempts to deal with broader themes than the eternal triangle—or in a bolder portrayal of reality, a characteristic of our films’ search for fidelity—or in the mere wish to make use of those formal methods that are the fruit of our cinema’s new intellectual content.

  As for a theoretical comprehension of the cinema, there are still few individual efforts in this field outside our country, for only here is there any intensive or systematic attempt by film-makers themselves to work on research and analysis of this most amazing of the arts.

  As a genuinely major art the cinema is unique in that it is, in the full sense of the term, a child of socialism. The other arts have centuries of tradition behind them. The years covered by the entire history of cinematography are fewer than the centuries in which the other arts have developed.

  Yet what is most essential is that cinema as an art in general, and, further, as an art not only equal to, but in many respects superior to, its fellow-arts, began to be spoken of seriously only with the beginning of Socialist cinematography.

  Though it was a matter of years before the full realization of our cinema, that some of the greatest minds pointed in our country to the cinema as the most important of the arts and the one of greatest mass-potency, it required the appearance of a brilliant constellation of Soviet films before people across the frontier began to speak of the cinema as an art deserving as serious attention as is ordinarily given the theater, literature, or painting.

  It was only then that the cinema rose above the level of the music-hall, the amusement park, the zoo, and the chamber of horrors, to take its place within the family of great arts.

  The cinema would seem to be the highest stage of embodiment for the potentialities and aspirations of each of the arts.

  Moreover, the cinema is that genuine and ultimate synthesis of all artistic manifestations that fell to pieces after the peak of Greek culture, which Diderot sought vainly in opera, Wagner in music-drama, Scriabin in his color-concerti, and so on and on.

  For sculpture—cinema is a chain of changing plastic forms, bursting, at long last, ages of immobility.

  For painting—cinema is not only a solution for the problem of movement in pictorial images, but is also the achievement of a new and unprecedented form of graphic art, an art that is a free stream of changing, transforming, commingling forms, pictures, and compositions, hitherto possible only in music.

  Music has always possessed this possibility, but with the advent of cinema, the melodious and rhythmic flow of music acquired new potentialities of imagery—visual, palpable, concrete (true, our practice of the new art knows as yet but few cases of any complete fusion of aural and visual images).

  For literature—cinema is an expansion of the strict diction achieved by poetry and prose into a new realm where the desired image is directly materialized in audio-visual perceptions.

  And Anally, it is only in cinema that are fused into a real unity all those separate elements of the spectacle once inseparable in the dawn of culture, and which the theater for centuries has vainly striven to amalgamate anew.

  Here is real unity:

  Of mass and individual, in which the mass is genuine, and not a handful of participants in a “crowd scene,” hurrying around back-stage in order to reappear from the opposite wings to give a “bigger” impression.

  Here is a unity of man and space. How many inventive minds have striven unsuccessfully to solve this problem on the stage! Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia, and how many others! And how easily this problem is solved in cinema.

  The screen need not adapt itself to the abstractions of Craig in order to make man and his environment commensurate. Not satisfied with the mere reality of the setting, the screen compels reality itself to participate in the action. “Our woods and hills will dance”—this is no longer merely an amusing line from a Krylov fable, but the orchestral part played by the landscape, which plays as much of a part in the film as does everything else. In a single cinematographic act, the film fuses people and a single individual, town and country. It fuses them with dizzying change and transfer. With an all-embracing compass of whole countries or of any single character. With its ability to follow watchfully not only the clouds gathering in the hills, but also the swelling of a tear from beneath an eyelash.

  The diapason of the dramatist’s creative potentialities widens beyond all limits. And the keyboard of the sound mixer, who long ago ceased to be a mere composer, stretches for miles to the right and to the left, embracing not only all the sounds of nature, but also any that the author may invent.

  We sometimes forget that we have in our hands—a genuine miracle, a miracle of technical and artistic potentialities, only a fraction of which we have as yet learned to utilize.

  We who have learned that there are neither limits nor insurmountable barriers to creative activity shall do well to recall this.

  Again and again and again will all the advantages of the cinema flash out if we can picture the arts arranged according to the degree in which they are adapted to their chief task—the reflection of reality and the master of this reality—man.

  How narrow is the diapason of sculpture which in most cases is obliged to tear man from his inseparable environment and society in order to hint—by his features and posture—at his inner world which is a mirror of the world around him. A diapason bereft of word, color, movement, the changing phases of drama, the progressive unfolding of events.

  How frustrated have been those efforts by composers—Richard Strauss, in particular—to burden music with the task of conveying specific images.

  How bound is literature, capable of penetrating into the most subtle coils of a man’s consciousness, as well as into the movement of events and epochs, with speculative methods and melodic-rhythmic means, but can only hint at that amplitude of the senses, called for by every line and every page.

  How imperfect and limited, too, is the theater in this respect! Only by external “physical action” and behavior is it able to convey to the spectator the inner content, the inner movement of consciousness and feelings, the inner world in which live the characters and the author himself. But this is not the material of representation alone.

  Rejecting incidentals as well as the “imitative limitations” of the arts as defined by Lessing, and basing ourselves on the most important factors, we might describe the method of each of the arts:

  The method of sculpture—patterned on the human body’s structure.

  The method of painting—patterned on the positions of bodies and their relations with nature.

  The method of literature—patterned on the interrelations of reality and man.

  The method of theater—patterned on the behavior and activity of people roused by outer and inner motives.

  The method of music—patterned on the laws of the inner harmonies of emotionally apprehended phenomena.

  In one way or another, all of these—from the most external and lapidary, but more material and less ephemeral, to the most subtle
and plastic, but less concrete and tragically ephemeral—with all the means at their disposal, strain towards a single aim.

  And that is, through their structures and methods—to reconstruct, to reflect reality, and above all the consciousness and feelings of man. None of the “previous” arts has been able to achieve this purpose to the full.

  For the ceiling of one is—the body of man.

  The ceiling of another—his acts and behavior.

  The ceiling of a third—is the elusive emotional harmony that attends these.

  The full embrace of the whole inner world of man, of a whole reproduction of the outer world, cannot be achieved by any one of them.

  When any of these arts strives to accomplish this end, by venturing outside its own frame, the very base that holds the art together is inevitably broken.

  The most heroic attempt to achieve this in literature was made by James Joyce in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake.

  Here was reached the limit in reconstructing the reflection and refraction of reality in the consciousness and feelings of man.

  Joyce’s originality is expressed in his attempt to solve this task with a special dual-level method of writing: unfolding the display of events simultaneously with the particular manner in which these events pass through the consciousness and feelings, the associations and emotions of one of his chief characters. Here literature, as nowhere else, achieves an almost physiological palpability. To the whole arsenal of literary methods of influence has been added a compositional structure that I would call “ultra-lyrical.” For while the lyric, equally with the imagery, reconstructs the most intimate passage of the inner logic of feeling, Joyce patterns it on the physiological organization of the emotions, as well as on the embryology of the formation of thought.

  The effect at times is astounding, but the price paid is the entire dissolution of the very foundation of literary diction, the entire decomposition of literary method itself; for the lay reader the text has been turned into abracadabra.