Film Form

by Sergei Eisenstein

  Mr. Griffith found the idea to which he clung thus heroically in Dickens. That was as luck would have it, for he might have found the same idea almost anywhere. Newton deduced the law of gravitation from the fall of an apple; but a pear or a plum would have done just as well. The idea is merely that of a “break” in the narrative, a shifting of the story from one group of characters to another group. People who write the long and crowded novels that Dickens did, especially when they are published in parts, find this practice a convenience. You will meet with it in Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, Meredith, Hardy, and, I suppose, every other Victorian novelist. . . . Mr. Griffith might have found the same practice not only in Dumas pere, who cared precious little about form, but also in great artists like Tolstoy, Turgeniev, and Balzac. But, as a matter of fact, it was not in any of these others, but in Dickens that he found it; and it is significant of the predominant influence of Dickens that he should be quoted as an authority for a device which is really common to fiction at large.

  Even a superficial acquaintance with the work of the great English novelist is enough to persuade one that Dickens may have given and did give to cinematography far more guidance than that which led to the montage of parallel action alone.

  Dickens’s nearness to the characteristics of cinema in method, style, and especially in viewpoint and exposition, is indeed amazing. And it may be that in the nature of exactly these characteristics, in their community both for Dickens and for cinema, there lies a portion of the secret of that mass success which they both, apart from themes and plots, brought and still bring to the particular quality of such exposition and such writing.

  What were the novels of Dickens for his contemporaries, for his readers? There is one answer: they bore the same relation to them that the film bears to the same strata in our time. They compelled the reader to live with the same passions. They appealed to the same good and sentimental elements as does the film (at least on the surface); they alike shudder before vice,* they alike mill the extraordinary, the unusual, the fantastic, from boring, prosaic and everyday existence. And they clothe this common and prosaic existence in their special vision.

  Illumined by this light, refracted from the land of fiction back to life, this commonness took on a romantic air, and bored people were grateful to the author for giving them the countenances of potentially romantic figures.

  This partially accounts for the close attachment to the novels of Dickens and, similarly, to films. It was from this that the universal success of his novels derived. In an essay on Dickens, Stefan Zweig opens with this description of his popularity:

  The love Dickens’s contemporaries lavished upon the creator of Pickwick is not to be assessed by accounts given in books and biographies. Love lives and breathes only in the spoken word. To get an adequate idea of the intensity of this love, one must catch (as I once caught) an Englishman old enough to have youthful memories of the days when Dickens was still alive. Preferably it should be someone who finds it hard even now to speak of him as Charles Dickens, choosing, rather, to use the affectionate nickname of “Boz.” The emotion, tinged with melancholy, which these old reminiscences call up, gives us of a younger generation some inkling of the enthusiasm that inspired the hearts of thousands when the monthly instalments in their blue covers (great rarities, now) arrived at English homes. At such times, my old Dickensian told me, people would walk a long way to meet the postman when a fresh number was due, so impatient were they to read what Boz had to tell. . . . How could they be expected to wait patiently until the letter-carrier, lumbering along on an old nag, would arrive with the solution of these burning problems? When the appointed hour came round, old and young would sally forth, walking two miles and more to the post office merely to have the issue sooner. On the way home they would start reading, those who had not the luck of holding the book looking over the shoulder of the more fortunate mortal; others would set about reading aloud as they walked; only persons with a genius for self-sacrifice would defer a purely personal gratification, and would scurry back to share the treasure with wife and child.

  In every village, in every town, in the whole of the British Isles, and far beyond, away in the remotest parts of the earth where the English-speaking nations had gone to settle and colonize, Charles Dickens was loved. People loved him from the first moment when (through the medium of print) they made his acquaintance until his dying day. . . .4

  Dickens’s tours as a reader gave final proof of public affection for him, both at home and abroad. By nine o’clock on the morning that tickets for his lecture course were placed on sale in New York, there were two lines of buyers, each more than three-quarters of a mile in length:

  The tickets for the course were all sold before noon. Members of families relieved each other in the queues; waiters flew across the streets and squares from the neighboring restaurant, to serve parties who were taking their breakfast in the open December air; while excited men offered five and ten dollars for the mere permission to exchange places with other persons standing nearer the head of the line!5*6

  Isn’t this atmosphere similar to that of Chaplin’s tour through Europe, or the triumphant visit to Moscow of “Doug” and “Mary,” or the excited anticipation around the premiere of Grand Hotel in New York, when an airplane service assisted ticket buyers on the West Coast? The immense popular success of Dickens’s novels in his own time can be equaled in extent only by that whirlwind success which is now enjoyed by this or that sensational film success.

  Perhaps the secret lies in Dickens’s (as well as cinema’s) creation of an extraordinary plasticity. The observation in the novels is extraordinary—as is their optical quality. The characters of Dickens are rounded with means as plastic and slightly exaggerated as are the screen heroes of today. The screen’s heroes are engraved on the senses of the spectator with clearly visible traits, its villains are remembered by certain facial expressions, and all are saturated in the peculiar, slightly unnatural radiant gleam thrown over them by the screen.

  It is absolutely thus that Dickens draws his characters—this is the faultlessly plastically grasped and pitilessly sharply sketched gallery of immortal Pickwicks, Dombeys, Fagins, Tackletons, and others.

  Just because it never occurred to his biographers to connect Dickens with the cinema, they provide us with unusually objective evidence, directly linking the importance of Dickens’s observation with our medium.

  [John] Forster speaks of Dickens’s recollections of his childhood sufferings, and notes, as he could hardly fail to note, Dickens’s amazingly detailed memory. He does not note, as he should, how this super-acuteness of physical vision contributed a basic element to Dickens’s artistic method. For with that acuteness of physical vision, and that unerring recollection of every detail in the thing seen, went an abnormally complete grasp of the thing in the totality of its natural connections. . . .

  And if ever a man had the gift of the eye—and not merely of the eye but of the ear, and of the nose—and the faculty of remembering with microscopic accuracy of detail everything ever seen, or heard, or tasted, smelled, or felt, that man was Charles Dickens. . . . The whole picture arises before us in sight, sound, touch, taste, and pervading odour, just exactly as in real life, and with a vividness that becomes positively uncanny.

  To readers less sensitive than Dickens, this very vividness with which he visualizes plain things in plain everyday life appears to be “exaggeration.” It is no such thing. The truth is that Dickens always sees instantly, and in every last, least, tiny detail, all that there is to be seen; while lesser mortals see only a part, and sometimes a trifling part at that.7

  Zweig continues the case:

  He cuts through the fog surrounding the years of childhood like a clipper driving through the waves. In David Copperfield, that masked autobiography, we are given reminiscences of a two-year-old child concerning his mother with her pretty hair and youthful shape, and Peggotty with no shape at all; memories which are like silhouette
s standing out from the blank of his infancy. There are never any blurred contours where Dickens is concerned; he does not give us hazy visions, but portraits whose every detail is sharply defined. . . . As he himself once said, it is the little things that give meaning to life. He is, therefore, perpetually on the watch for tokens, be they never so slight; a spot of grease on a dress, an awkward gesture caused by shyness, a strand of reddish hair peeping from beneath a wig if its wearer happens to lose his temper. He captures all the nuances of a handshake, knows what the pressure of each finger signifies; detects the shades of meaning in a smile.

  Before he took the career of a writer, he was parliamentary reporter for a newspaper. In this capacity he became proficient in the art of summary, in compressing long-winded discussions; as shorthand writer he conveyed a word by a stroke, a whole sentence by a few curves and dashes. So in later days as an author he invented a kind of shorthand to reality, consisting of little signs instead of lengthy descriptions, an essence of observation distilled from the innumerable happenings of life. He has an uncannily sharp eye for the detection of these insignificant externals; he never overlooks anything; his memory and his keenness of perception are like a good camera lens which, in the hundredth part of a second, fixes the least expression, the slightest gesture, and yields a perfectly precise negative. Nothing escapes his notice. In addition, this perspicacious observation is enhanced by a marvellous power of refraction which, instead of presenting an object as merely reflected in its ordinary proportions from the surface of a mirror, gives us an image clothed in an excess of characteristics. For he invariably underlines the personal attributes of his characters. . . .

  This extraordinary optical faculty amounted to genius in Dickens. . . . His psychology began with the visible; he gained his insight into character by observation of the exterior—the most delicate and fine minutiae of the outward semblance, it is true, those utmost tenuosities which only the eyes that are rendered acute by a superlative imagination can perceive. Like the English philosophers, he does not begin with assumptions and suppositions, but with characteristics. . . . Through traits, he discloses types: Creakle had no voice, but spoke in a whisper; the exertion cost him, or the consciousness of talking in that feeble way, made his angry face much more angry, and his thick veins much thicker. Even as we read the description, the sense of terror the boys felt at the approach of this fiery blusterer becomes manifest in us as well. Uriah Heep’s hands are damp and cold; we experience a loathing for the creature at the very outset, as though we were faced by a snake. Small things? Externals? Yes, but they invariably are such as to recoil upon the soul.8

  The visual images of Dickens are inseparable from aural images. The English philosopher and critic, George Henry Lewes,9 though puzzled as to its significance, recorded that “Dickens once declared to me that every word said by his characters was distinctly heard by him . . .

  We can see for ourselves that his descriptions offer not only absolute accuracy of detail, but also an absolutely accurate drawing of the behavior and actions of his characters. And this is just as true for the most trifling details of behavior—even gesture, as it is for the basic generalized characteristics of the image. Isn’t this piece of description of Mr. Dombey’s behavior actually an exhaustive regisseur-actor directive?

  He had already laid his hand upon the bell-rope to convey his usual summons to Richards, when his eye fell upon a writing-desk, belonging to his deceased wife, which had been taken, among other things, from a cabinet in her chamber. It was not the first time that his eye had lighted on it. He carried the key in his pocket; and he brought it to his table and opened it now—having previously locked the room door—with a well-accustomed hand.10

  Here the last phrase arrests one’s attention: there is a certain awkwardness in its description. However, this “inserted” phrase: having previously locked the room door, “fitted in” as if recollected by the author in the middle of a later phrase, instead of being placed where it apparently should have been, in the consecutive order of the description, that is, before the words, and he brought it to his table, is found exactly at this spot for quite unfortuitous reasons.

  In this deliberate “montage” displacement of the time-continuity of the description there is a brilliantly caught rendering of the transient thievery of the action, slipped between the preliminary action and the act of reading another’s letter, carried out with that absolute “correctness” of gentlemanly dignity which Mr. Dombey knows how to give to any behavior or action of his.

  This very (montage) arrangement of the phrasing gives an exact direction to the “performer,” so that in defining this decorous and confident opening of the writing-desk, he must “play” the closing and locking of the door with a hint of an entirely different shade of conduct. And it would be this “shading” in which would also be played the unfolding of the letter; but in this part of the “performance” Dickens makes this shading more precise, not only with a significant arrangement of the words, but also with an exact description of characteristics.

  From beneath a heap of tom and cancelled scraps of paper, he took one letter that remained entire. Involuntarily holding his breath as he opened this document, and ’bating in the stealthy action something of his arrogant demeanour, he sat down, resting his head upon one hand, and read it through.

  The reading itself is done with a shading of absolutely gentlemanly cold decorum:

  He read it slowly and attentively, and with a nice particularity to every syllable. Otherwise than as his great deliberation seemed unnatural, and perhaps the result of an effort equally great, he allowed no sign of emotion to escape him. When he had read it through, he folded and refolded it slowly several times, and tore it carefully into fragments. Checking his hand in the act of throwing these away, he put them in his pocket, as if unwilling to trust them even to the chances of being reunited and deciphered; and instead of ringing, as usual, for little Paul, he sat solitary all the evening in his cheerless room.

  This scene does not appear in the final version of the novel, for with the aim of increasing the tension of the action, Dickens cut out this passage on Forster’s advice; in his biography of Dickens Forster preserved this passage to show with what mercilessness Dickens sometimes “cut” writing that had cost him great labor. This mercilessness once more emphasizes that sharp clarity of representation towards which Dickens strove by all means, endeavoring with purely cinematic laconism to say what he considered necessary. (This, by the way, did not in the least prevent his novels from achieving enormous breadth.)

  I don’t believe I am wrong in lingering on this example, for one need only alter two or three of the character names and change Dickens’s name to the name of the hero of my essay, in order to impute literally almost everything told here to the account of Griffith.

  From that steely, observing glance, which I remember from my meeting with him, to the capture en passant of key details or tokens—indications of character, Griffith has all this in as much a Dickens-esque sharpness and clarity as Dickens, on his part, had cinematic “optical quality,” “frame composition,” “close-up,” and the alteration of emphasis by special lenses.

  Analogies and resemblances cannot be pursued too far—they lose conviction and charm. They begin to take on the air of machination or card-tricks. I should be very sorry to lose the conviction of the affinity between Dickens and Griffith, allowing this abundance of common traits to slide into a game of anecdotal semblance of tokens.

  All the more that such a gleaning from Dickens goes beyond the limits of interest in Griffith’s individual cinematic craftsmanship and widens into a concern with film-craftsmanship in general. This is why I dig more and more deeply into the film-indications of Dickens, revealing them through Griffith—for the use of future film-exponents. So I must be excused, in leafing through Dickens, for having found in him even—a “dissolve.” How else could this passage be defined—the opening of the last chapter of A Tale of Two Cities:


  Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. . . .

  Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to what they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my Father’s house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants!

  How many such “cinematic” surprises must be hiding in Dickens’s pages!

  However, let us turn to the basic montage structure, whose rudiment in Dickens’s work was developed into the elements of film composition in Griffith’s work. Lifting a comer of the veil over these riches, these hitherto unused experiences, let us look into Oliver Twist. Open it at the twenty-first chapter. Let’s read its beginning:

  Chapter XXI*

  1. It was a cheerless morning when they got into the street; blowing and raining hard; and the clouds looking dull and stormy.

  The night had been very wet: for large pools of water had collected in the road: and the kennels were overflowing.

  There was a faint glimmering of the coming day in the sky; but it rather aggravated than relieved the gloom of the scene: the sombre light only serving to pale that which the street lamps afforded, without shedding any wanner or brighter tints upon the wet housetops, and dreary streets.