Film Form

by Sergei Eisenstein

  In these and other examples there is nowhere any further tendency towards a union of representations in a generalized image: they are united neither by a unity of composition nor by the chief element, emotion: they are presented in an even narrative, and not in that degree of emotional excitement when it is only natural for an imagist turn of speech to arise.

  But pronounced without a corresponding emotional degree, without corresponding emotional preparation, the “image” inevitably sounds absurd. When Hamlet tells Laertes:

  I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers

  Could not, with all their quantity of love,

  Make up my sum. . . .

  this is very pathetic and arresting; but try taking from this the expression of heightened emotion, transfer it to a setting of ordinary lifelike conversation, that is, consider the immediate objective content of this image, and it will evoke nothing but laughter!

  Strike (1924) abounded in “trials” of this new and independent direction. The mass shooting of the demonstrators in the finale, interwoven with bloody scenes at the municipal slaughter-house, merged (for that “childhood” of our cinema this sounded fully convincing and produced a great impression!) in a film-metaphor of “a human slaughter-house,” absorbing into itself the memory of bloody repressions on the part of the autocracy. Here already were not the simple “contemplative” contrasts of Palace and Fortress, but already—though still crude and still “hand-made”—a consistent and conscious attempt at juxtaposition.

  Juxtaposition, striving to tell about an execution of workers not only in representations, but further also through a generalized “plastic turn of speech,” approaching a verbal image of “a bloody slaughter-house.”

  In Potemkin three separate close-ups of three different marble lions in different attitudes were merged into one roaring lion and, moreover, in another film-dimension— an embodiment of a metaphor: “The very stones roar!”

  Griffith shows us an ice-break rushing along. Somewhere in the center of the splintering ice lies, unconscious, Anna (Lillian Gish). Leaping from ice-cake to ice-cake comes David (Richard Barthelmess) to save her.

  But the parallel race of the ice-break and of the human actions are nowhere brought together by him in a unified image of “a human flood,” a mass of people bursting their fetters, a mass of people rushing onward in an all-shattering inundation, as there is, for example, in the finale of Mother, by Gorky-Zarkhi-Pudovkin.

  Of course, on this path excesses also occur, and also bald failures; of course, in more than a few examples these were good intentions defeated by shortcomings in compositional principles and by insufficient reasons for them in the context: then, in place of a flashing unity of image, a miserable trope is left on the level of an unrealized fusion, on the level of a mechanical pasting together of the type of “Came the rain and two students.”

  But thus or otherwise the dual parallel rows characteristic of Griffith ran in our cinema on the way to realizing themselves in the future unity of the montage image at first as a whole series of plays of montage comparisons, montage metaphors, montage puns.

  These were more or less stormy floods, all serving to make clearer and clearer the final main task in the montage side of creative work—the creation in it of an inseparable domination of the image, of the unified montage image, of the montage-built image, embodying the theme, as this was achieved in the “Odessa steps” of Potemkin, in the “attack of the Kappel Division” of Chapayev, in the hurricane of Storm Over Asia, in the Dnieper prologue of Ivan, more weakly—the landing of We Are from Kronstadt, with new strength in “Bozhenko’s funeral” in Shchors, in Vertov’s Three Songs About Lenin, in the “attack of the knights” in Alexander Nevsky. . . . This is the glorious independent path of the Soviet cinema—the path of the creation of the montage image-episode, the montage imageevent, the montage image-film in its entirety— of equal rights, of equal influence and equal responsibility in the perfect film-on an equal footing with the image of the hero, with the image of man, and of the people.

  Our conception of montage has far outgrown the classic dualistic montage esthetic of Griffith, symbolized by the two never-convergent parallel racers, interweaving the thematically variegated strips with a view towards the mutual intensification of entertainment, tension and tempi.

  For us montage became a means of achieving a unity of a higher order— a means through the montage image of achieving an organic embodiment of a single idea conception, embracing all elements, parts, details of the film-work.

  And thus understood, it seems considerably broader than an understanding of narrowly cinematographic montage; thus understood, it carries much to fertilize and enrich our understanding of art methods in general.

  And in conformity with this principle of our montage, unity and diversity are both sounded as principles.

  Montage removes its last contradictions by abolishing dualist contradictions and mechanical parallelism between the realms of sound and sight in what we understand as audiovisual (“vertical”) montage.*

  It finds its final artistic unity in the resolution of the problems of the unity of audio-visual synthesis—problems that are now being decided by us, problems that are not even on the agenda of American researches.

  Stereoscopic and color film are being realized before our eyes.

  And the moment is drawing near when, not only through the method of montage, but also through the synthesis of idea, the drama of acting man, the screen picture, sound, three-dimension and color, that same great law of unity and diversity— lying at the base of our thinking, at the base of our philosophy, and to an equal degree penetrating the montage method from its tiniest link to the fullness of montage imagery in the film as a whole—passes into a unity of the whole screen image.

  [1944]

  Appendix A

  A STATEMENT

  THE DREAM of a sound-film has come true. With the invention of a practical sound-film, the Americans have placed it on the first step of substantial and rapid realization. Germany is working intensively in the same direction. The whole world is talking about the silent thing that has learned to talk.

  We who work in the U.S.S.R. are aware that with our technical potential we shall not move ahead to a practical realization of the sound-film in the near future. At the same time we consider it opportune to state a number of principle premises of a theoretical nature, for in the accounts of the invention it appears that this advance in films is being employed in an incorrect direction. Meanwhile, a misconception of the potentialities within this new technical discovery may not only hinder the development and perfection of the cinema as an art, but also threatens to destroy all its present formal achievements.

  At present, the film, working with visual images, has a powerful affect on a person and has rightfully taken one of the first places among the arts.

  It is known that the basic (and only) means that has brought the cinema to such a powerfully affective strength is MONTAGE. The affirmation of montage, as the chief means of effect, has become the indisputable axiom on which the world-wide culture of the cinema has been built.

  The success of Soviet films on the world’s screens is due, to a significant degree, to those methods of montage which they first revealed and consolidated.

  Therefore, for the further development of the cinema, the important moments will be only those that strengthen and broaden the montage methods of affecting the spectator. Examining each new discovery from this viewpoint, it is easy to show the insignificance of the color and the stereoscopic film in comparison with the vast significance of SOUND.

  Sound-recording is a two-edged invention, and it is most probable that its use will proceed along the line of least resistance, i.e., along the line of satisfying simple curiosity.

  In the first place there will be commercial exploitation of the most saleable merchandise, TALKING FILMS. Those in which sound-recording will proceed on a naturalistic level, exactly corresponding with the movement on the sc
reen, and providing a certain “illusion” of talking people, of audible objects, etc.

  A first period of sensations does not injure the development of a new art, but it is the second period that is fearful in this case, a second period that will take the place of the fading virginity and purity of this first perception of new technical possibilities, and will assert an epoch of its automatic utilization for “highly cultured dramas” and other photographed performances of a theatrical sort.

  To use sound in this way will destroy the culture of montage, for every ADHESION of sound to a visual montage piece increases its inertia as a montage piece, and increases the independence of its meaning—and this will undoubtedly be to the detriment of montage, operating in the first place not on the montage pieces, but on their JUXTAPOSITION.

  ONLY A CONTRAPUNTAL USE of sound in relation to the visual montage piece will afford a new potentiality of montage development and perfection.

  THE FIRST EXPERIMENTAL WORK WITH SOUND MUST BE DIRECTED ALONG THE LINE OF ITS DISTINCT NON-SYNCHRONIZATION WITH THE VISUAL IMAGES. And only such an attack will give the necessary palpability which will later lead to the creation of an ORCHESTRAL COUNTERPOINT of visual and aural images.

  This new technical discovery is not an accidental moment in film history, but an organic way out of a whole series of impasses that have seemed hopeless to the cultured cinematic avant-garde.

  The FIRST IMPASSE is the sub-title and all the unavailing attempts to tie it into the montage composition, as a montage piece (such as breaking it up into phrases and even words, increasing and decreasing the size of type used, employing camera movement, animation, and so on).

  The SECOND IMPASSE is the EXPLANATORY pieces (for example, certain inserted close-ups) that burden the montage composition and retard the tempo.

  The tasks of theme and story grow more complicated every day; attempts to solve these by methods of “visual” montage alone either lead to unsolved problems or force the director to resort to fanciful montage structures, arousing the fearsome eventuality of meaninglessness and reactionary decadence.

  Sound, treated as a new montage element (as a factor divorced from the visual image), will inevitably introduce new means of enormous power to the expression and solution of the most complicated tasks that now oppress us with the impossibility of overcoming them by means of an imperfect film method, working only with visual images.

  The CONTRAPUNTAL METHOD of constructing the sound-film will not only not weaken the INTERNATIONAL CINEMA, but will bring its significance to unprecedented power and cultural height.

  Such a method for constructing the sound-film will not confine it to a national market, as must happen with the photographing of plays, but will give a greater possibility than ever before for the circulation throughout the world of a filmically expressed idea.

  (signed by) S. M. EISENSTEIN

  V. I. PUDOVKIN

  G. V. ALEXANDROV

  [Note: This historic collective “Statement,” generally assumed to have been initiated and composed by the first of its three signatories and endorsed by the other two, first appeared in the Leningrad magazine, Zhizn lskusstva, on August 5, 1928. All previous English texts have been translated from a German publication of the statement later in that month. The above is the first direct translation into English from the original Russian text. As predicted by the Statement, progress in the technical development of the Soviet sound-film was slow. In September of that year, the Shorin sound-system was first tested in Leningrad, and these tests were exhibited in March of the following year; in Moscow the Tager system was tried out in July 1929. In August the Leningrad studio of Sovkino constructed the first sound-stage, which was first used for the synchronization of recently completed films. Following the release of Old and New in October, arrangements were made for Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Tisse to go abroad to study the sound-film.]

  Appendix B

  NOTES FROM A DIRECTOR’S LABORATORY

  (DURING WORK ON Ivan the Terrible)

  1. The First Vision

  THE MOST important thing is to have the vision. The next is to grasp and hold it. In this there is no difference whether you are writing a film-script, pondering the plan of the production as a whole, or thinking out a solution for some particular detail.

  You must see and feel what you are thinking about. You must see and grasp it. You must hold and fix it in your memory and senses. And you must do it at once.

  When you are in a good working mood, images swarm through your busy imagination. Keeping up with them and catching them is very much like grappling with a run of herring.

  You suddenly see the outline of a whole scene and, rising simultaneously before this same inner eye, a close-up in full detail: a head nesting on a great white ruff.

  Just as you are seizing from the passing figures in your imagination a characteristic bend of Tzar Ivan’s back in the confessional, you must drop your pencil and take up your pen to sketch the dialogue for this scene, and before the ink of this is dry, your pencil is once more making a note of an image that came to you during the dialogue—of the priest’s long white hair descending like a canopy over the Tzar’s graying head. Before this mood has finished, you find yourself drawing with your pen and penciling notes for the dialogue—on the sheets of drawings.

  Directions become drawings; the voices and intonations of various characters are drawn as series of facial expressions. Whole scenes first take shape as batches of drawings before they take on the clothing of words.

  In this way mountains of folders, stuffed with drawings, accumulate around the writing of the script—these multiply as the production plans are conceived—and they become a storage problem as the details of sequences and mises-en-scène are worked out.

  These are nothing more than attempts to grasp stenographically the features of those images that flash through your mind in thinking about the individual details of your film. These drawings cannot claim to be more than this, nor can they possibly make any claim as drawings!

  But neither can they claim less than this! For in them are secured the principal, initial elements of those ideas that will later have to be worked on, developed and realized in the course of the coming weeks and months: through the work of the designer who will have to transform rough sketches into a system of blueprints for the settings, through the work of the make-up man who will have to fuss for hours with greasepaint and wigs to achieve the same effect on the screen that the light pressure of a pencil indicated so freely on paper.

  For days we will struggle with the stubborn cloth, cutting and draping it to capture that rhythm of folds that suddenly struck me when I closed my eyes over that bit of brocade and envisioned a procession of boyars in heavy robes moving slowly to the chambers of the dying Tzar.

  And Cherkasov’s incomparably lithe and flexible body will practice long and tiringly to produce the tragic bend of Tzar Ivan’s figure so spontaneously fixed on paper as camera setups. In intent these drawings are no more (but also no less) than those Japanese paper toys that, when cast into warm water, unfold and develop stems, leaves and flowers of fantastic and surprising shape.

  Altogether, to change the image, they are no more than the corner of a veil lifted from the creative kitchen of film production.

  Here a viewpoint on that suddenly rising head and ruff is calculated.

  Here the characteristic position of fingers and hands in El Greco’s paintings is analyzed.

  And here is a trial for the most effective intersection of the curve of an arch by a tall, dark figure in the foreground.

  Sometimes the hint fixed on paper will be developed and transferred to the screen. Sometimes it will be scrapped. Sometimes the contribution of an actor, or some unforeseen possibility (or more frequently, impossibility) of lighting, or any kind of production circumstance will alter or revise your first vision. But even here, by other means and methods, you will strive to convey in the finished work that invaluable seed that was present in you
r first vision of what you hoped to see on the screen.

  2. Facing the Camera

  The dream becomes reality.

  It is no longer pen and pencil, notebooks, scraps torn from envelopes, backs of telegrams, announcements, invitations—all completely covered with sketches and notes—that lie before one.

  The dream has grown up to be an unwieldy, massive thing.

  The words of the script on the capture of Kazan have grown into a military camp.

  The rays of the sun are so scorching that we are all compelled to wear sun helmets. No second under this sun can be spent in dream or fantasy. Fancy is now in harness.

  The earlier free play of fantasy has now become depth of focus, choice of the properly dense filters for the lens, the clicking of the footage meter.

  The cold glass of the lens looks out mercilessly on the hot chaos of tents, reflectors, armor and umbrellas—paying attention to nothing but that which has been called into being by the innocent pages of the script.

  From the sun-scorched plains of Kazan the cameras move to the sound-stage. No longer do we face the dust of hundreds of galloping horses.