Film Form

by Sergei Eisenstein

  Now Tzar Ivan is swearing his vow over the coffin of his poisoned wife. At this moment he would seem to be absolutely alone with her body.

  Nothing of the sort. The fearful steel cameras are recording his every movement, every trace of emotion on his face.

  Eyes are watching him intently from every corner of the sound-stage: to make sure that he does not slide out of the compositional margins, that he does not slip out of focus, or out of the laboriously set lighting, that he does not raise his voice beyond the level that the sound-engineers have prepared for. . . .

  A few days later in the same cathedral where the aging Tzar wept over the coffin of his Tzaritza, the same man, but now fifteen years younger, is being crowned Tzar!

  It requires a great effort of creative will and imagination on the part of Cherkasov to transform himself from a mature man weighed down by cares, into an impassioned youth full of hope and boldly looking towards a glorious future.

  And with the ruthlessness of H. G. Wells’ “time machine,” the same camera boom is wheeled into position to record, with the same objectivity and accuracy as for the stem words of the graying Tzar, the youthful speech and gestures of the newly crowned Tzar.

  One of the absorbing aspects of film-making, compensating for much that is irksome, difficult and unpleasant, is the constant variety and novelty of the subject matter.

  Today you film a record-breaking harvest. Tomorrow a matador in the bull-ring. The next day, the Patriarch blessing the new Tzar.

  And each subject requires its own peculiar and strict technique.

  That the scythe may be more effective in the fields of the collective-farm, it must be handled with no less strict an observance of rule than that observed by the matador preparing his muleta and sword for the kill.

  Equally strict is the ritual in the ceremonies and customs of the past which you resurrect when you bring the people of that past to the screen of today.

  And so Father Pavel Tzvetkov, one of the deans of Moscow, himself dressed in civilian clothes, patiently teaches the actor who plays the role of the Metropolitan, the proper performance of the ritual of blessing of the Tzar. At the same time he instructs the young Tzar how to conduct himself at this solemn moment, in accordance with the ancient canons.

  And here, in a deep bass (how deep, and what a bass!) the words of the prayer for the young Tzar’s health pass from the pages of the script onto the sound-track.

  Not only have we selected the best bass in our country, that of People’s Artist Mikhailov, but we have also selected that version of the “Long Life” prayer that best suits the atmosphere of our sequence—the solemn coronation of the first Russian Autocrat—Tzar Ivan Vasilyevich IV.

  [Note: These “Notes” were originally written to accompany sketches and production stills made during the preparation and filming of Ivan the Terrible.]

  Notes on Texts and Translations

  “Through Theatre to Cinema” (Srednaya iz trekh, 1924–1929). Originally printed in Sovyetskoye kino, November-December 1934 (Moscow). The present translation, by the editor and Paya Haskelson, has been previously published in Theatre Arts Monthly, New York, September 1936.

  “The Unexpected” (Nezhdannyi styk). Originally printed in Zhizn iskusstva, 19 August 1928 (Leningrad). The present translation is the first appearance in English of this essay.

  “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram” (Za kadrom). An afterword to Yaponskoye kino, by N. Kaufman (Moscow, 1929). Translated by Ivor Montagu and S. S. Nolbandov and revised by the author and Ivor Montagu, published as “The Cinematographic Principle and Japanese Culture (with a digression on montage and the shot)” in Transition, June 1930 (Paris). The present text employs this translation, with alterations based on the original Russian text.

  “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” The original German manuscript, deposited in the Eisenstein Collection at the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, New York, has been newly translated for this edition by John Winge. Only the first half of this essay has been previously translated by Ivor Montagu as “The Principles of Film Form,” Close Up, September 1931 (London).

  “The Filmic Fourth Dimension” (Kino chetyrekh izmerenii). Originally printed in Kino, 27 August 1929 (Moscow). Previously translated by W. Ray as “The Fourth Dimension in the Kino,” Close Up, March 1930 (Territet). The translation for this edition has been newly made from the original Russian text.

  “Methods of Montage,” written in London to supplement the preceding essay, this essay was translated by W. Ray as “The Fourth Dimension in the Kino: II,” Close Up, April 1930 (Territet). The present text is a revision of Miss Ray’s translation.

  “A Course in Treatment” (Odolzhaites!). Originally printed in Proletarskoye kino, No. 17–18, 1932 (Moscow). Previously translated by W. Ray as “Cinematography with Tears,” Close Up, March 1933, and “An American Tragedy,” Close Up, June 1933 (London). The translation for this edition has been newly made from the original Russian text, restoring omitted passages.

  “Film Language” (“E!” o chistotye kinoyazyka). Originally printed in Sovyetskoye kino, May 1934 (Moscow). The present translation is the first appearance in English of this essay. (The portion of analysis was quoted in Vladimir Nilsen’s The Cinema as a Graphic Art, translated by Stephen Garry, London, 1936.)

  “Film Form: New Problems.” The full text of this speech at the All Union Creative Conference of Workers in Soviet Cinematography, Moscow, 8–13 January 1935, was published in Za bolshoye kinoiskusstvo (Moscow, 1935). The greater part of the speech was translated by Ivor Montagu as “Film Form, 1935—New Problems,” Life and Letters Today, September-December 1935 (London). The present text employs this translation, with alterations based on the original Russian text.

  “The Structure of the Film” (O stroyenii veshchei). Originally printed in Iskusstvo kino, June 1939 (Moscow). The present translation is the first appearance in English of this essay. A detailed mathematical analysis of ideal proportions (in relation to the inter-related parts of Potemkin), employing illustrations from the practice of architecture, poetry, and painting, has been omitted in this translation.

  “Achievement” (Gordost). Originally printed in Iskusstvo kino, January-February 1940 (Moscow). Previously translated as “Pride,” International Literature, April-May, 1940 (Moscow). The translation for this edition has been newly made from the original Russian text.

  “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today” (Dikkens, Griffit i myi). An essay in Amerikanskaya kinematografiya: D. 17. Griffit, Volume I in Materialy po istorii mirovogo kinoiskusstva (Moscow, 1944). The present translation has been made for this edition.

  “Statement” (Zayavleniye). Originally printed in Zhizn iskusstva, 5 August 1928 (Leningrad). Previously translated from a German text in the New York Herald Tribune (September 21, 1928), the New York Times (October 7, 1928), and Close Up (October 1928). The present translation has been made for this edition from the original Russian text.

  “Notes from a Director’s Laboratory.” Written for the VOKS Film Chronicle, February 1945 (Moscow), and published as “In a Regisseur’s Laboratory.” The present text is an adaptation of the earlier translation, based on the original Russian text.

  Sources

  “THROUGH THEATER TO CINEMA”

  1. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1929.

  2. Andrei Belyi (Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev), Masterstvo Gogolya. Moscow, 1934.

  “THE UNEXPECTED”

  1. Quoted in Haiku Poems, Ancient and Modern, translated and annotated by Miyamori Asatarō. Tokyo, Maruzen Company, 1940.

  2. From a collection of anecdotes about Vasili Ignatyevich Givochini.

  3. “Montage of Attractions,” LEF, 3, 1923; a translated excerpt appears in Appendix 2 of The Film Seme.

  4. Zoë Kincaid, Kabuki, The Popular Stage of Japan. London, Macmillan and Co., 1925, pp. 199–200.

  5. J. Ingram Bryan, The Literature of J
apan. London, Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1929, pp. 33–34.

  6. Julius Kurth, Japanische Lyrik, p. iv.

  7. Heinrich von Kleist, “Uber das Marionettentheater,” translated by Eugene Jolas, in Vertical. New York City, Gotham Book Mart, 1941.

  “THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE AND THE IDEOGRAM”

  1. Jean Pierre Abel Rémusat, Recherches sur l’origine et la formation de l’écriture chinoise. Paris.

  2. Translation by Miyamori, op. cit.

  3. Translation by Frederick Victor Dickins, in Primitive & Mediaeval Japanese Texts. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1906.

  4. Yone Noguchi, The Spirit of Japanese Poetry. London, John Murray, 1914, p. 53.

  5. Julius Kurth, Sharaku. München, R. Piper, 2nd edition, 1922, pp. 78–79. The Sharaku print referred to is that numbered 24 in the catalogue by Harold G. Henderson and Louis V. Ledoux, The Surviving Works of Sharaku. Published by EU Weyhe, in behalf of the Society for Japanese Studies, 1939.

  6. George Rowley, Principles of Chinese Panting. Princeton University Press, 1947, p. 56.

  7. Ibid., p. 66.

  8. Lev Kuleshov, Iskusstvo Kino. Leningrad, 1929.

  9. Illustration No. 12, “How to choose composition,” in Jinjo Shogaku Shintei Gaten Dai Roku Gaku Nen Dan Sei Yo (Elementary Grade Drawing Manual for Sixth Grade Boys). Tokyo, Board of Education, 1910.

  “A DIALECTIC APPROACH TO FILM FORM”

  1. In Conversations with Eckermarm (5 June 1825), translated by John Oxenford.

  2. Razumovsky, Theory of Historical Materialism, Moscow, 1928.

  3. Ludwig Klages, The Science of Character, translated by W, H. Johnston, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1929.

  4. Graham Wallas, The Great Society, A Psychological Analysis. Macmillan, 1928, p. 101.

  5. In Conversations with Eckermarm (23 March 1829).

  6. In the preface to Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, illustrated by Auguste Rodin, Paris, Limited Editions Club, 1940.

  7. Renoir’s manifesto for La Société des Irrégularistes (1884) is thus synopsized by Lionello Venturi in his Painting and Painters, New York, Scribners, 1945; the original text can be consulted in Les archives de l’lmpressiomsme, edited by Lionello Venturi, Paris, Durand-Ruel, 1939, I, pp. 127–129.

  8. Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals (13 May 1856), translated by Christopher Isherwood. New York, Random House, 1930.

  “THE FILMIC FOURTH DIMENSION”

  1. Albert Einstein, Relativity, the Special and General Theory, translated by Robert W. Lawson. Peter Smith, p. 6y.

  “METHODS OF MONTAGE”

  1. Memoirs of Goldoni, translated by John Black, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.

  2. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Filosofskiye tetradi. Moscow, Ogiz, 1947, pp. 192–193.

  “A COURSE IN TREATMENT”

  1. James Joyce, Ulysses, New York, Random House, 1934, p. 425.

  2. Nikolai Gogol, “The Story of the Quarrel between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich.”

  3. “What “The Friends of the People’ Are,” in Lenin, Sochinemya, Moscow, 1929.

  4. Quoted in Herbert Gorman, The Incredible Marquis. New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1929, p. 441.

  5. Jean Lucas-Dubreton, The Fourth Musketeer, the Life of Alexander Dumas, translated by Maida Castelhun Damton, New York, Coward-McCann, 1928, p. 145.

  6. Ibid., p. 148.

  7. Ibid., pp. 141–142.

  8. “Maupaussant” by Isaac Babel.

  9. See Last Plays of Maxim Gorky, translated by Gibson-Cowan. New York, International Publishers, 1937.

  10. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, translated by Edward Aveling. New York, International Publishers, 1935. Introduction, p. 18.

  11. Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, New York, Boni and Liveright, 1925, it p. 78. (Note: Eisenstein’s copy of this work, used in the preparation of his film treatment, is in the Eisenstein Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.)

  12. Translated by Stuart Gilbert as We’ll to the Woods No More, Cambridge, New Directions, 1938.

  13. See, particularly, René Bizet, ha double vie de Gérard de Nerval. Paris, Pion, 1928.

  “FILM LANGUAGE”

  1. From a speech, “Soviet Literature,” delivered at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress. Proceedings published as Problems of Soviet Literature. New York, International Publishers, 1934.

  2. Belyi, op. cit.

  3. Book V, Chap. XXV of Gargantua and Pantagruel, “How We Disembarked at the Isle of Hodes, Where the Roads a-Roading Go,” in All the Extant Works of François Rabelais, translated by Samuel Putnam. New York, Covici-Friede, 1929.

  4. Translation by Miyamori, op. cit.

  5. Emile Zola, Germinal, translated by Havelock Ellis. New York, Boni 8t Liveright, 1924.

  6. Sebastien Mercier, Paris pendant la Revolution . . . Paris, Poulet-Malassis, 1862, I, p. 88.

  “FILM FORM: NEW PROBLEMS”

  1. “The Actor and the Image,” in Proceedings of the Moscow Club of Art Craftsmen, No. 1, Moscow, 1934.

  2. Wilhelm Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology, translated by Edward Leroy Schaub. New York, Macmillan, 1928, p. 72.

  3. This illustration, employed by Lévy-Bruhl in Les fonctions mentales dam les sociétés inférieures, is taken from The Klamath Language, by A. Gatschet (Contributions to North American Ethnology, ii, I); the previous illustration from the Bororo tribe, used by Lévy-Bruhl in the same work, is taken from Unter den Naturvölkern Zentralbräsiliens, by K. von den Steinen.

  4. “The Philosophy of Style,” in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative. New York and London, D. Appleton and Co., 1916.

  5. Engels, op. cit.

  6. Engels, op. cit., p. 48.

  “THE STRUCTURE OF THE FILM”

  1. Maxim Gorky, essay on “Man.”

  2. Franz Kafka, “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way,” in The Great Wall of China, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York, Schocken Books, 1947.

  3. Johann Nicolaus Forkel, “On Johann Sebastian Bach’s Life, Genius, and Works,” translated by Mr. Stephenson. In The Bach Reader, edited by Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1945.

  4. The Works of Leo Tolstoy, Oxford University Press, London, 1937 (Centenary Edition). The Kreutzer Sonata, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, Chap. XXIII.

  5. Ibid., Vol. 9, Anna Karenina, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, Part II, Chap. XI.

  6. V. Veresayev (Smidovich), Vospominaniya (second edition). Moscow, 1938.

  7. The Kreutzer Sonata, ed. cit., Chap. XIII.

  8. Ibid., Chap. XVI.

  9. Lenin, loc. cit., Vol. XIII, pp. 302–303.

  10. See Notes for L’Assommoir as described in the appendix to Matthew Josephson, Zola and His Time, New York, Macaulay, 1928; the full notes have been printed by Henri Massis in Comment Zola composait ses Romans, 1906.

  11. Victor Shklovsky, lkh nastoyashcheye. Moscow, Kinopechat, 1927.

  12. See “P-R-K-F-V,” Eisenstein’s introduction to Sergei Prokofiev, by Israel Nestyev, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1945.

  “ACHIEVEMENT”

  1. Quoted in Léon Moussinac, La décoration théâtrale. Paris, F. Rieder, 1922, p. 13.

  2. A. Gvozdëv, Zapadno-yevropeiskii teatre na rubezhe XIX i XX stoletii. Leningrad, Iskusstvo, 1939.

  3. Quoted in Moussinac, op. cit., pp. 12, 14.

  4. Gvozdëv, op. cit.

  5. Moussinac, op. cit., p. 16.

  6. Gvozdëv, op. cit.

  7. The context of these opening titles can be found in the printed treatment of Old and New, in Film Writing Forms, edited by Lewis Jacobs. New York, Gotham Book Mart, 1934.

  8. In Novi Zritel, No. 3J, 1926.

  “DICKENS, GRIFFITH, AND THE FILM TODAY”

  1. George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (Preface). London, 1921.

  2. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Charles Dickens, The Last of the Great Men. New York, The Readers Club, 1942, p. 107.


  3. Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young. New York, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1925, p. 66.

  4. Stefan Zweig, Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New York, The Viking Press, 1930, pp. 51–53.

  5. A Philadelphia newspaper, New York correspondent, December 1867.

  6. Letters of January 5 and 9, 1868; quoted in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens. London, Chapman and Hall, 1892.

  7. T. A. Jackson, Charles Dickens; The Progress of a Radical. New York, International Publishers, 1938, pp. 250–251, 297–298.

  8. Zwei g, op. cit.

  9. George Henry Lewes, “Dickens in Relation to Criticism,” The Fortnightly Review, February 1, 1871, p. 149.

  10. Quoted in Forster, op. cit., p. 364.

  11. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, Chap. XXXII

  12. Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book I, Chap. V.

  13. Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film. New York, 1939, pp. 101–103.

  14. Ibid., pp. 16–17.

  15. Iris Barry, D. W. Griffith, American Film Master. New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1940, p. 15.

  16. This, and the following citations from Brady’s reminiscences are quoted from his “Drama in Homespun,” Stage, January 1937, pp. 98–100.

  17. William A. Brady, Showman. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1937.

  18. This entire issue has been reproduced in Phoenixiana, edited by Francis P. Farquhar, San Francisco, The Grabhom Press, 1937.