Film Form
Page 30
Sue, Eugène, [>]
Sukhotin, Mikhail, [>]
Suprematism, [>], [>]
symbolism, [>], [>]
Tager, P. G., [>]
tanka, [>], [>], [>]
Tarasova, Alla, [>]
Technicolor, [>]
theater experience, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>]; theater principles, [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>]
Théâtre d’Art, [>]–[>], [>]
Théâtre des Arts, [>]–[>]
theme, [>], [>]–[>]
Théroigne de Méricourt, [>]
Thief of Bagdad, The, [>]
Thomas, Augustus, [>]
Thompson, Denman, [>]
Three Ages, The, [>]
Three Songs about Lenin, [>]
Tieck, Johann Ludwig, [>]
Tisse, Edward, [>]
Tolstoy, Lev, [>]–[>]; Anna Karenina, [>]–[>]; The Kreutzer Sonata, [>], [>]–[>]; War and Peace, [>]
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, [>], [>]
Trauberg, Ilya, [>]
treatment, [>]–[>]
Tretyakov, Sergei, Gas Masks, [>], [>]; Listen, Moscow, [>], [>]
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, [>]
Trust D. E., [>]
Ts’ang Chieh, [>]–[>]
Twain, Mark, [>]
typage, [>]–[>], [>]
Tzvetkov, Pavel, [>]
Unser Emden, [>]
Uzume, [>]
Vasiliyev, G. N. & S. D., [>]
Véber, Pierre, [>]
Vendryes, Joseph, [>]–[>]
Verbitzkaya, [>]
Veresayev, V. (Smidovich), [>]
Vertov, Dziga, [>], [>], [>], [>]
Vidor, King, [>], [>]
viewpoint, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]
Vishnevsky, Vsevolod, [>]
Viva Villa, [>]
Volkenstein, Vladimir Mikhailovich, [>]
Wagner, Richard, [>], [>]
Walkley, A. B., [>]
Wallas, Graham, [>]
Waltzertraum, Ein, [>]
’Way Down East, [>], [>]–[>], [>]
We Are from Kronstadt, [>]
Webster, John, [>]
Wells, Herbert George, [>]
Weltmann, [>]
Werner, [>]
Whistler, James McNeill, [>]
White, Pearl, [>]
Whitman, Walt, [>], [>]
Wild boys of the Road, [>]
Wolheim, Louis, [>]
Woman of Paris, A, [>]
Worth, [>]
Wundt, Wilhelm, [>]–[>]
Yamei, [>]
Yanukova, [>]
Yashaō (The Mask-Maker), by Okamoto Kido, [>]
Yezikanov, [>]
Zarkhi, Natan, [>], [>]; Joy Street, [>]
Zheltovskv, [>]
Zola, Emile, [>], [>], [>]–[>]; L’Assommoir, [>]; Germinal, [>]–[>]; Nana, [>]–[>]
Zvenigora, [>]
Zweig, Stefan, [>]–[>], [>]
About the Author
SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH EISENSTEIN, who was born in Riga in 1898, first achieved world fame with his silent film Potemkin in 1925. Although he completed only six films before his death in 1948, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers and film theoreticians of our time.
Footnotes
* The Film Sense, his first book, originally appeared in 1942; the revised edition in 1947.
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*Eisenstein has said that one might define typage as a modern development of the Commedia dell’arte—with its seven stock figures multiplied into infinity. The relationship lies not in numbers, but in audience conditioning. Upon entrance of Pantalone or the Captain, his mask tells the audience immediately what to expect of this figure. Modern film typage is based on the need for presenting each new figure in our first glimpse of him so sharply and completely that further use of this figure may be as a known element. Thus new, immediate conventions are created. An amplification of this approach is given in the author’s comments on Lavater, on [>].—EDITOR.
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* Schub, long a familiar name to world-documentalists, is known abroad only by the film exhibited in America as Cannons and Tractors. The first time Eisenstein ever joined together two pieces of “real film” was while assisting Esther Schub in the re-editing of Lang’s Dr. Mabuse. This was shortly after the production of The Sage. The Vassiliyevs’ Chapayev establishes their place in cinema history.—EDITOR.
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* As indicated in “A Course in Treatment,” the first two years of Eisenstein’s course for directors at the State Cinema Institute emphasize a thorough study of theater principles.—EDITOR.
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* In its European tour during 1928 a troupe of Kabuki actors, headed by Ichikawa Sadanji, performed in Moscow and Leningrad; in the latter city the magazine Zhizn Iskusstva devoted to this visit an issue (19 August 1928), to which Eisenstein contributed this essay.
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* It is my conviction that cinema is today’s level of theater. That theater in its older form has died and continues to exist only by inertia. [The author’s commentary of eleven years later on this viewpoint can be found in “Achievement,” [>].—EDITOR.]
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* Not even what is eaten in this theater is accidental! I had no opportunity to discover if it is ritual food eaten. Do they eat whatever happens to be there, or is there a definite menu? If the latter, we must also include in the ensemble the sense of taste!
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* “. . . samisen music depends almost completely on rhythm, rather than melody, to interpret emotion. Sound is inexhaustible, and by groupings of sounds in changing rhythms the samisen musicians gain the effects they desire. . . . Ripple-clang-bang; smoothness, roughness, villainy, tranquillity; falling snow, a flight of birds, wind in the tree-tops; skirmish and fray, the peace of moonlight, the sorrow of parting, the rapture of spring; the infirmity of age, the gladness of lovers—all these and much more the samisen expresses to those who are able to look beyond the curtain that shuts this musical world away from Western ears because of its baffling conventions of sound rather than melody.”—KINCAID.
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* A professor in comparative philology at the University of St. Petersburg.
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† This “Statement” is printed in Appendix A.
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* “The measure of the classical stanza is known as the shichigoto, or seven-and-five movement, which all Japanese believe to echo the divine pulse-beat of the race.”—bryan.
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* Eisenstein’s essay was originally published as an “afterword” to N. Kaufman’s pamphlet, Japanese Cinema (Moscow, 1929).
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* It is possible to trace this particular tendency from its ancient, almost pre-historical source (“. . . in all ideational art, objects are given size according to their importance, the king being twice as large as his subjects, or a tree half the size of a man when it merely informs us that the scene is out-of-doors. Something of this principle of size according to significance persisted in the Chinese tradition. The favorite disciple of Confucius looked like a little boy beside him and the most important figure in any group was usually the largest.”) through the highest development of Chinese art, parent of Japanese graphic arts: “. . .natural scale always had to bow to pictorial scale . . . size according to distance never followed the laws of geometric perspective but the needs of the design. Foreground features might be diminished to avoid obstruction and overemphasis, and far distant objects, which were too minute to count pictorially, might be enlarged to act as a counterpoint to the middle distance or foreground.”
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* It has been left to James Joyce to develop in
literature the depictive line of the Japanese hieroglyph. Every word of Kurth’s analysis of Sharaku may be applied, neatly and easily, to Joyce.
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* Discussed in the preceding essay.—EDITOR.
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* “Epic” and “dramatic” are used here in regard to methodology of form—not to content or plot!
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* See discussion in preceding essay.
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* Further details on this film grammar of conflicts are given in the preceding essay, pp. 39–40.—EDITOR.
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* Examples of more primitive effects belong here also, such as simple cross-cutting of church spires, angled in mutual opposition.
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* The montage list of this sequence from Strike is given in Appendix 3 of The Film Sense— EDITOR.
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* This issue of the newspaper Kino for August 27, 1929, was chiefly devoted to the reports and speeches at the All-Union Conference on the Sound Film, held earlier in the month.
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* There was even a parallel with the ironic conclusion of A Woman of Paris in the original end planned for Old and New. This is, by the way, a film unique in the number of references (both in story and in style) to other films: the “pillar of industry” sequence playfully builds its satire on a similar but serious episode in Pudovkin’s End of St. Petersburg; the tractor’s final triumph is an inflated parody of a Wild West film chase, etc. Even Buster Keaton’s Three Ages was consciously reflected in the original structure of Old and New— EDITOR.
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* The founder of the Suprematist school of painting had delivered some commonplaces about the “photographic” and naturalistic limitations of the cinema.—EDITOR.
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* A portion of this sequence (omitted from most of the American prints of Ten Days That Shook the World) is reproduced in the section of photographs beginning on [>].
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* The Repertory Committee is entrusted with the supervision of stage and film repertories.—EDITOR.
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* According to his opening soliloquy in Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri.—EDITOR.
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* An unrealized wish. See “The Work of Eisenstein,” in The Film Sense.—EDITOR.
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* It was Pushkin who suggested the themes of both these works.—EDITOR.
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* Yegor Bulichev was the first of a planned trilogy that was to reach the first post-revolutionary years.
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* A sample: “You might save her. But again you might not! For see how she strikes about. She is stunned. She herself is unable to save herself and by her erratic terror, if you draw near her now, may bring about your own death also. But you desire to live! And her living will make your life not worth while from now on. Rest but a moment—a fraction of a minute! Wait—wait—ignore the pity of that appeal. And then—then—But there! Behold. It is over. She is sinking now. You will never, never see her alive any more—ever.”
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* Alla Tarasova, of the Moscow Art Theatre, had appeared in a film version of Ostrovsky’s play Thunderstorm shortly before this essay was written.—editor.
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* The reader curious to see more of the haiku mentioned in a previous essay, will encounter another “anticipation” of Dovzhenko’s poetic sequence:
The sail hoisted,
The willows on the shore
Have run away.
JAKUSUI
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* Left unfinished at the author’s death, the completed sections of this definitive work may be prepared for publication by his literary executors.—EDITOR.
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* Approximate English and American equivalents for these popular Russian writers of the early twentieth century: Elinor Glyn, Dorothy Dix, Rupert Hughes.—EDITOR.
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* See “A Course in Treatment,” [>].
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* This thesis is not offered as either new or original. Hegel and Plekhanov gave equal attention to sensual thought processes. What appears to be new here is a constructive distinction of the laws of this sensual thinking, for these classics do not particularize on this aspect, while no operative application of this thesis can be made to artistic practice and craft training without this distinction. The following development of these considerations, materials, and analyses, has set itself this particular operative aim of practical use.
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* A differentiated concept of “strength” outside the concrete specific bearer of that strength equally does not exist at this stage.
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* The considerable skill achieved in this field by our silent cinema fell perceptibly from the moment of transition to sound-film—for evidence, see most of our sound-films.
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* The differences of both examples here will be that details of walking and selected movements, however refined they may be, in a genuine master would always be, at the same time, also a “conductor” of the generalized content which he produces in a particularized embodiment. Especially if his task is to transform the simple “approach” to an intricate reconstruction of an interplay of psychological states. Without this neither type nor realism is possible.
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* Even to the present day Mexicans in some of the remoter regions of the country, in times of drought, drag out from their temples the statue of the particular Catholic saint that has taken the place of the former god responsible for rains and, on the edge of the fields, whip him for his non-activity, imagining that thereby they cause pain to him whom the statue portrays.
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* In the spring of 1935 Eisenstein did return to active production, with Bezhin Meadow from a scenario by Alexander Rzheshevsky. The film was left unfinished in 1937; see The Film Sense, appendices 1 (page 226) and 8 (page 274).
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* Two phrases commonly employed by Eisenstein’s critics.—EDITOR.
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* This is a much abused term, used here in its original sense.
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* When Potemkin was exhibited outside the Soviet Union, these part-titles were invariably removed by the various adaptors; the only foreign prints of Potemkin restored to its original form are those circulated by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library.—EDITOR.
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* Though Zola prided himself on his “scientific documentation,” he was a master in selecting and arranging raw material for his own undeniably artistic purposes. Even in his “documentary” notes for L’Assommoir one sees the compositional imagination at work in the naked “lists” describing, for example, his central tenement, or the opening violence in the washing-house, or the bitterly fantastic details of Coupeau’s alcoholic death. The works of Frank Norris reveal similar environmental compositions.
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* I have pointed out previously that this analysis is of solely compositional “main-lines.” The fabric of Potemkin holds up, however, just as well under more microscopic examination, as in the analysis of fourteen shots, on pages [>].
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* “See Through Theater to Cinema,” above, [>].
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* As we
see, our “Statement,” appearing two years later [see [>]], posing in this way the question of the audio-visual image, was based on a few proved experiments.
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* Written by Victor Shklovsky and directed by Pudovkin, this is the least known of Pudovkin’s films in the United States, receiving here in 1940 only a limited circulation without superimposed English titles.—EDITOR.
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* I do not mean only in the use of processes, such as Technicolor, Agfacolor, etc., but in the sensitive use of the rich range from black to white, within the sound film.
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* In the preceding essay.
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* Released on May 27, 1909, with Herbert Pryor, Linda Arvidson Griffith, Violet Mersereau, Owen Moore, this film followed the dramatic adaptation of the Cricket made by Albert Smith with Dickens’s approval.
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* Nava’s Charms (by Sologub) and At the Hearthside, two pre-Revolutionary Russian films, as is also Forget the Hearth. The names that follow are of the male and female film stars of this period.—EDITOR.
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* Nosferatu (1922), directed by F. W. Mumau; Die Strasse (1923), directed by Karl Grune; Schatten (1923), directed by Arthur Robison; Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), directed by Fritz Lang.
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† Looping the Loop (1928), directed by Arthur Robison; Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926), directed by G. W. Pabst.
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* The House of Hate (1918), a serial directed by George Seitz, with Pearl White; The Mark of Zorro (1921), directed by Fred Niblo, with Douglas Fairbanks. The American film released in Russia as The Gray Shadow has not been identified.—EDITOR.
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* As late as April 17, 1944, Griffith still considered this the chief social function of film-making. An interviewer from the Los Angeles Times asked him, “What is a good picture?” Griffith replied, “One that makes the public forget its troubles. Also, a good picture tends to make folks think a little, without letting them suspect that they are being inspired to think. In one respect, nearly all pictures are good in that they show the triumph of good over evil.” This is what Osbert Sitwell, in reference to Dickens, called the “Virtue v. Vice Cup-Tie Final.”