Sergei Eisenstein From Film Form

 Cinema is:  so many firms  so much working capital  such & such a ‘star’  so many dramas  First and foremost, montage  Japanese cinema is well provided with firms, actors & plots  Ts’ang Chieh in 2650 BC, the first ‘contingent’ of hieroglyphs  Copulation- the combination of 2 hieroglyphs regarded as their product  Combination corresponds to a concept  This is montage!

 Do in cinema, juxtaposing representational shots  The starting-point for ‘intellectual cinema’  Japan possesses the most laconic forms of poetry, the hai-kai & the tanka  Figurative effect  The hai-kai is a concentrated Impressionist sketch  We see these as montage phrases, montage lists  Finished representation of another order, the psychological  In emotional terms  Born from a cross between the figurative mode & the denotative purpose

 Sharaku was the creator of the finest prints of the 18 th century  Same Daumier whom Balzac (the Bonaparte of literature) in turn caled the ‘Michelangelo of caricature’  We reassemble the disintegrated phenomena into a single whole but from our own perspective  This dual divergence in yet a fourth sphere – theatre  The theatre is in its cradle – present in parallel form, in a curious dualism  The denotation of the action is carried out by the so-called Joruri, a silent puppet on the satge

 This antiquated practice passes into the early Kabuki theatre, preserved to this day, as a partial method, in the classical repertoire  The shot, a tiny rectangle with some fragment of an event organized within it  Glued together, these shots form montage  The shot is an element of montage  Montage is the assembling of these elements  The shot is a montage cell

 Conflict between 2 neighbouring fragments: Conflict, Collision  A graduate of the Kuleshov school defends the concepts of montage as a series of fragments in a chain, ‘Bricks’ – expound an idea serially  Opposed him with the view of montage as a collision, the view that the collision of 2 factors gives rise to an idea  Montage is conflict, lies at the basis of every art  Conflict within the shot, can take many forms  Close-ups & long shots  The reduction of all the properties

Sergei Eisenstein From Film Form

 Dialectical materialism - PHILOSOPHY  In form – produces ART  Synthesis that evolves from the opposition between thesis & antithesis  FOR ART IS ALWAYS CONFLICT  Its social mission  Its nature  Its methodology  The hypertrophy of purposeful initiative – of the principle of rational logic – leaves art frozen in mathematical technicism

 The interaction between the 2 produces and determines the dynamic  The basis of distance determines the intensity of the tension  The spatial form of this dynamic is the expression of the phases in its tension – rhythm  ‘Architecture is frozen music’  Together with the conflict of social conditionality & the conflict of reality, principle of conflict serves as the foundation stone for the methodology of art  Because of its methodology: shot & montage are the basic elements of film

MONTAGE  Lev Kuleshov, adding individual shots to one another like building blocks  Movement within these shots & the resulting length of the pieces regarded as rhythm  Mesendick system VS. Bode school  Not next to the one it follows, but on top of it  Ex. The phenomenon of spatial depth as the optical superimposition of two planes in stereoscopy arises

MONTAGE  Material ideogram set against material ideogram produces transcendental result (concept)  The degree of incongruity determines the intensity of impression, determines the tension, become authentic rhythm  I. linear: Fernand Léger, Suprematism II. ‘anecdotal’ III. Primitive Italian Futurism lies somewhere between I & II IV. It can be of ideographic kind. Characterisation of a Sharaku (18-century Japan)  The resolution of the representation  Finally, colour  Move from the realm of the spatial-pictorial to the realm of the temporal-pictorial

VISUAL COUNTERPOINT  The relationship between the three: conflict within a thesis (an abstract idea)  Is formulated in the dialectic of the title  Is formed spatially in the conflict within the shot  Explodes with the growing intensity of the conflict montage between the shots

 Conflict between matter & shot (achieved by spatial distortion using camera angle)  “Meaning from their juxtaposition”  Conflict between matter & its spatiality (achieved by optical distortion using the lens)  Conflict between an event & its temporality (achieved by slowing down & speeding up  Conflict between the entire optical complex & a quite different sphere  The conflict between optical & acoustic experience produces: SOUND FILM which is realizable as AUDIO-VISUAL COUNTERPOINT VISUAL COUNTERPOINT

FILM SYNTAX  I. Each moving piece of montage in its own right II. Artificially produced representation of movement  A. Logical: example 2. Potemkin (1925), Sensation of a shot hitting the eye B. Alogical: example 3. Potemkin  Marble lions – one sleeping, one waking, one rising  The examples have shown primitive-psychological cases – using only the optical superimposition of movement

 III. The chains of psychological association. Associational montage (1923-4). As a means of sharpening (heightening) a situation emotionally  By analogy this dynamization of the material produces, not in the spatial but in the psychological, i.e. the emotional field FILM SYNTAX

EMOTIONAL DYNAMISATION  Unleashes a process that, in terms of its form, is identical to a process of logical deduction  The conventional descriptive form of the film becomes a kind of reasoning  Develops the emotions  Directing the entire thought process  This form that is best suited to express ideologically critical theses  SYNTHESIS OF ART AND SCIENCE  Lenin’s statement ‘of all the arts… cinema is the most important.’