This weaving of four epochs was magnificently conceived.*
Griffith stated:
. . . the stories will begin like four currents looked at from a hilltop. At first the four currents will flow apart, slowly and quietly. But as they flow, they grow nearer and nearer together, and faster and faster, until in the end, in the last act, they mingle in one mighty river of expressed emotion.26
But the effect didn’t come off. For again it turned out to be a combination of four different stories, rather than a fusion of four phenomena in a single imagist generalization.
Griffith announced his film as “a drama of comparisons.” And that is what Intolerance remains—a drama of comparisons, rather than a unified, powerful, generalized image.
Here is the same defect again: an inability to abstract a phenomenon, without which it cannot expand beyond the narrowly representational. For this reason we could not resolve any “supra-representational,” “conveying” (metaphorical) tasks.
Only by dividing “hot” from a thermometer reading may one speak of “a sense of heat.”
Only by abstracting “deep” from meters and fathoms may one speak of “a sense of depth.”
Only by disengaging “falling” from the fommla of the accelerated speed of a falling body (mv2/2) may one speak of “a sensation of falling!”
However, the failure of Intolerance to achieve a true “mingling” lies also in another circumstance: the four episodes chosen by Griffith are actually un-collatable. The formal failure of their mingling in a single image of Intolerance is only a reflection of a thematic and ideological error.
Is it possible that a tiny general feature—a general and superficially metaphysical and vague viewpoint towards Intolerance (with a capital !!)—can really unite in the spectator’s consciousness such obvious historically uncollated phenomena as the religious fanaticism of St. Bartholomew’s Eve with labor’s struggle in a highly developed capitalist state! And the bloody pages of the struggle for hegemony over Asia with the complicated process of conflict between the colonial Hebrew people and enslaving Mother Rome?
Here we find a key to the reason why the problem of abstraction is not once stumbled upon by Griffith’s montage method. The secret of this is not professional-technical, but ideological-intelle ctual.
It is not that representation cannot be raised with correct presentation and treatment to the structure of metaphor, simile, image. Nor is it that Griffith here altered his method, or his professional craftsmanship. But that he made no attempt at a genuinely thoughtful abstraction of phenomena—at an extraction of generalized conclusions on historical phenomena from a wide variety of historical data; that is the core of the fault.
In history and economics it was necessary for the gigantic work of Marx and the continuers of his teaching to aid us in understanding the laws of the process that stand behind miscellaneous separate data. Then science could succeed in abstracting a generalization from the chaos of separate traits characteristic for the phenomena.
In the practice of American film studios there is a splendid professional term—“limitations.” Such a director is “limited” to musical comedies. The “limits” of a certain actress are within fashionable rôles. Beyond these “limitations” (quite sensible in most cases) this or that talent cannot be thrust. Risking departure from these “limitations” sometimes results in unexpected brilliance, but ordinarily, as in commonplace phenomena, this leads to failure.
Using this term, I would say that in the realm of montage imagery the American cinema wins no laurels for itself; and it is ideological “limitations” that are responsible for this.
This is not affected by technique, nor by scope, nor by dimensions.
The question of montage imagery is based on a definite structure and system of thinking; it derives and has been derived only through collective consciousness, appearing as a reflection of a new (socialist) stage of human society and as a thinking result of ideal and philosophic education, inseparably connected with the social structure of that society.
We, our epoch—sharply ideal and intellectual— could not read the content of a shot without, before all else, having read its ideological nature, and therefore find in the juxtaposition of shots an arrangement of a new qualitative element, a new image, a new understanding.
Considering this, we could not help rushing into sharp excesses in this direction.
In October we cut shots of harps and balalaikas into a scene of Mensheviks addressing the Second Congress of Soviets. And these harps were shown not as harps, but as an imagist symbol of the mellifluent speech of Menshevik opportunism at the Congress. The balalaikas were not shown as balalaikas, but as an image of the tiresome strumming of these empty speeches in the face of the gathering storm of historical events. And placing side by side the Menshevik and the harp, the Menshevik and the balalaika, we were extending the frame of parallel montage into a new quality, into a new realm: from the sphere of action into the sphere of significance.*
The period of such rather naive juxtapositions passed swiftly enough. Similar solutions, slightly “baroque” in form, in many ways attempted (and not always successfully!) with the available palliative means of the silent film to anticipate that which is now done with such ease by the music track in the soundfilm! They quickly departed from the screen.
However, the chief thing remained—an understanding of montage as not merely a means of producing effects, but above all as a means of speaking, a means of communicating ideas, of communicating them by way of a special film language, by way of a special form of film speech.
The arrival at an understanding of normal film-speech quite naturally went through this stage of excess in the realm of the trope and primitive metaphor. It is interesting that in this direction we were covering methodological ground of great antiquity. Why. for example, the “poetic” image of the centaur is nothing more than a combination of man and horse with the aim of expressing the image of an idea, directly un-representable by a picture (but its exact meaning was that people of a certain place were “high speed”—swift in the race).
Thus the veiy production of simple meanings rises as a process of juxtaposition.
Therefore the play of juxtaposition in montage also has such a deep background of influence. On the other hand, it is exactly through elementary naked juxtaposition that must be worked out a system of the complicated inner (the outer no longer counts) juxtaposition that exists in each phrase of ordinary normal literate montage speech.
However, thi; same process is also correct for the production of any kind of speech in general, and above all for that literary speech, of which we are speaking. It is well known that the metaphor is an abridged simile.
And in connection with this Mauthner has very acutely written about cur language:
Every metaphor is witty. A people’s language, as it is spoken today, is the sum total of a million witticisms, is a collection of the points of a million anecdotes whose stories have been lost. In this connection one must visualize the people of the language-creating period as being even wittier than those present-day wags who live by their wits. . . . Wit makes use of distant similes. Close similes were captured immediately into concepts or words. A change in meaning consists in the conquest of these words, in the metaphorical or witty extension of the concept to distant similes. . . .27
And Emerson says of this:
As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.28
At the threshold of the creation of language stands the simile, the trope and the image.
All meanings in language are imagist in origin, and each of these may, in due time, lose its original imagist source. Both these states of words—imagery and non-imagery—are equally natural. If the non-imagery of a word was considered derivative as something elementary (which it is always), that
derives from the fact that it is a temporary latency of thought (which imagery is its new step), but movement attracts more attention and is more provocative of analysis than is latency.
The calm observer, reviewing a prepared transferred expression of a more complicated poetic creation, may find in his memory a corresponding non-imagist expression, more imagistically corresponding to his (the observer’s) mood of thought. If he says that this non-imagery is communis et primum se offerens ratio then he attributes his own condition to the creator of imagist expression. This is as if one were to expect that in the midst of a heated battle it is possible thus calmly to deliberate, as at a chess-board, with an absent partner. If one should transfer into the condition of the speaker himself, that would easily reverse the assertion of the cold observer and he would decide that primum se offerens, even if not communis, is exactly imagist. . . .29
In Werner’s work on the metaphor he thus places it in the very cradle of language, although for other motives—he links it not with the tendency to perceive new regions, familiarizing the unknown through the known, but, on the contrary, with the tendency to hide, to substitute, to replace in customary usage that which lies under some oral ban—and is “tabu.”30
It is interesting that the “fact word” itself is naturally a rudiment of the poetic trope:
Independently from the connection between the primary and derivative words, any word, as an aural indication of meaning, based on the combination of sound and meaning in simultaneity or succession, consequently, is metonymy.31
And he who would take it into his head to be indignant and rebel against this would inevitably fall into the position of the pedant in one of Tieck’s stories, who cried out:
“. . . When a man begins to compare one object with another, he lies directly. ‘The dawn strews roses.’ Can there be any thing more silly? ‘The sun sinks into the sea.’ Stuff!. . .‘The morning wakes.’ There is rio morning, how can it sleep? It is nothing but the hour when the sun rises. Plague! The sun does not rise, that too is nonsense and poetry. Oh! If I had my will with language, and might properly scour and sweep it! O damnation! Sweep! In this lying world, one cannot help talking nonsense!”32
The imagist transference of thought to simple representation is also echoed here. There is in Potebnya a good comment on this:
The image is more important than the representation. There is a tale of a monk who, in order to prevent himself from eating roast suckling during Lent, tarried on himself this invocation: “Suckling, transform thyself into a carp!” This tale, stripped of its satirical character, presents us with a universal historical phenomenon of human thought: word and image are the spiritual half of the matter, its essence.33
Thus or otherwise the primitive metaphor necessarily stands at the very dawn of language, closely linked with the period of the production of the first transfers, that is, the first words to convey meanings, and not merely motor and objective understanding, that is, with the period of the birth of the first tools, as the first means of “transferring” the functions of the body and its actions from man himself to the tool in his hands. It is not astonishing, therefore, that the period of the birth of articulate montage speech of the future had also to pass through a sharply metaphorical stage, characterized by an abundance, if not a proper estimation, of “plastic sharpness”!
However, these “sharpnesses” very soon became sensed as excesses and twistings of some sort of a “language.” And attention was gradually shifted from curiosity concerning excesses towards an interest in the nature of this language itself.
Thus the secret of the structure of montage was gradually revealed as a secret of the structure of emotional speech. For the very principle of montage, as is the entire individuality of its formation, is the substance of an exact copy of the language of excited emotional speech.
It is enough to examine the characteristics of similar speech, in order to be convinced, with no further commentary, that this is so.
Let us open to the appropriate chapter in Vendryes’ excellent book, Language:
The main difference between affective and logical language lies in the construction of the sentence. This difference stands out clearly when we compare the written with the spoken tongue. In French the two are so far removed from each other that a Frenchman never speaks as he writes and rarely writes as he speaks. . . .
. . . The elements that the written tongue endeavours to combine into a coherent whole seem to be divided up and disjointed in the spoken tongue: even the order is entirely different. It is no longer the logical order of present-day grammar. It has its logic, but this logic is primarily affective, and the ideas are arranged in accordance with the subjective importance the speaker gives to them or wishes to suggest to his listener, rather than with the objective rules of an orthodox process of reasoning.
In the spoken tongue, all idea of meaning in the purely grammatical sense, disappears. If I say, L’homme que vous voyez la-bas assis sur la greve est celui que j’ai rencontre hier a la gare (The man that you see sitting down there on the beach is he whom I met yesterday at the station), I am making use of the processes of the written tongue and form but one sentence. But in speaking, I should have said: V ous voyez bien cet homme—la-bas—il est assis sur la greve—eh bien! je l’ai rencontre hier, il etait à la gare. (You see that man, down there—he is sitting on the beach—well! I met him yesterday, he was at the station.) How many sentences have we here? It is very difficult to say. Imagine that I pause where the dashes are printed: the words la-bas in themselves would form one sentence, exactly as if in answer to a question—“Where is this man?—Down there.” And even the sentence il est assis sur la greve easily becomes two if I pause between the two component parts: “il est assis,” [il est] “sur la greve” (or “[c’est] sur la greve [qc’] il est assis”). The boundaries of the grammatical sentence are here so elusive that we had better give up all attempts to determine them. In a certain sense, there is but one sentence. The verbal image is one though it follows a kind of kinematical development. But whereas in the written tongue it is presented as a whole, when spoken it is cut up into short sections whose number and intensity correspond to the speaker’s impressions, or to the necessity he feels for vividly communicating them to others.34
Isn’t this an exact copy of what takes place in montage? And doesn’t what is said here about “written” language seem a duplication of the clumsy “long shot,” which, when it attempts to present something dramatically, always hopelessly looks like a florid, awkward phrase, full of the subordinate clauses, participles and adverbs of a “theatrical” mise-en-scène, with which it dooms itself?!
However, this by no means implies that it is necessary to chase at any cost after “montage hash.” In connection with this one may speak of the phrase as the author of “A Discussion of Old and New Style in the Russian Language,” the Slavophile Alexander Shishkov wrote of words:
In language both long and short words are necessary; for without short ones language would sound like the long-drawn-out moo of the cow, and without long ones—like the short monotonous chirp of a magpie.35
Concerning “affective logic,” about which Vendryes writes and which lies at the base of spoken speech, montage very quickly realized that “affective logic” is the chief thing, but for finding all the fullness of its system and laws, montage had to make further serious creative “cruises” through the “inner monologue” of Joyce, through the “inner monologue” as understood in film, and through the so-called “intellectual cinema,” before discovering that a fund of these laws can be found in a third variety of speech—not in written, nor in spoken speech, but in inner speech, where the affective structure functions in an even more full and pure form. But the formation of this inner speech is already inalienable from that which is enriched by sensual thinking.
Thus we arrived at the primary source of those interior principles, which already govern not only the formation of montage, but the inner formation of a
ll works of art—of those basic laws of the speech of art in general— of those general laws of form, which lie at the base not only of works of film art, but of all and all kinds of arts in general. But of that—at another time.
Let us return now to that historical stage when montage in our field realized itself as a montage trope, and let us follow that path of development which it performed in the field of creating a unity of work, inseparable from that process, in which it became conscious of itself as an independent language.
Thus, in its way, montage became conscious of itself among us with the very first, not imitative, but independent steps of our cinema.
It is interesting that even in the interval between the old cinema and our Soviet cinema, researches were conducted exactly along the line of juxtaposition. And it is even more interesting that at this stage they naturally are known as . . . contrasts. Therefore on them above all else lies the imprint of “contemplative dissection” instead of an emotional fusion in some “new quality,” as were already characterizing the first researches in the field of the Soviet cinema’s own language. Such a speculative play of contrasts fills, for example, the film Palace and Fortress as if to carry the principle of contrast from its title into the very style of the work. Here are still constructions of a type of un-crossed parallelism: “here and there,” “before and now.” It is completely in the spirit of the posters of the time, split into two halves, showing on the left, a landlord’s house before (the master, serfdom, flogging) and on the right—wow (a school in the same building, a nursery). It is completely such a type of colliding shots that we find in the film: the “points” of a ballerina (the Palace) and the shackled legs of Beidemann (the Fortress). Similarly speculative in the order of parallelism is given also in the combination of shots—Beidemann behind bars and . . . a caged canary in the jailer’s room.*
Film Form Page 26