Film Form Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Through Theater To Cinema

  The Unexpected

  The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram

  A Dialectic Approach To Film Form

  Photos

  The Filmic Fourth Dimension

  Methods of Montage

  A Course In Treatment

  Film Language

  Film Form: New Problems

  The Structure of The Film

  Achievement

  Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Notes on Texts and Translations

  Sources

  Index

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  Copyright 1949 by Harcourt, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1977 by Jay Leyda

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-15-630920-3 (Harvest: pb)

  eISBN 978-0-547-53947-8

  v1.0514

  Introduction

  THE COMPILATION of this book of essays was one of its author’s last tasks. Though too weak in his last two years of life to resume film work, Eisenstein was too strong to relax his theoretical activity. His fatal attack, on the night of February 10, 1948, interrupted him at work; when he was found the next morning, before him were his last words—an unfinished essay on color, its use in the unfinished Ivan the Terrible. It is precisely because he was so far from being finished, as film-maker or theoretician, that we feel his loss so deeply.

  A great artist leaves his work behind him, but a contemplation of Eisenstein’s completed work does little to ease the shock of his death, for all these films pointed to further work in which his heroic and tireless expansion of the film medium would push beyond all the limits that lesser artists have set around it. Each step forward by Eisenstein promised a hundred following unexpected steps, and death at the age of forty-nine leaves many steps untaken.

  As a great teacher he left an even richer heritage: from his students and the large body of his theory we can expect further fruit, even beyond our generation. It was said of Bach, “Only he who knows much can teach much,” and we can be eternally grateful that Eisenstein’s immense knowledge was poured not only into six finished films but also, directly and indirectly, into an incalculable number of pupils.

  A steady source for his imagination, as artist and as teacher, lay in his consciousness of the artist’s real influence in society, an influence to be fully realized only within an equally powerful sense of responsibility to society. This dual pull determined his every decision: in esthetics, for example, it made him impatient with every lean towards surface naturalism—for he could see the unwillingness, the laziness, ignorance and often opportunism behind such an evasion of the difficult but central problem. The film artist’s job was to learn his principles from a profound investigation of all arts and all levels of life, to measure these principles against an unfaltering understanding of himself, and if he then did anything less than create—with bold, living works that moved their audiences to excitement and understanding—he was neither good artist nor positive member of society. In film, with all its easy satisfactions, there was more temptation to skirt this primary issue than in any other art, but once Eisenstein chose cinema as the supremely expressive medium, he undertook to wage upon it, as upon a battlefield, a perpetual war against the evils of dishonesty, satisfaction, superficiality. He fought with the arrogance of an assured artist—he knew how much we all needed him, whether we admitted it or not. His aim was a poetry possible only to films, a realism heightened by all the means in the film-artist’s power. Though both he and the surrealists would have denied his relation to the term, this was sur-realism—but the dynamic aim and accomplishment of Sergei Eisenstein need no category or label.

  To challenge laziness and naturalism puts the challenger at a disadvantage: it attaches “anti-natural” labels to the challenger’s principles and practice, and forces him to prove, in works, that they can be affective beyond those works whose “simplicity” is essentially negative. The affective test was passed by each of Eisenstein’s films; the principles were stubbornly enunciated in writing that in sheer quantity outdoes the public thinking of any film-maker. He admitted to being neither a smooth nor a talented writer, and was dependent on the energy of his ideas and the clarity of their expression; he employed circumstantial as well as poetic proof—and he drew on the world for his illustrations. His “right way,” swerving sharply from standard thinking, or rather, standard non-thinking about films, forced his theoretical writing to combine polemic, rhetoric, self-defense, essay, gallery tour, analysis, lecture, sermon, criminal investigation, chalk-talk—and to be as valid for the local, immediate problem, as for the general, lasting issue. A many-sided, never-ending education stocked his armory of illustration: criticized for distortion, he would point to the “purposeful distortion” employed by a Sharaku or a Flaubert; accused of “unlifelike theories” he would hold up precedents from the fields of philology and psychology; accusations of “leftism” and “modernism” brought out defenses by Milton, Pushkin, El Greco that not only solidified his argument, but gave it a fresh dimension, and stimulated the reader to investigate these neglected riches.

  His first readers were always, as were his first audiences, his fellow film-makers and his students, furnishing, even in their maintenance of opposite views, a body of encouragement and stimulation that would be hard to equal outside that electric Moscow-Leningrad-Kiev circuit of film-enthusiasts. His foreign readers have been variously handicapped, by an unavoidable remoteness from this stimulating atmosphere and by a remoteness from the issues under discussion there, that motivated a great deal of Eisenstein’s combative writing; but the greatest handicap for his readers (and professionally interested spectators) abroad was the distortion, by misuse, imitation, and misinterpretation, of his basic terms and concepts. To read, for example, about “montage” through the distorting haze of superficiality with which this term has been brought into our studios, has not aided an understanding of Eisenstein’s theoretical writing. In recent years, however, general information on Eisenstein’s theories has tended to escape these earlier prejudices and apings, and it seems that his films and writings alike will be now examined with more profit in this country than during his lifetime. It is hoped that this second volume of his writing to appear in English* will contribute to this profit and comprehension.

  Of his hundreds of essays, this group was selected to show certain key-points in the development of his film theory and, in particular, of his analysis of the sound-film medium. Despite the existence of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, the study of Eisenstein’s theories usually finds its illustrations in his “silent” films. This almost makes more poignant the revelation in these essays of his long planning and contemplation of sound as an essential element in his vision of the total film, and he was fully aware of the apparent strangeness that he “should resemble the last to arrive at the wedding.” Yet the still restless couple—sight and sound—has lost its most hopeful conciliator and advisor in Eisenstein’s death, for no soundfilm program has achieved eithe
r the solidity of his “Statement” of 1928 and his “Achievement” of 1939 or the adventure of his plans for An American Tragedy (discussed in “A Course in Treatment”). The sure simplicity of audio-visual experiment in Nevsky and the grand experiment in heroic style of Ivan the Terrible, Part I have not yet been properly gauged for their instructional virtues, and the rich fund of discussion of the sound-film in these essays must be added to the sum of his completed films to gain a rounded view on his intellectually mature grasp of the film medium.

  Some of these essays have been previously available, sometimes in inadequate English renderings; the relation of the present texts to these earlier translations is indicated at the end of the volume.

  Generous assistance on all levels has been given this book by Esther and Harold Leonard, by Jane and Gordon Williams, by Sergei Bertensson, Richard Collins, Robert Payne, and other friends. John Winge made the new translation from Eisenstein’s German manuscript (lent by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library) of “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” and the frames chosen by Eisenstein for its illustration were prepared for reproduction here by Irving Lerner. I am particularly grateful to the Hon. Ivor Montagu whose long association with the personality and ideas of the author produced translations so conscientious and scrupulous that a minimum of adjustment has been necessary in adding them to this collection. The library staffs that contributed their talents so patiently were those of the University of California at Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Beverly Hills Public Library, Columbia University, the Museum of Modern Art, and the American-Russian Institute.

  JAY LEYDA

  Through Theater To Cinema

  IT IS interesting to retrace the different paths of today’s cinema workers to their creative beginnings, which together compose the multi-colored background of the Soviet cinema. In the early 1920s we all came to the Soviet cinema as something not yet existent. We came upon no ready-built city; there were no squares, no streets laid out; not even little crooked lanes and blind alleys, such as we may find in the cinemetropolis of our day. We came like bedouins or gold-seekers to a place with unimaginably great possibilities, only a small section of which has even now been developed.

  We pitched our tents and dragged into camp our experiences in varied fields. Private activities, accidental past professions, unguessed crafts, unsuspected eruditions—all were pooled and went into the building of something that had, as yet, no written traditions, no exact stylistic requirements, nor even formulated demands.

  Without going too far into the theoretical debris of the specifics of cinema, I want here to discuss two of its features. These are features of other arts as well, but the film is particularly accountable to them. Primo: photo-fragments of nature are recorded; secundo: these fragments are combined in various ways. Thus, the shot (or frame), and thus, montage.

  Photography is a system of reproduction to fix real events and elements of actuality. These reproductions, or photoreflections, may be combined in various ways. Both as reflections and in the manner of their combination, they permit any degree of distortion—either technically unavoidable or deliberately calculated. The results fluctuate from exact naturalistic combinations of visual, interrelated experiences to complete alterations, arrangements unforeseen by nature, and even to abstract formalism, with remnants of reality.

  The apparent arbitrariness of matter, in its relation to the status quo of nature, is much less arbitrary than it seems. The final order is inevitably determined, consciously or unconsciously, by the social premises of the maker of the film-composition. His class-determined tendency is the basis of what seems to be an arbitrary cinematographic relation to the object placed, or found, before the camera.

  We should like to find in this two-fold process (the fragment and its relationships) a hint as to the specifics of cinema, but we cannot deny that this process is to be found in other art mediums, whether close to cinema or not (and which art is not close to cinema?). Nevertheless, it is possible to insist that these features are specific to the film, because film-specifics lie not in the process itself but in the degree to which these features are intensified.

  The musician uses a scale of sounds; the painter, a scale of tones; the writer, a row of sounds and words—and these are all taken to an equal degree from nature. But the immutable fragment of actual reality in these cases is narrower and more neutral in meaning, and therefore more flexible in combination, so that when they are put together they lose all visible signs of being combined, appearing as one organic unit. A chord, or even three successive notes, seems to be an organic unit. Why should the combination of three pieces of film in montage be considered as a three-fold collision, as impulses of three successive images?

  A blue tone is mixed with a red tone, and the result is thought of as violet, and not as a “double exposure” of red and blue. The same unity of word fragments makes all sorts of expressive variations possible. How easily three shades of meaning can be distinguished in language—for example: “a window without light,” “a dark window,” and “an unlit window.”

  Now try to express these various nuances in the composition of the frame. Is it at all possible?

  If it is, then what complicated context will be needed in order to string the film-pieces onto the film-thread so that the black shape on the wall will begin to show either as a “dark” or as an “unlit” window? How much wit and ingenuity will be expended in order to reach an effect that words achieve so simply?

  The frame is much less independently workable than the word or the sound. Therefore the mutual work of frame and montage is really an enlargement in scale of a process microscopically inherent in all arts. However, in the film this process is raised to such a degree that it seems to acquire a new quality.

  The shot, considered as material for the purpose of composition, is more resistant than granite. This resistance is specific to it. The shot’s tendency toward complete factual immutability is rooted in its nature. This resistance has largely determined the richness and variety of montage forms and styles—for montage becomes the mightiest means for a really important creative remolding of nature.

  Thus the cinema is able, more than any other art, to disclose the process that goes on microscopically in all other arts.

  The minimum “distortable” fragment of nature is the shot; ingenuity in its combinations is montage.

  Analysis of this problem received the closest attention during the second half-decade of Soviet cinema (1925–1950), an attention often carried to excess. Any infinitesimal alteration of a fact or event before the camera grew, beyond all lawful limit, into whole theories of documentalism. The lawful necessity of combining these fragments of reality grew into montage conceptions which presumed to supplant all other elements of film-expression.

  Within normal limits these features enter, as elements, into any style of cinematography. But they are not opposed to nor can they replace other problems—for instance, the problem of story.

  To return to the double process indicated at the beginning of these notes: if this process is characteristic of cinema, finding its fullest expression during the second stage of Soviet cinema, it will be rewarding to investigate the creative biographies of film-workers of that period, seeing how these features emerged, how they developed in pre-cinema work. All the roads of that period led towards one Rome. I shall try to describe the path that carried me to cinema principles.

  Usually my film career is said to have begun with my production of Ostrovsky’s play, Enough Simplicity in Every Sage, at the Proletcult Theatre (Moscow, March 1923). This is both true and untrue. It is not true if it is based solely on the fact that this production contained a short comic film made especially for it (not separate, but included in the montage plan of the spectacle). It is more nearly true if it is based on the character of the production, for even then the elements of the specifics mentioned above could be detected.

  We have agreed that the first sign of a cinema tendency is
one showing events with the least distortion, aiming at the factual reality of the fragments.

  A search in this direction shows my film tendencies beginning three years earlier, in the production of The Mexican (from Jack London’s story). Here, my participation brought into the theater “events” themselves—a purely cinematographic element, as distinguished from “reactions to events”—which is a purely theatrical element.

  This is the plot: A Mexican revolutionary group needs money for its activities. A boy, a Mexican, offers to find the money. He trains for boxing, and contracts to let the champion beat him for a fraction of the prize. Instead he beats up the champion, winning the entire prize. Now that I am better acquainted with the specifics of the Mexican revolutionary struggle, not to mention the technique of boxing, I would not think of interpreting this material as we did in 1920, let alone using so unconvincing a plot.

  The play’s climax is the prize-fight. In accordance with the most hallowed Art Theatre traditions, this was to take place backstage (like the bull-fight in Carmen), while the actors on stage were to show excitement in the fight only they can see, as well as to portray the various emotions of the persons concerned in the outcome.

  My first move (trespassing upon the director’s job, since I was there in the official capacity of designer only) was to propose that the fight be brought into view. Moreover I suggested that the scene be staged in the center of the auditorium to re-create the same circumstances under which a real boxing match takes place. Thus we dared the concreteness of factual events. The fight was to be carefully planned in advance but was to be utterly realistic.

  The playing of our young worker-actors in the fight scene differed radically from their acting elsewhere in the production. In every other scene, one emotion gave rise to a further emotion (they were working in the Stanislavsky system), which in turn was used as a means to affect the audience; but in the fight scene the audience was excited directly.