5 Eisenstein and Montage

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1898–1948) was the only son of a Jewish architect from Riga, and a mother who came from a well to do merchant family that was Russian Orthodox. The boy’s early family life was troubled by the authoritarian rule of his father, and he moved with his mother to St. Petersburg in 1905. His father joined them there in 1910, and his mother moved to Paris shortly thereafter, leaving Sergei in the care of his father. Eisenstein tried to follow in his father’s footsteps, studying civil engineering, but the 1917 Russian Revolution cut short his studies. He was drafted and sent to the front, and in 1918 he joined the Red Army while his father was allied with the White Guard, the anti-communist forces. An avid artist, Eisenstein drew continuously throughout his life, and his longstanding interest in the circus led him to a unit in the army that would stage plays and skits on the battlefront.

Mustered out of the army in 1920, he studied Japanese for a while before abandoning formal education for the Proletkult Central Workers Theatre. While working in this avant-garde theatre, Eisenstein studied under Vsevolod Meyerhold, a director of innovative, experimental drama, and an immensely influential figure in modern theatre. One of Eisenstein’s early works was a production of the play Gas Masks, staged in the Moscow Gasworks using the working turbines and catwalks of the complex as the setting for the action. In 1924, he suggested to Proletkult that they make a seven-part film series of agitation-propaganda films to glorify the revolution, and he launched into direction of his first feature, Strike with very little film experience but with the help of Edward Tisse, a military newsreel cameraman who would become his lifelong collaborator and cinematographer. Strike examined the steps leading to the political awakening of a factory, using broadly drawn characters and masses of workers to enact a heroic uprising that ends with an extreme close up of a pair of eyes glaring at the audience coupled with the title, “Proletarians, remember!”

The next year, 1925, Eisenstein completed Battleship Potemkin, a remarkable, internationally recognized film, that was both celebrated and sharply contested in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The film brought unprecedented profits for the Soviet film industry, and its reach extended as far as Hollywood where the powerful producer David O. Selznick declared it “unquestionably one of the greatest motion pictures of all time” and encouraged MGM to hire the director.¹ Eisenstein was only 27 years old at the time, and Potemkin was a sensation, bringing the revolutionary fervor of his stage work to cinema, along with mass spectacle, intense screen violence never before seen, and a radically different style of editing. Along with the film, Eisenstein began to create a new theory of montage that explained how cinema could agitate the masses into political consciousness.

With only two films to his credit, Eisenstein was now world famous, at the center of Soviet filmmaking, and engaged in a community of young, emerging film artists, who worked in the state owned film industry bent on expanding the message of the Russian Revolution to mobilize mass action. In the vortex of revolutionary changes in social, political and artistic expression, Eisenstein would struggle his entire life to create imaginative works in a film, and to theorize their construction, while negotiating the prevailing political winds of a state enterprise operating under Soviet dictatorship. Theorizing about practical methods for creating impactful films was central to Eisenstein’s creative practice: he was as influential as a film theorist as he was a filmmaker. He was profoundly affected by Constructivism, a modern art movement that embraced abstraction, rejected the past, and sought to pare the work down to its essential elements. Constructivism advocated the creation of art that had the quality of factura, meaning the surface of the object should demonstrate how it had been made. In theatre, this meant that a creation for the stage should make its methods of production explicit. Constructivism was part of a larger trend in Soviet culture as a whole toward “techné-centered thought. Techné is Aristotle’s term for the unity of theory and practice within skilled activity.”² In his view, the craftsperson should seek to master not only techniques, but also the standardized knowledge underlying them. Likewise, Soviet filmmakers, in the spirit of the times, sought to fully explore and understand the creative means available to them. Given Eisenstein’s international prominence, he was at the center of that enterprise, and both his creative film work and his dogged pursuit of the theoretical principles underlying them led to groundbreaking innovations in cinema.

At the same time, Eisenstein was largely a self-taught artist, a ravenous reader, and a prolific writer. His written work is wide open, overwrought and telegraphic, leaping from one topic to the next. His writing reflects a commitment to conflict and montage as much as his films do, and he tries to impress the reader with the connections he makes to other art forms and other cultures (i.e., music, kabuki theatre, haiku, etc.). Eisenstein is constantly remodeling old concepts and inventing new ones, “which are themselves transformed or ‘outgrown.’ Eisenstein himself rather aptly dubbed this aspect of his work a ‘theoretical self-service cafeteria.’”³ And while his theories explain film phenomena on the macro and the micro scale in intuitive and descriptive ways that perhaps only an accomplished film artist could, they often do not bear the weight of close scrutiny. His terminology is often vague or left undefined, and its use is undisciplined, so the reader is often left to ponder what exactly Eisenstein is referring to. In other instances, like Eisenstein’s famous chart of “vertical montage” in Alexander Nevsky (see p. 191), scholars have dismissed his theories as “heavy artillery to shoot sparrows.”⁴ His work has resisted neat unification, and he has been called “an unsystematic autodidact, a modern Leonardo da Vinci, a materialist in the grips of mysticism and conversely a Mystic in the grip of materialism, A neo-formalist, a semiotician, compliant propagandist, and an artist driven by an unresolved Oedipal complex.”⁵ To understand the editing theory of Sergei Eisenstein, and the work that engenders it, we will first look to the theories of his Russian contemporaries for context, clarify a few meanings of the word “montage,” examine Eisenstein’s early theories on how montage works to “seize the spectator,” and finally review the typology of montage that he proposed for understanding how editing functions in cinema.

Eisenstein's Contemporaries

Like Eisenstein, the most prominent filmmakers in the emerging Soviet cinema were very young: when Potemkin was released in 1925, three of the most significant were Dzia Vertov at 29, Lev Kuleshov, only 26 and Vsevolod Pudovkin who was 32. And while the left avant-garde was never a particularly unified movement,

If we focus for a moment on three of Eisenstein’s contemporaries – Vertov, Kuleshov and Pudovkin – we can better understand how Soviet cinema of the 1920s was a remarkable attempt to transform a popular art form, rapidly consolidating in Hollywood, into “a new mode of vision.”

Dziga Vertov (1896–1954)

Born David Abelevich Kaufman into a Jewish family in Poland in 1896, he changed his name into the more Russian Denis Arkadievich, and ultimately into “Dziga Vertov,” an avant-garde moniker that loosely translates from Ukranian as “spinning top” or “spinning gypsy.” In spring 1918 Vertov joined the Moscow Cinema Committee, and worked as a cameraman on weekly newsreels designed to highlight the achievements of the Soviet government. By 1919, he met Elizaveta Svilova, who worked with the Moscow committee as an editor. Svilova was willing to edit his films to include the innovations he was seeking, and within a short time they were married. She edited every film he made from that point forward. The couple pursued a new newsreel series, Cine-Pravda (literally, Cine-Truth) with the help of Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman. Vertov quickly discovered the power of nonfiction motion picture propaganda to awaken the masses. This approach was consistent with the politics of the age in which Bolshevik journalism placed the newspaper at the center of motivating the masses. Lenin wrote: “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer.”⁷ Falling under many of the same influences as Eisenstein and Kuleshov, Vertov explored the formalist techniques consistent with the experimental milieu in which he came of age – slow motion, fast motion, double exposure, freeze frame, canted angles, superimposition, comparison by cutting, fastening the camera to cars and trains for tracking shots etc. – anything that would increase the impact of nonfiction motion pictures on Soviet audiences. While he condemned the study of aesthetics, he was writing provocative manifestoes about the power of the Kino-eye, the more perfect vision of the motion picture camera,

Vertov aimed to capture “film truth” by organizing elements of reality into films that reveal a deeper truth unseen by the human eye. His greatest works combine un-staged footage ingeniously, with tremendous rhetorical force, distilling “the sensibilities of newspaper column and Futurist poem into nonfiction feature films of incredible power and sophistication.”⁹ Vertov’s body of work had significant impact on the development of realism and nonfiction films during the 1920s, and his most famous feature film, The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) exhibits the creative genius of Svilova’s editing, particularly in the accelerated editing sequence that ends the film. See Critical Commons, “Editing Rhythm in The Man with a Movie Camera.”¹⁰

Vertov’s work continued to influence the documentary into the 1960s. His goal of revealing the truth underlying brute reality with improvisational camerawork greatly influenced the emergence of cinéma vérité, led by the French anthropologist Jean Rouch, and the direct cinema movement of Albert and David Maysles, Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker in the United States.

Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970)

In a career that spanned 50 years, Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970) was a groundbreaking director, film theorist, and professor at V.G.I.K. one of the oldest film schools in the world, established in Moscow in 1919.¹¹ The feature films of Lev Kuleshov are rarely seen in the West, but many of Russia’s most prominent directors trained under him, including Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Kalatozov and Parajanov. In his earliest writing about cinema he argued for a new, heroic style of filmmaking to replace the stultifying work coming from the budding Russian film industry. Kuleshov began to write and experiment with problems of acting and shot sequencing, and he sought to reduce film to its most basic material element, arriving at editing as the formal element specific to cinema. Though he directed 19 silent and sound feature films, many of which were nuanced psychological dramas, and wrote several significant books on filmmaking, he is known for his experiments in editing, particularly for what has become known as the “Kuleshov effect.”

Working with only rudimentary resources – some of his editing experiments were shot in 1921 on 90 meters (roughly 3.5 minutes) of 35mm film¹² – Kuleshov began

Pudovkin went on to say that the audience “raved about the acting. . . the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, . . . the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, . . . the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.”¹⁴ Although the film does not survive intact, the impact of this experiment has been pervasive, suggesting that juxtaposition is a powerful creator of meaning. It has been studied and written about in countless texts, including a 1964 CBS television interview with Alfred Hitchcock. See Critical Commons, “A Talk with Hitchcock (1964) – Hitchcock Explains the Kuleshov Effect” and a reconstruction of the film The Kuleshov Effect.¹⁵

Beyond this experiment, Kuleshov is also remembered for experiments in “artificial landscapes” (now commonly called creative geography) in which a sequence containing shots of actors walking in disparate areas of Moscow ends with a two shot of them converging, an early demonstration that motion vectors in film (to use Herbert Zettl’s terminology) are key to building and stabilizing the viewer’s spatial orientation, (see Chapter 1, p. 24). Creative geography is further demonstrated in a Kuleshov sequence of actors walking up steps of a Moscow landmark, conjoined with a stock shot of the White House in Washington, D.C., creating a unique, unified screen space from distinct real spaces. In another instance, Kuleshov synthesized a film of a woman moving by cutting together shots of the feet, heads and hands of different women. Kuleshov went on to publish three significant books of film theory and practice, and, despite coming under attack in the Stalin era, was appointed in 1944 to Head of the All-Russian Institute of Cinematography (V.G.I.K.), received the nation’s highest award, the Order of Lenin in 1967, and continued to lecture on filmmaking until very late in his life.

Vsevolod I. Pudovkin (1893–1953)

An engineering student in Moscow, Pudovkin served in the artillery during World War I. He was captured by the Germans, spent three years in prison, was released and returned to the city in 1918. He entered V.G.I.K. in 1920 and studied under Kuleshov, leaving in 1923 to join Kuleshov’s Experimental Laboratory. One of his first successful features, Mother (1926) was drawn from the Maxim Gorky novel, and became a classic film of the Russian silent period.

Set in the Russian Revolution of 1905, a vast movement of peasant unrest, worker’s strikes and mutinies in the armed forces, The Mother (Vera Baranovskaya) is caught between The Father (Aleksandr Chistyakov) and The Son (Nikolai Batalov) who are on opposite sides of a factory strike. After The Father is killed in the strike, The Mother’s actions inadvertently send her son to prison. With her political consciousness transformed, she joins a march to free the strikers, who, learning of the approaching march, plan to escape. The Son is shot during the escape, and at the end of the film, The Mother is trampled to death by the Tsarist cavalry.

Pudovkin believed that a central problem for the film artist is to find a way to reveal emotions visually. He writes,

Plastic material is perhaps more commonly known as the objective correlative, a term coined in 1922 by T. S. Eliot who argues that “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”¹⁷ Pudovkin argues that incorporating plastic material in film allows the actors to tone down their performances, to underplay what would be more broadly rendered on the stage because the director, through montage, is able to associate the actor’s performance with powerful, expressive imagery that will help carry the scene.

After The Father is killed early in Mother, Pudovkin creates a long, somber evening scene of The Mother “sitting with the dead,” as her husband lies in on a bier in their home. See Critical Commons, “Mother (Pudovkin, 1926) The Objective Correlative: Water Dripping.”¹⁸ The pace of the cutting is very slow and methodical, and the movements of the actors are subdued, and almost motionless. The sequence proceeds as follows:

1. A somber two shot in the family home of the mother, sitting in grief adjacent to the deceased father who is lying on a bier. The mother sits stoically. (:07 seconds)
2. Cut to a medium close up of a pan of water from a Russian “rukomoynik,” a kind of functional, industrial wall-mounted sink. The water drips slowly into the basin, creating a slow, metronomic beat. (:07 seconds)
3. Cut to a medium close up of the mother, eyes distant, expressionless, staring straight into the camera. (:04 seconds)
4. Cut to the medium shot of the father motionless on his bier. (:04 seconds)
5. Cut to the medium close up (shot 2) of a slow drip into pan of water. (:07 seconds)
6. Cut to a long shot, the son opens the door and enters. (:05 seconds)
7. Cut to the somber two shot (shot 1) of mother by the bier. (:04 seconds)
8. Cut to long shot of the son at door (shot 6), he stares while the door continues to slowly swing open behind him. (:08 seconds)
9. Cut to the medium shot of the father (shot 4) motionless on his bier. (:03 seconds)
10. Cut to the medium close up (shot 3) of the mother expressionless, staring straight into the camera. (:03 seconds)
11. Cut to long shot of the son at door (shot 6), he stares and drops his hands to his side. (:05 seconds)
12. Cut to the medium close up (shot 3) of the mother expressionless, staring straight into the camera. (:03 seconds)
13. Cut to long shot of the son at door (shot 6), he crosses without taking his eyes off his parents, and sits slowly on the bed. (:07 seconds)
14. Cut to the medium close up (shot 2) of a slow drip into pan of water. (:07 seconds)
15. Cut to the medium close up (shot 3) of the mother expressionless, staring straight into the camera. (:03 seconds)
16. Cut to long shot of the son on the bed (shot 6) and he finally speaks. (:03 seconds)
17. Title card: “Who killed him?”

The Mother answers that one of his friends, a trouble making striker, killed his father, and Pudovkin returns for one more round of close ups, this time with tears in The Mother’s eyes, followed by the water dripping, before closing on The Father dead on the bier.

The shot selection, acting, and cutting here are all very restrained. The shot selection consists of five shots that are virtually static, except for The Son who slowly sits on the bed. The establishing two shot of Mother and deceased Father is used to open the scene, and to re-establish when The Son enters. At the bier, there are close ups of the expressionless Mother (shown seven times) and the motionless Father (shown four times, including the closing shot). At the door there is a long shot of The Son entering, staring, then sitting, and asking who killed his father (shown six times). Also at the door is a close up of the water dripping from the rukomoynik into the basin (shown four times).

The cycling of these shots is tactful, and the cutting rhythm is tranquil and detached. At the core of the scene is the repeated stasis of mother and father, widow and corpse, intercut with the dripping water that continues to mark the slow, inevitable passage of time, like the grains of sand through an hourglass. Visually, the dripping water is a precise choice for the objective correlative, suggesting at once, the monotony of a ticking clock, the loss of vital essence, the relentless forward motion of time, and the mother’s tears, which conclude the scene.¹⁹ The fusion of these elements synthesizes a feeling of grief, “the Hour of Lead,”²⁰ to use a line from the famous Emily Dickenson poem.

Pudovkin returns to the use of plastic material throughout the film, creating plastic synthesis through montage:

See Critical Commons, “Mother (Pudovkin, 1926) The Objective Correlative: Spring.”²²

Pudovkin Versus Eisenstein

Beyond his use of plastic material, it is instructive to compare Pudovkin’s concept of montage to Eisenstein’s. Like Kuleshov, Pudovkin sees editing as linkage, shots joined like links in the chain, a construction assembled “Screw by screw, brick by brick.”²³ Eisenstein counters that this notion of editing is only a diluted version of the real source of editing’s power, conflict. In 1929, Eisenstein wrote a critique of Pudovkin’s view,

Eisenstein casts Pudovkin as a traditional director, whose use of montage remains grounded in Hollywood editing practices, particularly those gleaned from the films of D. W. Griffith, who was greatly admired by the Soviet filmmakers. Eisenstein sees Pudovkin’s films as conventionally rendered stories. While not as precisely driven by the character-centered causality that gives Hollywood films a more tightly focused narrative, they do present ordinary people, swept along by the movement of the masses, transformed by the impact of the revolutionary events around them. Not surprisingly, Pudovkin argues for the “invisible observer” model of film editing; that is, the cuts in a film mimic the shifts in attention of an ideal observer who controls the flow of narrative information. So a close-up shot mimics our visual fixation on details, and by this shifting focus, the director controls the “psychological guidance” of the viewer.

By contrast, in The Cinema of Eisenstein, David Bordwell gives a thorough account of the plotless cinema advanced by the more radical film artist Eisenstein, a style that

1. rejects the notion of plot as a series of consequences developing from the actions of an individual
2. favors perceptual and emotional shock over stringent realism
3. depicts the “mass protagonist,” not the individual, as the creator of historic change, and so . . .
4. unifies the film using acts and longer sequences that structure the stages of mass action
5. creates motifs of significant objects and graphic patterns to develop complex, unifying thematic associations
6. cultivates overlapping editing to create an agitated rhythm, and to replay key events
7. employs typage, Eisenstein’s innovative portrayal of character through the external features of physiognomy, dress and behavior to indicate religion, region of origin, and class, particularly in the grotesque attributes of the bourgeois
8. paints the broad sweep of history using associative parallels. Where Pudovkin kept these parallels within the diegesis (e.g., the militants’ march in Mother is compared with the ice thawing on a nearby river), Eisenstein moves beyond that to quasi-diegetic or non-diegetic parallels. (See intellectual montage below, p. 186.) Typically, non-diegetic material will be photographed against a black background in close up, providing “a kind of abstract commentary on the action, making the viewer aware of an intervening narration that can interrupt the action and point of thematic or pictorial associations.”²⁵

So while both Pudovkin and Eisenstein hope to propagandize the proletariat, Pudovkin is clearly more traditional in film style and form, providing the customary “psychological guidance” for the viewer through editing, while Eisenstein is more inventive, relentlessly bent upon pushing the artistic capabilities of the medium. Pudovkin’s human scale stories are more conventional, while Eisenstein’s strive for a vibrant new filmic art that can glorify the monumental heroics of the masses.

Likewise, Pudovkin’s theoretical writings do not aim as high as Eisenstein’s. Pudovkin wrote two practical handbooks for makers: Film technique (1929) and Film acting (1933). Since they are exclusively grounded in the practice of making films, his accounts of how editing works draw heavily on what was known from the routines and practices of the day. Ordinary editing – what Pudovkin called “Structural Editing” – is the result of taking the shooting script and atomizing it: at the production stage, the filmmaker breaks the script down first into scenes, then into sequences, then into shots, and photographs that material. The resulting footage is assembled to reflect “the guidance of the attention of the spectator to different elements of the developing action in succession. . . [This] is, in general, characteristic of the film. It is the basic method.”²⁶ (Note that découpage articulates the same concept. See p. 58.)

Beyond this basic method, Pudovkin described as early as 1926 a group of five elements of editing under the heading “Editing as an Instrument of Impression (Relational Editing).” He argues that these five are the primary “special editing methods having as their aim the impression of the spectator.”²⁷ Again, the basic editing method is structural or constructive; relational editing is a subset of those methods that has special power to create impressions or associations in the viewer. Some of these five are more coherent and specific than others, but overall appear to be more committed to crosscutting than Eisenstein’s conception of montage is to creating metaphor or collision. In other words, his typology remains within a coherent scenario of integrated characters, whose temporal and spatial relationships are clearly indicated. Pudovkin never seems to be willing to push very far beyond the coherent diegesis, even with these “special editing methods” which he differentiates as follows:

Contrast

In practice, this method seems to be nothing more than crosscutting between opposing images. Pudovkin writes,

The thrust here is to place opposites against each other in a sequence, but unlike the idea-associative collision montage or intellectual montage (see below p. 186) where the forward motion of an action on screen is stopped by radially colliding visuals, Pudovkin here is calling for a kind of pointed crosscutting – “to relate separate scenes and even separate shots of scenes to one another” – not the radical departure Eisenstein seeks.

Parallelism

Pudovkin uses the term parallelism, but it is not clear that his intended meaning for the word is the standard usage of film studies. The example he gives is a sequence in which

Pudovkin’s parallelism seems like a combination of motif (the clock/time motif), crosscutting (simultaneous actions) and contrast editing (worker vs. factory owner). Traditional usage, according to Kristen Thompson, defines crosscutting as “editing which moves between simultaneous events in widely separated locales. ‘Parallel editing’ differs in that the two events intercut are not simultaneous” and if the time relationship is unclear, the device could be either.³⁰

Symbolism

What Pudovkin calls “symbolism” is more commonly called idea associative comparison montage or visual metaphor. (See below, p. 158.) Writing of Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) Pudovkin says, “just as a butcher fells a bull with the swing of a pole-axe, so cruelly and in cold blood, were shot down the workers. This method is especially interesting because, by means of editing, it introduces an abstract concept into the consciousness of the spectator without use of a title.”³¹ The strikers are slaughtered cattle, and juxtaposition creates this “symbol” or visual metaphor.

Simultaneity

Known in American films since 1910, Pudovkin is referring to what is commonly known as crosscutting, when two simultaneous actions that are spatially distant are intercut. (See crosscutting, Chapter 2, p. 75.) Pudovkin writes that this ubiquitous device is aimed at suspense:

Leit-motif (reiteration of theme)

The German leitmotiv literally means “leading motif” or “guiding motif,” and was first used to describe Wagner’s association of short, distinctive musical phrases with a particular character, ideas, or situations in his operas. Here, Pudvokin simply means repetition for emphasis of theme, and gives this example: “In an anti-religious scenario that aimed at exposing the cruelty and hypocrisy of the Church in employ of the Tsarist regime, the same shot was several times repeated: a church-bell slowly ringing and, superimposed on it, the title: ‘The sound of bells sends into the world a message of patience and love.’ This piece appeared whenever the scenarist desired to emphasise the stupidity of patience, or the hypocrisy of the love thus preached.”³³ Clearly, since Pudovkin is writing in the silent era, a leit-motif need not use sound or a super imposed title, though a musical accompaniment to a silent exhibition in a theatre may have used bells. Pudovkin is merely pointing to repetition as a way to reinforce meaning: the leit-motif could be audio or video.

Though Pudovkin’s film work is of secondary importance to Eisenstein’s, and indeed has been called “the work of a blackboard theoretician. . . [who] used images in an invariably dull way – the photographed storyboard,”³⁴ he had a significant impact in the Soviet film industry. As a director of 27 films, as a screenwriter, actor, author of early books on film theory and as a film teacher at V.G.I.K., Pudovkin played a very important role in the development of Russian cinema. Eisenstein would always outshine Pudovkin, particularly in the West. Eisenstein’s films were more innovative in their editing, more sensational in their violent clashes, more energizing in their nervous rhythm, and more heroic in scale than Pudovkin’s work. We will survey Eisenstein’s key contributions to Russian cinema after we first clarify a number of distinct meanings for the word “montage.”

What is "Montage"?

Montage is a word that is frequently used to describe a range of filmic phenomena without ever specifying systematically all its uses. Montage in the broad sense describes a series of short shots that compress time, space, or narrative information, but it actually has several distinct meanings. Its association with Eisenstein is often condensed – too simply – into two words: “collision montage,” whereby the juxtaposition of two shots that oppose each other on formal parameters or on the content of their images are cut against each other to create a new meaning not contained in the respective shots: shot A + shot B = new meaning C.

The association of collision montage with Eisenstein is not surprising. He consistently maintained that the mind functions dialectically, in the Hegelian sense, that the contradiction between opposing ideas (thesis versus antithesis) is resolved by a higher truth, synthesis. He argued that conflict was the basis of all art, and never failed to see montage in other cultures. For example, he saw montage as a guiding principle in the construction of “Japanese hieroglyphics in which two independent ideographic characters (‘shots’) are juxtaposed and explode into a concept. Thus:

• Eye + Water = Crying
• Door + Ear = Eavesdropping
• Child + Mouth = Screaming
• Mouth + Dog = Barking
• Mouth = Bird = Singing³⁵

He also found montage in Japanese haiku, where short sense perceptions are juxtaposed, and synthesized into a new meaning, as in this example:

• A lonely crow
• On a leafless bough
• One autumn eve.

As Dudley Andrew notes, “The collision of attractions from line to line produces the unified psychological effect which is the hallmark of haiku and montage.”³⁶ But there are at least six usages for the word “montage,” of which collision montage is just one, and it is worth clarifying some of those usages before we proceed.

Six Usages of the Word "Montage"

1. Montage = Editing

In many contexts, “montage” simply means “editing.” The French word “montage” means literally “a mounting,” “an assembly,” as in “mounting an engine,” and the English screen credit “Editor” has the French equivalent “le monteur/la monteuse.” This usage, editing as “mounting” is relevant to Eisenstein’s theory because he saw editing as the process whereby the simple assembly of shots, the “mounting” of the film shot by shot through editing, is a form of engineering, specifically “psycho engineering” whereby the assembled shots will create moments of raw stimulation, triggering basic emotions in the viewer that, over time, develop into larger themes.

2. Sequential Analytical Montage

Herbert Zettl defines this kind of montage as one that will “condense an event into key developmental elements and present these elements in their original cause-effect sequence.”³⁷ While adhering to the ordinary forward progression of time, this type of montage routinely implies its central event or idea rather than show it explicitly. A car crash scene that intercuts the shots of two approaching cars without showing them hit, but includes the aftermath is one example given by Zettl for this type of montage. Eisenstein used this technique in Strike (1925). When Cossacks attack the workers in their living quarters, they drop a baby from a balcony. The horrifying montage ends with the baby lying on the ground, rather than showing the baby hit the ground. (Figure 5.1). See Critical Commons, “Kinds of Montage: Analytical Sequential Montage in Strike.”³⁸

3. The Hollywood Montage

This familiar subset of the Sequential Analytical Montage, where key elements of the narrative are compressed, often uses traditional markers of time passing like dissolves, but also tropes like newspaper headlines. In Heaven Can Wait (Lubitsch, 1943) the aging socialite, Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche), is lamenting growing older, and a humorous montage of birthdays passing, shown in cakes, candles, a telegram and an endless stream of birthday neckties summarizes the theme that getting older is not all that much fun. See Critical Commons, “Kinds of Montage: Hollywood Montage in Heaven Can Wait.”³⁹

Another classic example of the Hollywood montage comes from Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) where Susan’s disastrous opera career and her descent into an attempt at suicide is summarized with newspaper headlines and a flashing stage lamp that ultimately flickers out as the soundtrack winds down to a halt (Figure 5.2). Doug Travers at RKO created the montage. See Critical Commons, “Kinds of Montage: Hollywood Montage in Citizen Kane.”⁴⁰

4. Sectional Analytical Montage

Herbert Zettl uses this term for a montage that shows the various sections of an event and explores the complexity of a particular moment. Rather than showing cause and effect, a sectional analytic montage temporarily stops the progression of a screen event and explores an isolated point in time from various viewpoints.⁴¹ We can imagine such a montage in a film that halts the progress of the narrative to bring out the emotional content of a scene. Imagine two lovers strolling a sidewalk. In one case, we could interrupt story progression to create a montage that illustrates “Manhattan, 5:00 pm, late autumn as winter approaches.” In another case, with another shot of two lovers strolling on a sidewalk, we could interrupt story progression to create a montage that illustrates “Paris, 5:00 pm, early spring, as winter fades.” We can imagine the kinds of images that would be expressive in each case, and how the cutting of these images would impact the emotional tone of the lover’s interaction. (And it is worth noting that Zettl argues that a multiscreen presentation of this kind of imagery would be, by definition, a sectional analytical montage because the event details are presented simultaneously rather than sequentially.)

Another form of sectional analytical montage is one that portrays “subjective time” by temporarily arresting event progression to examine a specific moment. In Sam Peckipah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his men try to force General Mapache to release one of their gang, Angel (Jaime Sánchez), who is barely alive after being tortured. When the general cuts his throat, the men gun Mapache down almost by instinct, in front of hundreds of his men. At that point, “time stops,” as they assess the hopelessness of their situation (Figure 5.3). Peckinpah stops the scene for roughly 30 seconds as the men react, looking at each other and the Mexican soldiers, taking in their situation and finally acknowledging their commitment and dedication to one another before the hopeless blood bath to come. See Critical Commons, “The Wild Bunch: Final Shootout,” for a sectional analytical montage near the beginning.⁴²

5. Idea-Associative Comparison

This type of montage uses successive shots that appose similar themes in different events, so that the thematically related events reinforce each other.⁴³ Here, by placing shots (or in Eisenstein’s terminology “fragments”) that are related thematically side by side, the viewer contemplates the similarity, and synthesizes a tertium quid, literally a “third thing,” that is not contained in either shot. The classic example for this case is from Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1928). Alexander Kerensky (Vladimir Popov), a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, is the Minster of Justice in the provisional government from the Winter Palace of Czar Nicholas II, who has been overthrown and executed with all his family. Kerensky is seeking democratic reforms but signs an order reinstating the death penalty for army deserters. In a segment that leads with the title card “A ‘Royal’ Democrat,” Eisenstein places shots of Kerensky in his formal dress uniform with leather boots and gloves (Figure 5.4) against a shot (“fragment”) of the mechanical peacock⁴⁴ unfurling his feathers (Figure 5.5), suggesting that he is vain and strutting like a peacock, and corrupted by the power he has ascended to.

See Critical Commons, “Kinds of Montage: Idea Associative Comparison, Kerensky vs. Peacock”⁴⁵

Another famous comparison montage from Eisenstein is found in Strike (1925) that intercuts non-diegetic shots (“fragments”) (i.e., images that are outside the story space of the film) of a bull being slaughtered with shots (“fragments”) of soldiers killing striking factory workers. The visual metaphor – the strikers are cattle and the soldiers are butchers – is clear and effective, and continues the animal motif that runs throughout the film: each of the spies for the police shown earlier is tagged visually as Fox, Owl, Bulldog or Monkey. See Critical Commons, “Visual Metaphor in Strike.”⁴⁶ Notice that because the footage of the bull is non-diegetic and viscerally violent it is tempting to classify this as a idea-associative collision montage rather than idea associative comparison, but the fact that we can describe its meaning as “the strikers are cattle led to the slaughter” points to the comparison rather than the collision of these two.

6. Idea-Associative, Collision Montage

In a collision montage, two opposing events express or reinforce a basic idea or feeling.⁴⁷ Here again, there is a tertium quid, a third something, generated from the placing the two events next to each other. But in this case the juxtaposition creates conflict, not comparison, and consequently tends to intensify the moment even more than a comparison montage. Given that it is an overtly rhetorical device, the collision montage has the potential to be impactful or alienating to an audience.

More than any other usage of the word “montage,” it is this “collision” usage that we associate with Eisenstein. In part, this association grows from the fame Eisenstein achieved with the editing of the Odessa steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin, probably the most famous sequence in film history, and a masterful piece of editing the likes of which had not been seen when the film premiered in 1925. Certainly the notion of “collision” corresponds to “intellectual montage,” a term from Eisenstein’s typology of montage that we will deal with more fully below. For now, we can point to the closing of the steps sequence as an example of collision montage. See Critical Commons, “Battleship Potemkin (1925) Odessa Steps,” to view the four closing shots.⁴⁸

In the final four shots⁴⁹, Eisenstein synthesizes the idea of “horrific, violent repression.” Starting from the final shot of the baby carriage beginning to flip over at the end of its journey down the steps (Figure 5.6), Eisenstein cuts to repeated actions of a Cossack slashing downward towards the camera, first in a medium close up (Figure 5.7), then in a tight close up (Figure 5.8) where he grimaces ferociously. Spatially, it is unclear where he is standing, and if he is slashing at the baby, since nothing in the sequence has shown their relative positions. The next shot – the school mistress with smashed pince-nez screaming with blood dripping down her face – only adds to horror and the spatial ambiguity: was she shot or was she slashed?

The explosive energy these four shots impart can be described in a number of ways, all of which demonstrate the difficulty in putting a highly kinetic image sequence into words, but also suggesting the range of formal parameters (attractions) embedded in the shot that potentially collide in the four shot sequence;

High angle shot (carriage tips), low angle shot (Cossack starts to strike), low angle shot (Cossack slashes once, and begins to slash again), head-on shot (woman with pince-nez is frozen in horror).

Objective medium shot (carriage tips), subjective shot (Cossack starts to strike towards us), subjective shot (Cossack slashes towards camera and begins to slash towards us again), objective medium shot (woman with pince-nez is frozen in horror).

Incomplete action (carriage tips), incomplete action (Cossack starts to slash), complete /incomplete action (Cossack slashes once, and begins to slash again), resolution (woman with pince-nez is frozen in horror).

Forward energy down the stairs that does not resolve (carriage tips), forward energy down towards camera that does not resolve (Cossack starts to slash), forward energy down towards camera that resolves then does not resolve (Cossack slashes once, and begins to slash again), effect (woman with pince-nez is frozen in horror).

Regardless of how we try to account for the impact of the colliding attractions in each shot, their effect is palpable. They are clear evidence of Eisenstein’s artistry, and the correctness of his theorizing: his intuition that collision montage can be a visceral stimulus towards the “psycho engineering” is obvious here.

One final question: What about audio? We have not accounted for the interaction of audio and video in the categories above, and audio is a powerful element to juxtapose within a montage sequence. Zettl says that often audio can work as a montage element in a way that is effective but less glaring than a visual element, since both kinds of analytical montage – sectional and sequential – and ideas-associative montage – collision and comparison – emerge when the sequence is juxtaposed with a specific track.⁵⁰ Zettl gives as an example of comparison idea-associative A/V montage a long shot of a sports car moving through tight turns juxtaposed with the sound of a jet engine of a fighter plane, which only hints at the potentials of audio in montage. Today, with advances in Dolby noise reduction and surround sound, the wide-ranging creative possibilities of audio as a crucial, combustive element in montage are unquestioned. But for Eisenstein, a famous filmmaker with Potemkin to his credit and his first sound film still 13 years ahead, the issue of how to integrate audio into his theory of montage is not a pressing one. More acute is the issue of how he will conceptualize montage, how he will catalog its formal potentials and account for its substantive impact on the viewer. His theorizing will progress in the silent period even though his filmmaking flounders politically, but ultimately he will return to the sound film as a creative and theoretical problem much later in his life.

Eisenstein's Early Theorizing: The Attraction and Seizing the Spectator

Eisenstein’s early theorizing about montage grew out of his work in theatre, which began when he served in the Red Army. In 1918, as the civil war in Russia deepened, he began painting posters for agit-prop trains that were presented as simple plays with broadly drawn political characters representing good and evil. “Agitation-propaganda” trains were units of the army that spread the Bolshevik message across the vast expanse of Russia. Since much of the population was illiterate, the trains travelled to remote regions without electricity to propagandize the peasantry. Mustered out of the army in 1920, Eisenstein joined the Proletkult movement in Moscow, an experimental artistic group dedicated to advancing a new working class aesthetic in the arts.

In 1921, Eisenstein came under the tutelage of Vsevolod Meyerhold, the leading Russian director of avant-garde theatre, who became a primary influence in the development of the young man’s aesthetics. “Eisenstein’s belief in controlling the spectator through the performer’s bodily virtuosity; his emphasis on pantomime; his interest in Asian theater, the circus and the grotesque; even his 1930s attempt to create a curriculum in which film directors would undergo stringent physical and cultural training – all were initiated by the association with Meyerhold.”⁵¹ The central tenet that Eisenstein drew from his mentor was grounded in an acting style Meyerhold pioneered, biomechanics, that replaced studied gesture and overwrought language with an emphasis on automatic reflexive motions that arise naturally in the actor. Under Meyerhold, Eisenstein came to believe that the stage director’s goal is to be a “psycho engineer.” Using biomechanics, the director strings together freestanding moments of peak action that reflexively deliver the desired shock to the audience’s nervous system. By jolting the audience, the play will begin to turn their thinking toward the revolution. This belief in the power of art to motivate through reflex action drew not only on work of Meyerhold, but also on the contemporary experiments of Ivan Pavlov, the influential Russian psychologist who was demonstrating the power of classical conditioning by, among other things, training dogs in his lab to salivate to the ringing of a bell.

Beginning with the play Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man that he co-produced with Sergei Tretyakov in 1923, Eisenstein sought to bring the spectator to revolutionary action. Eisenstein, rejecting the “dramatic illusion” of traditional theatre, transformed the original play into a revue, with remarkable, circus-like moments of acrobatics, tight rope walking, and feats of agility. He even created a short film to include in the production. He described his new method in a short article, “Montage of Attractions.”

For Eisenstein, the attraction is a way to dismantle the tradition of naturalism in theatre by focusing on the power of an independent moment of maximum performance, a “unit of impression,” in Tom Gunning’s words.⁵³ The attraction prompts a direct response: an audience member sits in the physical presence of an actor, and the actor’s actions stimulate reactions in the primitive brain through a motor-imitative response in the audience. The motor-imitative response might arise as follows: the actor raises his fist on stage to strike another actor, and the audience experiences a primitive, reflexive mental response, an “inner recoiling” from that action.

For Eisenstein, biomechanical acting and the motor-imitative response it triggers in the audience opens up a new range of possibilities for stage and screen:

Later, applied to film, this acting style will often reveal a flaw: the “realistic, ritualistically repeated and abstracted behavior on the part of the actors and participants who tend to become walking concepts . . . typage figures.”⁵⁵

Although there are two distinct periods in which Eisenstein theorizes about film’s potential – his writings from the 1920s during the early silent period, and his revision of those ideas in the 1930s and 1940s – his notion of the “attraction” is carried into his filmmaking and into his theorizing with few modifications. In 1924, barely a year after his original statement on theatre, Eisenstein pens an article “The Montage of Film Attractions.” Though he never defined the term concisely, in broad terms, the attraction for Eisenstein centered on both a visually expressive moment and the immediate shock effect on the viewer of seeing violent or frightful or surprising action represented (in film or theatre). Jacques Aumont points out that the ingredients that remain central to both are the attraction’s autonomy, and its visual impact, and its rejection of the need to express theme through traditional character action within a scene:

If the purpose of revolutionary art is to mold the spectator to the desired (political) end, then any striking aspect of theatre or film can serve as the attraction, as the “fist,” that will deliver violent shocks to the audience and conquer their inflexible beliefs. The word choice here – “fist” – is calculated. Dziga Vertov’s belief in the “Kino-eye,” the power of the “film machine” to reveal the world in a way unique to that device, is transformed by Eisenstein who famously wrote, “I don’t believe in the kinoeye, I believe in kino-fist.”⁵⁷ And while Eisenstein’s use of the attraction is political, notice that it is not excluded from entertainment cinema, where it has a long history. The attraction, common in early silent film spectacle, lives on, though tamed by narrative in entertainment cinema: “The Hollywood advertising policy of enumerating the features of a film, each emblazoned with the command ‘See!’ shows this primal power of the attraction running beneath the armature of narrative regulation. . Clearly in some sense recent spectacle cinema has re-affirmed its roots in stimulus and carnival rides, in what might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects.”⁵⁸

Beyond the central role of the “attraction,” “conflict” is the other key concept for Eisenstein in the 1920s, based on the prevailing philosophy of “dialectical materialism,” developed in the writing of Marx and Engels. Dialectical materialism is “the Marxian interpretation of reality that views matter as the sole subject of change and all change as the product of a constant conflict between opposites arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all events, ideas, and movements.”⁵⁹ Adopted as the official Soviet philosophy under Stalin, historical events are seen as resulting from the conflict of opposing ideologies, a series of contradictions that give rise to new social orders. Eisenstein, writing in 1929, argues that conflict permeates film art, starting with the lowest physiological basis for the perception of movement in the viewer, because persistence of vision is conflict:

In the realm of art this dialectical principle of the dynamic is embodied in

Conflict

In short, conflict drives the low-order, primitive brain function that allows the viewer to see movement in the projected image because persistence of vision collides sequential project frames on top of each other. Eisenstein goes on to distinguish his concept of montage from Pudovkin’s using the same model, a way to distinguish his broad approach to storytelling from the traditional approach of Pudovkin. Pudovkin’s sequential elements arrayed next to one another become Pudovkin’s shots as links in a chain. Eisenstein’s sequential elements arrayed on top of one another become Eisenstein’s shots as bundles of attractions in conflict.

Conflict, then, becomes the overriding principle in Eisenstein’s theory and later in “Film Attractions,” he argues that Pudovkin’s films use the “epic” principle of narration through a series of the hero’s great achievements arrayed next to each other, versus Eisenstein’s films that use the “dramatic” principle of narration through a collision of vivid contrasts. At this higher level of conflict, executive-level brain functions allow the viewer to synthesize new ideas from conflicting opposites. Thus, conflict is indispensable to a range of mental activities used to process film art: it is essential to both “bottom up” (sensation of movement) processes and “top down” (cognition) processes, essential to the viewer at both ends of the mental spectrum.

Given this plausible theoretical model, a central question for Eisenstein the filmmaker is more practical: “How can a conflict in the film form be used for a higher purpose, as the ‘Kino-fist’ to lead the viewer to the Marxist world view?” His first answer is “A Tentative Film Syntax,” one of two taxonomies he constructed in 1929. “Tentative” is the operant word – this is mental doodling, a piece of writing that reads like it was jotted down on a napkin, that might be just as accurately titled “Some Early Thoughts About How Montage Works on the Viewer.” Nevertheless, “Syntax” is consistent with his early theorizing: it is hierarchical and it reflects the Pavlovian milieu of his silent film work. Stripped to its basic form, the hierarchy of possible shot arrangements follows a hypothesized hierarchy of mental functions in the viewer, namely perception, emotion, and cognition. Drawing from Eisenstein’s “syntax,” we can try to summarize his thinking about the impact of conflict/montage on a viewer’s mental processes. (For clarity, Eisenstein’s writing is in italics.)

A Tentative Film Syntax⁶¹

I. Each moving piece of montage in its own right. With this cryptic line, Eisenstein reiterates that, at the lowest level, the counterpoint between two frames of film, the finest grained conflict possible – frame against frame – is what creates movement in cinema.

II. Artificially produced representation of movement. Eisenstein says that the following examples show primitive-psychological cases – using only the optical superimposition of movement.

A. Logical. . . Montage: repetition of a machine-gun firing by cross-cutting the relevant details of the firing. At the level of the shot, we can mimic the creation of movement by inter-cutting short shots of relevant details. In October: Ten Days that Shook the World, Eisenstein intercuts shots of a machine gun (Figure 5.10) and shots of a machine gunner (Figure 5.11) in two frame shots that collide on a number of parameters including exposure or grey scale value and graphic mass.

The effect is a logical sensation of machine gun-like motion, recognized (or should we say felt) at the level of primitive-psychological perception. See Critical Commons, “October: Artificial Representation of Movement, Logical – Machine Gun.”⁶²

B. Alogical. . . This device used for symbolic pictorial expression [in] Potemkin. The marble lion leaps up surrounded by the thunder of Potemkin’s guns firing in protest against the bloodbath Odessa steps. The effect was achieved because the length of the middle piece was correctly calculated. Super imposition on the first piece [Figure 5.12] produced the first jump. Time for the second position [Figure 5.13] to sink in. Superposition of the third position [Figure 5.14] on the second – the second jump. Finally the lion is standing. Struck by the effect of these three simple shots, Eisenstein wants to highlight both its psychological and intellectual forces. The lion rising is an overt, artificial representation of movement that works on a number of levels in the brain. From still shots of sculpture, it stimulates primitive brain functions to create motion. It also triggers psychological effects that Bordwell sees as multifaceted. “As literal filmic ‘animation,’ it snaps the spectator to attention. More specifically, the shots have an auditory effect. In whipping a snoozing lion into a roar, the editing synesthetically evokes the tumult of the barrage [seen in the previous shots].” ⁶³ And clearly the lion sequence is also a metaphor: the revolution is waking even the sleeping stones. Or as Eisenstein puts it, “The jumping lions entered one’s perception as a turn of speech — ‘The stones roared.’”⁶⁴

See Critical Commons, “Battleship Potemkin: Artificial Representation of Movement, Alogical.”⁶⁵

III. The case of emotional combinations not merely of the visible elements of the pieces but principally of the chains of psychological association. Associational montage. . . As a means of sharpening (heightening) a situation emotionally. . . EMOTIONAL DYNAMISATION. The shooting down of the workers is cut in such a way that the massacre is intercut with the slaughter of a cow. (Difference in material. But the slaughter is employed as an appropriate association.) This produces a powerful emotional intensification of the scene.

Though it works through “primitive-psychological perception” – all perception of motion does – associative montage also functions at a higher level of mental activity to sharpen what the viewer feels. Attractions juxtaposed through montage create “chains of psychological associations” that startle and rouse the spectator to strong emotions, a further step in seizing the political consciousness of the viewer. See Critical Commons, “Visual Metaphor in Strike”.⁴⁶

IV. The emancipation of closed action from its conditioning by time and space. The first attempts at this form made in the Ten Days film.

Example 1. (Ten Days)

A trench packed with soldiers [Figure 5.15] seems to be crushed by the weight of an enormous cannonball [sic: mechanized gun] descending on the whole thing [Figure 5.16]. Thesis brought to expression. In material terms, the effect is achieved through the apparently chance intercutting between an independently existing trench and a metal object with a similarly military character. In reality they have absolutely no spatial relationship with one another.

Reflecting on ways his silent films have worked to “seize the spectator,” Eisenstein notes that the traditional, rigid adherence to “closed action” – the diegesis contained by time and space, the traditional story space created through analytical editing – is limiting. Here, with the spatial relationship between the two shots unspecified, the thesis of the juxtaposition is made explicit, using images that function more like language: the capitalist war machine oppresses the working class. Eisenstein argues further that unlike theatre, where a murder scene would be shown in continuous time and space (in the stage space before the audience) and affect the audience like an item of information, a single shot in film is not the reality of the theatre space, but a concrete image that has the potential to evoke associations. Given this power, cinema should become discursive, moving beyond the methods of theatre towards the methods of language, which can give rise to new ideas by factual description.⁶⁶

Here, using non-diegetic material entering apparently by chance – the “cannonball” (a mechanized gun) that has not been located in the diegesis – Eisenstein can make a thesis statement, a tertium quid, using visually concrete images to express new ideas, just like language. The false eye-line match created by the soldier looking up (Figure 5.15) contributes to the third meaning by explicitly thwarting the viewer’s expectation that the two are spatially connected. In the context of the film, where we have just seen early successes of the February Revolution and war weary Russian and German infantry exchanging food in friendly conversation, the mechanized gun descending (Figure 5.16) literally represents the “war machine” that continues to repress and crush the masses. The “war machine” in this instance is the provisional government, which the film has just shown honoring its commitment to the Allies rather than sue for peace. See “October: Ten Days that Shook the World, Cannon Lowers.”⁶⁷

“A Tentative Film Syntax” is based on a broad underlying model of montage that rests on a hierarchical view of the viewer’s mind, a mind to be moved by embedded attractions from perception to emotion to cognition. Or as Eisenstein wrote, “From image to emotion, from emotion to thesis.”⁶⁸ It builds on the notion that the very perception of motion in film dictates involuntary, “from the bottom up” processing (i.e., we can’t will ourselves to see a film as individual frames). And since biomechanics drives the motor-imitative response (i.e., we reflexively repeat an actor’s movement without conscious thought), “primitive-psychological perception” must be the foundation for the impact of montage. Eisenstein believes that when the director has transposed his theme into a set of attractions with a predetermined goal, the resulting pressures on the audience’s psyche will “arouse us” and “infect us” with emotion.⁶⁹ At the highest level, the filmmaker can trigger cognition when he emancipates “closed action from its conditioning by time and space”; that is, when it uses quasi-diegetic or non-diegetic attractions within shots more like a language to communicate abstract ideas to the viewer.

But what precisely happens to the spectator confronted with these overtly discontinuous shots? Why and how do quasi-diegetic and non-diegetic shots create more abstract meanings? In the second typol ogy of montage that Eisenstein creates in 1929, “Methods of Montage,” he offers “a richer taxonomy of formal options. Instead of postulating a conflict between equal forces within the shot, Eisenstein proposes that every cut juxtaposes two shots on the basis of some salient feature, the dominant.”⁷⁰ For Eisenstein, this is a carefully chosen word. “The dominant” obviously relates to music – the dominant chord in a diatonic scale – but as Bordwell points out, the idea also reflects Eisenstein’s continuing interest in physiology, to areas of the brain that “‘dominate’ a given behavior. More proximately, the term had also emerged in Russian formalist literary theory. . . the dominant as ‘the preeminence of one group of elements and the resulting deformation of other elements.’”⁷¹ The dominant is a factor in a sequence that is capable of working from the bottom up, and when it emerges, other attractions within the shot recede (and, as we shall see below, become “overtones”). Eisenstein writes,

Eisenstein argues that a canonical montage would be cut “according to the foreground” or the “dominating indications.” That is, look at what two shots placed side by side are indicating to you as their most potent visual potentials – graphic, planar, volumetric, spatial, tempo or light values – in order to release emotion and meaning in the viewer. A reasonable suggestion, but should those “foreground properties” be edited in a way that places them in conflict or in harmony or somewhere in between? Should the cut juxtapose graphic contrasts that are large or minor? Should the sequence move from shots of slow tempo action into shots that are slightly more rapid or suddenly swift? Not surprisingly given that the range of potential “foreground properties” is very large, Eisenstein points out it could be any of these: “This circumstance embraces all intensity levels of montage juxtaposition-all impulses: From a complete opposition of the dominants, i.e., a sharply contrasting construction, to a scarcely noticeable ‘modulation’ from shot to shot.”⁷³ Moreover, as the dominant emerges from a sequence, it may fluctuate from shot to shot – a series of shots might relate to one another in terms of their bright ness or value, but later shots in the sequence might relate to one another in terms of tempo – it is not “invariably stable.” And he goes on to give this concrete example:

Clearly, Eisenstein is seeing an edited sequence as a dynamic system, and the notion of a “guiding shot” placed at the beginning of the sequence that “christens” a sequence is a powerful one: in the irreversible flow of moving images, earlier images obviously shape the perception of later ones, but here Eisenstein, always the mystic, is arguing for a shot that “baptizes the sequence to its community” or “christens the ship,” both naming it and dedicating it to its purpose. If the christening shot can’t be found, a title card (or later in the sound era, a line of dialogue, a sound effect or a musical element) may be necessary to identify the dominant.

Given that every shot is a plethora of potential attractions, when the dominant drives the editing of a sequence, the others must recede and become secondary. Rather than disregard these secondary properties, Eisenstein wants to account for their impact, however modest, by introducing the notion of overtone. In sound, every musical instrument’s middle A is 440hz, but the difference between the sound of a violin or cello comes from its timbre, or tone color, which is determined by the number and relative loudness of it overtones (harmonics). Rather than write off the potential for secondary stimulants in a frame to create meaning, Eisenstein maintains that even these secondary “overtones” can play a vibrant part in the impact of a sequence.

Equipped with these two notions, Eisenstein offers a second typology, “Methods of Montage,” to articulate the possibilities of montage. This time, the typology will not address effects on the viewer, but rather, montage techniques available in the film itself that follow the hierarchical Perception-Emotion-Cognition model. (Eisenstein’s writings in italics):

Methods of Montage⁷⁵

1. Metric Montage

The fundamental criterion for this construction is the absolute lengths of the pieces. The pieces are joined together according to their lengths, in a formula-scheme corresponding to a measure of music. Realization is in the repetition of these “measures.”

With metric montage, the content of the shots is subordinated to the duration of the shots, thereby making duration the dominant. Notice that “metric montage” does not mean “all the shots are the same length,” although the term is often used that way. Eisenstein recognizes that shortening the shots is an effective way for an editor to create tension within a metric montage. Hence, the term simply means the cutting rhythm dominates in the sequence over the shot content, a difficult point we will return to shortly. Accelerated montage acknowledges a technique established in American films from at least Griffith’s Lonedale Operator (1911) where the climax of a screen chase is punctuated with shorter and shorter shots. See Critical Commons, “Lonedale Operator (1911) – Ending.”⁷⁶ Later, Eisenstein describes the power of metric montage as “rude motive force,” and it is clear that metric montage functions from the “bottom up,” at the lowest level of perception.

Metric montage has a direct, stimulus–response relationship with the audience that can bring the viewer’s “pulse” in to perfect accord with the film. The grain-mowing contest in The Old and the New is a metric montage that accelerates, and Eisenstein laughed when he saw some in the audience begin to rock in rhythm to the cutting, much as they would to a brass band.⁷⁷ Another example of metric montage Eisenstein gives is from October when the Savage Division, a cavalry unit from the Caucasus region, is persuaded by Bolsheviks to put away their weapons and join them to prevent the return of General Kornilov to Petrograd. Kornilov is on his way to lead a coup d’état against the Petrograd soviet, which would leave the provisional government under Alexander Kerensky in power. Kornilov, a loyal tsarist who tolerated the provisional government, is not shown in the sequence but leaflets distributed by the Bosheviks persuade the Savage Division not to join them. After the cavalrymen sheathe their knives, they celebrate by dancing the Lezginka, a folk dance commonly performed by peoples in the Caucasus region.

The cutting here is metric, but in typical Eisenstein fashion, it’s not that simple: metric cutting, yes, but hardly metric alone. Besides accelerated editing, the sequence also exhibits moments of intellectual montage (see p. 186 below) by cutting in non-diegetic inserts of a wind-up sculpture, as well as shots that return to the motif of Kerensky in his “idle” boots, lying on a couch surrounded by fluffy, brocade pillows. The wind-up sculpture is shot against a black background, like most of Eisenstein’s non-diegetic inserts, and appears (to Westerners) to be a caricature of a monk waving goodbye. However, the gesture in Japanese culture indicates “beckoning” as in the Maneki-neko, literally “beckoning cat,” the common Japanese talisman, which is believed to bring good luck to the owner. The motif of Kerensky in boots, “pouting” on the couch is intended to be in stark contrast with the energy and dynamism of the Savage Division dancers.

To focus on metric cutting, we have to look at duration as the dominant. The cutting towards the end of the sequence is clearly accelerated, and the effect is rousing, with staccatto cuts from dancing feet (Figure 5.17) to spinning faces synthesizing into a dynamic whirlwind of dance (Figure 5.18). Nevertheless, it’s difficult to imagine how to separate the internal visual rhythm – the movement of the actors – from the cutting rhythm here. In fact, if we examine these shots closely, many of the cuts show complete actions, like a dancer’s full kick or a complete twirl from where the dancer is spotting towards camera (i.e., stopping the rotation of his head to prevent dizziness) until he returns to that position. This suggests that the editing does acknowledge the shot contents rather than shot duration alone, though the sheer speed of the accelerating montage at the end of the sequence clearly dominates. See Critical Commons, “October: Metric Montage.”⁷⁸

Counting from after the last shot of Kerensky with his boots on the couch, the shots come very quickly: these are short shots, and here, the cumulative impact of 26 staccato shots in roughly:14 seconds of screen time is the potential of metric montage that Eisenstein seeks (see Table 5.1). Clearly, the metric montage in this brief section begins in a rapid rhythm, and then accelerates by chopping it into a whirling, leaping frenzy. The dominant created through cutting makes it much more a mediated event than a realistic event. Or to use Herbert Zettl’s terminology, Eisenstein is not objectively “looking at the Lezginka” here, but rather “creating a Lezginka event,” a screen event that can only exist in the film medium, by bringing a predetermined concept of shot length to drive the sequence.

2. Rhythmic Montage

Here, in determining the lengths of the pieces, the content within the frame is a factor possessing equal rights to consideration. . . Here its practical length derives from the specifics of the piece, and from its planned length according to the structure of the sequence.⁷⁹ Eisenstein goes on to say that the tension in rhythmic montage can be increased by shortening the shots, and by violating the established rhythm of the montage by cutting in material that has a different, easily identifiable tempo. He sees these violations in shots of the soldiers’ feet since their cadence is not synchronized with the established cutting rhythm and their march “comes in off-beat each time, and the shot itself is entirely different in its solution with each of these appearances.”⁸⁰ This off-the-beat, accelerating cutting ultimately is transferred to the baby carriage: “The stepping descent passes into a rolling descent.”⁸¹

Thus, in rhythmic montage, when you are thinking about where to cut, the “content within the frame” must be an equal consideration to the rhythm created by the cutting, that movement within the frame drives the montage.⁸² On Eisenstein’s mental hierarchy, rhythmic montage is of a higher order than perception, the “rude motive force” of metric montage. According to Eisenstein, this category could be called primitive-emotive, because even though “emotion is also a result of movement [in the montage], it is movement that is not merely a primitive external change [i.e., a simple “meter” created externally through cutting alone].”⁸³

To briefly clarify here a topic we will expand on in Chapter 8, we can define two terms. The term internal rhythm refers to the rhythm that is created by whatever appears or occurs within the shot, principally movement of actors and objects within the frame – the tempo, direction, and pattern of this movement – along with any of the formal elements available at the shooting stage

Table 5.1 Number of shots by duration in October metric montage sequence

to influence that movement, or create its own visual rhythm. A director can shape the rhythm of an actor’s performance in a single take so that it starts slowly and builds in intensity, or so that it starts in an intense rhythm and subsides. This is the essence of directing, what D. W. Griffith calls “the soul of the movies. . . pace. It is a part of the pulse of life itself, and, in common to all human consciousness, its insistent beat has a curious power to seduce and sway the emotions, as the rhythmic tread of marching troops sways a suspended bridge.”⁸⁴ Beyond performance, formal elements chosen and manipulated during the shooting stage can obviously affect the rhythm of whatever moves within the frame: to cite one example here, it is well known that a wide-angle lens accentuates (and a telephoto lens retards) motion towards and away from the camera.

External rhythm is cutting rhythm, the pattern established by the length of the shots that make up a scene. Lengthening or shortening the duration of the shots establishes a rhythmic measure that can complement or contrast the internal rhythm of a sequence. The kinds of transition (e.g., cut, fade, dissolve, wipe) used from shot to shot or from scene to scene also affect the nature of the cutting rhythm: if we take a sequence of shots and replace the straight cuts with leisurely dissolves, we would slow the external rhythm of the sequence. And though editors have no control of rhythm on the set, they absolutely control external rhythm by deciding duration of a shot, and to a lesser extent the internal rhythm by selection from the material available. (The editor can also modify internal rhythm by retiming the footage faster or slower in post, but this is rarely a first choice of how to manipulate internal rhythm unless it has been planned for in shooting.) Notice finally that internal rhythm and external rhythm are in constant flux, changing dynamically over a sequence, over a scene, and over the entire film. The editor modulates one of the primary stimuli for the viewer by controlling the dynamic, vibrantly changing rhythmic patterns that are displayed. We will return to these issues in the final chapter on rhythm.

Eisenstein notes that, even if you were creating a rhythmic montage with an eye towards internal rhythm as the dominant, you might still arrive at a sequence that exhibits “complete metric identity.” Presumably this means that while cutting a sequence attending to the rhythm of its subject matter (dominant internal rhythm) you might arrive at a sequence in which the dominant that emerges is metric (dominant external rhythm). There are other shared potentials. As in metric montage, tension can be created in the viewer when cutting a rhythmic sequence by acceleration of the material. Always seeking conflict, Eisenstein suggests that when cutting a sequence in an accelerating rhythm, the “most affective violation [of the primary rhythm emerging is] . . . the introduction of material more intense in an easily distinguished tempo.” In other words, tension can be created through acceleration in a line of action “A,” but the viewer’s emotions can be roused beyond that by introducing another line of action “B” that is more intense and in an easily identifiable tempo. See Critical Commons, “Battleship Potemkin: Odessa Steps.”⁸⁵

Eisenstein points to the famous Odessa steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin as an example of rhythmic montage. In the film’s third section, “The Odessa Staircase,” the people of the city take to their small boats to bring food and drink to the rebellious sailors on board Potemkin. As the townspeople watch and cheer from the steps, the sailors welcome gifts of bread, eggs, chickens and even piglets. Their celebration is cut short, starting with the jarring title, “AND SUDDENLY,” launching a briskly cut 157 shots in the next eight minutes (average shot length = 2.3 seconds) that is perhaps the most recognized scene in film history. Eisenstein cites the drum of the soldier’s feet descending the stairs as violating metrical demands by being “unsynchronized with the beat of the cutting. . [and coming] in off-beat each time.” Counting the three opening shots from the top of the stairs that show the soldiers from behind, there are 16 shots of the line of soldiers on the stairs (Throughout, I am using David Mayer’s extensively cataloged shot list for Battleship Potemkin, where the shots of soldiers moving downward are cataloged as “subtheme F” in the sequence).

The volley of muskets firing in the Odessa steps sequence can be considered a “violation,” a second line of action “B” used to accelerate the overall march of the soldiers down the stairs. Three shots of the line of soldiers are taken from the side and are simply framed, static shots of the muskets firing: shot 833 (the volley that hits the child) (Figure 5.19), shot 929 (the less orderly volley that sends a wave of citizens cascading down the steps), and shot 949 (the volley that hits the group of “pleaders,” but spares the woman in the pince-nez). The orderly efficiency of the volley is a violation of the primary line of action, the mass of citizens cascading chaotically down the stairs. The repeated forms of the guns, motionless, with bayonets fixed, are sufficient to meet Eisenstein’s criterion of “material more intense in an easily distinguished tempo.” Moreover, their impact is enhanced because they are cut extremely tight (i.e., short duration), with no “breathing room” on either side of the firing of the volley.

In other shots, this characteristic appears again. The soldiers march relentlessly down the steps – “material more intense in an easily distinguished tempo” – but will the viewer experience these shots as “off-beat” or “unsynchronized”? Viewed in the rhythm of the adjacent shots, which starts with a huddled group of citizens (Figure 5.20) who are starting to turn against the soldiers, the next shot is a stark contrast, again using Mayer’s shot description: “Shot 920: LS. The line of long, menacing shadows cast by the approaching off screen troops crawled slowly downward across the empty steps. Finally, the black-booted troops appear at the upper steps. They descend in slow, steady cadence, rifles grip and firing position.” (Figure 5.21) Eisenstein then cuts from this highly graphic shot of the repeated shadows (moving left to right in the frame) to the mother carrying her son up the steps (moving right to left in the frame) and castigating the troops (Figure 5.22) Here, if not literally “off-the-beat,” the cascade of 15 uniformed soldiers down the steps certainly is a “graphic violation” of the more chaotic, rounded close ups of the supplicants’ faces, wracked with fear, and moving against the military “cascade” rolling down the steps.

But perhaps the best place to see the “off-the-beat” cutting of the soldiers marching comes in adjacent shots of the soldiers marching, where the outgoing shot and the incoming shot both show

soldiers marching. Three shots midway through the Odessa steps sequence provides an instance to examine adjacent cuts where the soldiers advance, fire a volley and hit the mother by the baby carriage.

Shots 958 (Figure 5.23), 959 (Figure 5.24) and 960 (Figure 5.25) are described by Mayer as:

The “off-the-beat” cutting here arises from the fact that the outgoing shot 958 is profoundly dynamic in composition and in sustained movement from left to right – a descending march of soldiers in formation – while the next shot 959 abruptly transfers that dynamism to a static shot: a diagonal line of rigid bodies and static muskets erupts in a blast of gunfire. Not only is there unsynchronized conflict between a downward march that is abruptly arrested by the static shot of muskets, but Eisenstein emphasizes the “off–the-beat” quality of the cut by tightening shot 959 to its absolute essence: the volley is trimmed out to distill it into a:01 second shot of smoke bursting forth. The smoke that erupts from the muskets is propelled towards the right of the frame, and is answered by the cut to shot 960, a stable, centered close up of the mother in dark, rounded forms. The first two shots conflict in their movements, a descending march against a static volley, while the second two conflict on graphic parameters, parallel diagonals in a long shot against rounded ovals in close up. Taken together, the three shots contravene the principles of smooth continuity, and produce a halting, uneasy, a-rhythmic burst in the forward progress of the soldiers.

Similarly, in shots 970 and 971, we see the only cut where the marching cadence of the soldier’s legs in one shot continues into the next shot. Those two shots of continuing action come after the mother who is shot grips her stomach and slumps to the ground, while her carriage hovers precariously on the edge of the steps:

Notice that in a classically edited sequence, the positioning of the soldier’s footsteps from the last frame of outgoing shot 970 (Figure 5.26) would be closely matched to the first frame of the incoming shot 971 (Figure 5.27) so that – whether they match exactly or not – the illusion is that the footsteps continue smoothly and seamlessly in the next shot. Here, no attempt is made to smooth that match, since the first few frames of the incoming shot 971 show the soldiers just beginning to move forward from a dead stop. This is the most clear cut “violation” of the drumming rhythm of the soldier’s march, two shots that are “off-the-beat” in strict continuity editing terms, a deliberate rhythmic “stutter.” Shots 970 and 971 are also the last time in the sequence the soldiers appear. Eisenstein correctly describes this moment as the transfer of the downward rhythm of the soldier’s feet to the baby carriage rolling down the steps: rigid march transfers into uncontrolled rolling of the carriage, the “final pull of tension” that concludes the scene.

3. Tonal Montage

“This term is employed for the first time.” It expresses a stage beyond rhythmic montage.

In rhythmic montage it is movement within the frame that impels the montage movement from frame to frame. Such movements within the frame may be of objects in motion, or of the spectator’s eye directed along the lines of some immobile object.

In tonal montage, movement is perceived in a wider sense. The concept of movement embraces all affects of the montage piece. Here montage is based on the characteristic emotional sound of the piece-of its dominant. The general tone of the piece. . . An example: the “fog sequence” in Potemkin (preceding the mass mourning over the body of Vakulinchuk). Here the montage was based exclusively on the emotional “sound” of the pieces-on rhythmic vibrations that do not affect spatial alterations.⁸⁶

Eisenstein gives the fog sequence that precedes the mourning of Vakulinchuk as an example of tonal montage, but with again with caveats. First, he refuses to delimit it completely, saying “a secondary accessory rhythmic dominant is also operating.” And second, given that metric montage is quantifiable in feet and frames, Eisenstein seeks not an “impressionistic” measure for tonal montage, but a scientific, quantitative method of measurement. He says that if we give a subjective designation “more gloomy” to a shot, we can use a light meter to read its density, and generate a mathematical coefficient for its ability to transmit light. The first caveat seems plausible, and Eisenstein argues for a secondary dominant that arises on the edge of our perception through the rippling water, the rocking of the ships, the sea gulls fluttering.⁸⁷ His later concern that tonal montage be quantifiable seems to equate “more gloomy” with “darker,” which may not always be true. See Critical Commons, “Battleship Potemkin: Tonal Montage.”⁸⁸

The fog sequence combines 10 languid, homogenous wide shots of the bay at Odessa. David Mayer’s account of the sequence follows:

The cutting rhythm here is very slow, with the shortest shot being roughly 2 seconds and the longest 13.5 seconds. Most of the shots are 5–7 seconds in length,⁹⁰ and the broad area of sea surface that fills much of the area of the shots is in the mid-grey range, with gently lapping waves. A soft fog permeates the scene, diffusing the deep background, while the camera itself often rocks slowly on a floating platform. This slight motion adds to the emotive tone of the scene, and Eisenstein identifies it as part of a “barely perceptible” range of movements that contribute to the “secondary rhythmic” quality of the sequence. Shots 643–646 are particularly evocative, and “checkerboard” back and forth between two shots – a shot of a buoy with sea gulls on top rocking in the water (Figure 5.28), and a shot of the placid water’s “oily” surface swathed in light (Figure 5.29). The cuts move languidly back and forth – bouy/water/bouy/water – with the slowly fluttering gulls and the undulating water particularly effective in evoking the tranquil tone of the scene.

This kind of tonal montage is still higher on Eisenstein’s mental hierarchy, and he designates the level melodic emotive where movement “passes over distinctly into an emotive vibration of a still higher order.”⁹¹ It is unclear exactly what this means, but Eisenstein maintains that conflict in the fog sequence creates a tonal dominant from the expressive pictorial qualities that pervade the shots, stimulating an emotive response like a melody would in the brain.

4. Overtonal Montage

In my opinion, overtonal montage . . .is organically the furthest development along the line of tonal montage. As I have indicated, it is distinguishable from tonal montage by the collective calculation of all the piece’s appeals. This characteristic steps up the impression from a melodically emotional coloring to a directly physiological perception. This, too, represents a level related to the preceding levels. These four categories are methods of montage. They become montage

constructions proper when they enter into relations of conflict with each other-as in the examples cited. Within a scheme of mutual relations, echoing and conflicting with one another, they move to a more and more strongly defined type of montage, each one organically growing from the other. Thus the transition from metrics to rhythmic came about in the conflict between the length of the shot and the movement within the frame. Tonal montage grows out of the conflict between the rhythmic and tonal principles of the piece. And finally – overtonal montage, from the conflict between the principal tone of the piece (its dominant) and the overtone.

Here again, Eisenstein’s writing is obscure. Where metric montage creates a dominant of shot length, rhythmic montage creates a dominant of internal shot rhythms, and tonal montage a dominant of fundamental expressive shot features or “tones,” overtonal montage “distinguishes itself by taking full account of all the stimulants in the shot.”⁹² Where tonal montage stimulates a “melodic emotive” response, overtonal montage stimulates a “directly physiological perception” that is nevertheless, “a level related to the preceding levels.” How to understand this?

Eisenstein suggests, at this level, something else begins to activate the viewer with the direct motive force of a metric montage. What in an overtonal montage triggers this force? Like the overtones in a chime, an organ, a large drum, which seem to displace the fundamental tone, Eisenstein argues that sensed vibrations in the shot begin to displace the primary movement.⁹³ If we think of the sound of an organ, where stops have been engineered to mimic a clarinet, a flute, a piccolo, a tuba, to name just the horns it might emulate, clearly the overtones control in large part how the pipes “speak” to us – the overtones “displace” the dominant. By analogy, in overtonal montage, it is not the primary attraction that speaks, but the secondary attractions that emerge organically as the “collective calculation of all the piece’s appeals.” This explanation is only slightly more illuminating, but it is in keeping with the theorization of a film artist who is trying to untangle the rich knot of stimulants and associations that emerge through montage. Nevertheless, Eisenstein maintains that the montage of visual overtones is one of his most significant contributions to the future of cinema. ⁹⁴

Eisenstein cites The Old and the New (original title, The General Line) as an example of overtonal montage. Co-directed in 1929 with Grigori Aleksandrov (who played the lead in the stage version of Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man from the early Proletkult days), the film focuses on a single heroine in the film, Marfa, rather than the mass as protagonist. Marfa becomes a revolutionary because the death of her father leaves her unable to farm the small piece of land left to her, and she turns to collective agriculture for help with her precarious circumstances. The film was sidelined to complete October: Ten Days That Shook the World for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, and by the time Eisenstein returned to it, the political winds had changed. Reacting to a grain shortage in the winter of 1927–1928, Stalin was pushing for forced collectivization of farming, and this action drove changes in the film, including new scenes from Rostov-on-the-Don of a vast collective farming operation. Consequently, the film was re-edited and released under the new title, The Old and the New, which in the 1960s was restored under the original title, The General Line to an approximation of Eisenstein’s original scenario.

Eisenstein says that The Old and the New was the first occasion that the montage of visual overtone was developed. And yet, the scene he cites to exemplify the technique is not simply “overtonal montage.” Eisenstein finds it collides at various points with all the previously specified forms of montage – tonal and overtonal, metric and rhythmic. He finds examples of this complexity “in the various ‘tangles’ of the religious procession: those who fall on their knees beneath the ikons, the candles that melt, the gasps of ecstasy, etc.”⁹⁵ See Critical Commons, “Kinds of Montage: Eisenstein’s Overtonal Montage in The Old and New (aka The General Line).”⁹⁶ Over a decade later, writing about this sequence in a different context, Eisenstein specifies the “whole skein of separate motifs” seen in The Old and the New as:

1. The motif of “heat,” progressing, growing all the time, from sequence to sequence.
2. The motif of successive close-ups, increasing as purely graphic intensity (Figure 5.30).
3. The motif of the mounting intoxication of religious fanaticism, i.e. the histrionic content of the close-ups.
4. The motif of female “voices” – the faces of the peasant women singing and carrying icons.
5. The motif of male “voices” – the faces of the peasant men singing and carrying icons.
6. The motive of a rising tempo of movement by the people “diving” under the icons . . .
7. The general theme of “grovelling,” which unites both streams of people and the common progression of sequences “from the sky to the dust,” i.e., from the crosses and the tops of the banner-staffs in the sky to the people prostrate in the dust and ashes.⁹⁷

5. Intellectual Montage

Intellectual montage is montage not of generally physiological overtonal sounds, but of sounds and overtones of an intellectual sort: i.e., conflict-juxtaposition of accompanying intellectual affects.

The gradational quality is here determined by the fact that there is no difference in principle between the motion of a man rocking under the influence of elementary metric montage (see above) and the intellectual process within it, for the intellectual process is the same agitation, but in the dominion of the higher nerve-centers. . . Applying the experience of work along lower lines to categories of a higher order, this affords the possibility of carrying the attack into the very heart of things and phenomena. Thus, the fifth category is the intellectual overtone. Again, Eisenstein’s writing is obscure here, and feels almost intentionally so. For example, he is apparently shifting the discussion from visual attractions to “sounds and overtones of an intellectual sort,” and by using the terms “intellectual montage” and “intellectual overtone” interchangeably.

Eisenstein likens intellectual montage to metric montage in that is stimulates the viewer’s nerve centers, only here, in “higher nerve centers.” Presumably Eisenstein is referring to areas of the brain known to handle higher order mental functions like language, including the cerebral cortex, Broca’s area, and Wernicke’s area all of which were known in the 1920s. Current research suggests, however, that language functions in the brain are no longer limited to those areas.⁹⁸ See Critical Commons, “Kinds of Montage: Intellectual Montage.”⁹⁹

More helpful for understanding intellectual montage is the concrete example he gives from the “Gods” sequence in October: Ten Days the Shook the World, the semi-factual film Eisenstein made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. The sequence comes after Kerensky, mocked for his vanity by comparison to a peacock, has signed the order reinstating the death penalty for army deserters from the German front. After he signs the order, he ascends the steps, and assumes a stance that Eisenstein compares to a statue of Napoleon, asking with a title card whether Kerensky aspires to be emperor. As Kerensky pulls together a crystal cruet made in four sections and places a crown-shaped lid on top, Eisenstein cuts back and for to factory steam whistles, and titles that read “The Revolution in Danger!” and “Kornilov is Advancing!” General Kornilov’s return to Petrograd to attempt a coup d’état against the Petrograd soviet would leave Kerensky free to ascend to “imperial power,” so Eisenstein cuts to shots of the proletariat streaming from the factories to “Defend Petrograd!” as the title exhorts. The vitality of the proletariat in action is reinforced throughout the film by linking it with images of energy and power, a motif continued here by intercutting forceful images of steam whistles sounding the alarm.

At this moment, Eisenstein stops the emotional narrative of mass spectacle with a title card “In the name of God and Country,” which he immediately breaks down further with a second title “In the name of God. . . ” which is presumably what Eisenstein is referring to as the “Gods sequence.” The next 29 shots include images of the ornate onion shaped domes of Russian orthodox churches (the first of several shapes that echo the crown Kerensky placed on the bottle), radiant statues of Jesus, Shiva, numerous statues of the Buddha, a Chinese lion (Figure 5.31) masks from Asian and African cultures, and other shamanistic figures. Many of the images appear against a black background that is typical of Eisenstein’s non-diegetic inserts, but others are more spatially articulated. The sequence shows a close shot of a Hindu god and then cuts to a wider shot. Three shots of ceramic Buddha are shown in sequence, first lit with curls of smoke from incense rising into the frame, then a shot of his lower torso with his hands in resting meditation, and finally a full long shot with an oval of light on the background behind him. Many of the shots that move from close ups to wider shots are axial cuts. An axial cut is a cut from one scope of shot to another – either wider or tighter – where the axis extending from the center of the camera lens does not change. Axial cutting is a signature technique of Eisenstein and his cinematographer Edward Tissse, who frequently did not move his camera when changing shot scales, as opposed to following the traditional “30° rule,” so named because a move of at least 30° off the axis of the previous shot is considered the minimum change of position to ensure smooth continuity cutting when shooting coverage.

Shots of church domes are also shown in canted angles, and adjacent cuts of an African mask show it facing screen right, then screen left, then in a wider shot head on to the camera. The arms of a wooden figure swing in motion from the elbows. In the “Gods” sequence, these “conflict-juxtapositions,” and the manner in which they step outside the narrative of mass spectacle, clearly ask the viewer to construct abstract meanings. Eisenstein asserts that the order of the images moves from contemporary images of God to early images of God, forcing the viewer to proceed backwards to the beginning of man’s notion of God, and thus see man’s “progress” intellectually.¹⁰⁰

Notice that the “meaning making” cued by this sequence is perhaps not in the model of the simple dialectic that Eisenstein believes underlies everything, where contradictions give rise to new solutions, where thesis + antithesis = synthesis, since the opening title, “In the name of God. . . ” is critical to understanding the sequence:

Eisenstein does not address using titles with intellectual montage, a method aimed at creating abstract meanings of a high order, which of course, language can do easily. But he’s certainly innovating with the intellectual montage method, an approach he believes cues concept formation and retains its physiological basis and offers complex levels of dialectic conflict. In fact, according to Bordwell, across all these methods of montage, Eisenstein aims not for a single sensory response but a cross-modal bodily response created by conflict on many levels:

Eisenstein's Later Work: Making Films and Theorizing in the Age of Stalin

Eisenstein had two periods of productive filmmaking and theorizing in his life, separated by a period in which he left Russian in 1929, travelled to Europe, was courted in Hollywood by Charlie Chaplin and Paramount Pictures among others, and went to Mexico where he sunk a year of effort in 1931 into making a film that fell apart. ¡Que Viva Mexico! was to be an episodic panorama of the history of Mexico, and Eisenstein shot well over 30 hours of film for the production with his collaborator/cameraman Edward Tisse. When Stalin called Eisenstein back to Moscow in January 1932, accusing him of deserting Russia, Sinclair Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist who was producing the film with a group of investors, initially told Eisenstein he would send the footage for him to edit in Moscow. Later, in order to recoup whatever money he could for the investors, Lewis took the footage and released a short feature Thunder over Mexico in 1934, and later sold whatever shots he could for stock footage.

The entire episode left Eisenstein despondent. He also found that much had changed in Russia since he left. Since the death of Lenin in 1924, Joseph Stalin had been relentlessly consolidating his power as General Secretary of the Communist Party by expanding the secret police, centralizing the economy, collectivizing agriculture through the use of forced labor camps, building a cult of personality that glorified himself, and by ruthlessly purging his opposition on a monumental scale. Estimates of the number of people sent to the gulag camps range from 14 million to 40 million, and “The official data presented by the Soviet authorities indicate that over 1 million people died in camps between 1934 and 1953. Independent analysts however estimate the number of victims was at least 10 times higher.”¹⁰³

Closer to Eisenstein, the communist party’s influence in the cultural arena was driving a standardized style in the visual arts, fostering depictions of a typically robust and happy proletariat in a glorified struggle to achieve socialist progress. The increasing sway of this official style, Socialist Realism, was codified in the 1934 Communist Party Conference decree that art must be relevant to the proletariat, realistic in its depiction of everyday life, and support the goals of the state. The optimism of these monumental sculptures, murals, and images of the idealized worker was so forced that the work was often derided by Western critics as “Girl meets tractor.” In this politically charged atmosphere, Eisenstein’s revolutionary films were denounced as too avant-garde, too formal. In January 1935, the All-Union Conference on Soviet Cinematography became a major humiliation for Eisenstein as other directors including Dovzhenko, Yutkevisch and Pudovkin ridiculed his focus on film theory, his formalist style, his ego and his lack of output – he had not released a film in roughly six years. Eisenstein ended the conference with speech in which he acknowledged his “failures,” defended his theorizing, and promised to return to making films. His admission was answered by a triumphant ovation. But for those who continued to openly reject the official style, like Eisenstein’s muse Vsevolod Meyerhold, there would be arrest and torture (1939) and death by a firing squad (1940).

In the years that followed, Eisenstein, like many in the Soviet Union, felt the terror of Stalin’s reign. The filmmaker, who was gay,¹⁰⁴ was living in a society in which homosexual acts were punishable by death. He married filmmaker and writer Pera Atasheva in 1934 and remained married to her until his death in 1948, five years before Stalin’s death ended his dictatorship. In 1935, he was tasked with directing Bezhin Meadow. The film celebrates a young boy who is killed by his father for condemning the father’s counterrevolutionary actions. The film ran into script and budget problems as Eisenstein decided to change its thrust from the celebration of a young, contemporary socialist hero into a tragedy of patricide set against the industrialized transformation of agrarian culture. The film cost 2 million rubles, and took two years to make, partly because Eisenstein became ill with small pox and influenza. The Soviet Politburo, after reviewing a series of edits, refused to release the film. It was a dangerous moment, and Eisenstein publically recanted the work as a political error in an article titled “The Mistakes of Bezhin Meadow.” Luckily, a written appeal from Eisenstein to Stalin asking the dictator to trust him to make another film as worthy as Potemkin was convincing, and the calamity was pinned on the Principal Directorate for the Cinema, Boris Shumyatsky, who three years later was convicted as a traitor and shot. Stalin also personally supervised the Politburo vote that allowed Eisenstein to make a new film, on the condition that the subject be approved in advance, and produced under close supervision. Disgraced and under financial pressure, Eisenstein was forced out of his teaching job at the national film school V.G.I.K. and looked for publishing or directing opportunities.

At this time, a strange convergence with the rise of Socialist Realism provided the backdrop for Eisenstein’s struggle: the emergence of sound in cinema,

Under pressure to find suitable films to make, Eisenstein made three sound films during the period – Alexander Nevsky (1938), Ivan the Terrible Part I (1944) and Ivan the Terrible Part II (1946). Since he was no longer teaching and making fewer films, he continued to write extensively during this period, reworking, but also advancing his film theory, moving from the reductive materialism of film as rhetoric, plotless cinema, typage, and montage as a stimulus set driving primitive-psychological responses, towards a more organic model of how montage, and indeed, how art itself works.

Eisenstein's Later Theorizing and Vertical Montage

By the late 1930s, Eisenstein sees montage as interweaving lines of various artistic potentials in the film’s micro and macro structures into “artistic images.” Montage, for Eisenstein, penetrates all levels of filmmaking, starting with motion that is created by projection of successive frames, through the montage process, and up to the juxtaposition of larger structures like sequences and scenes.¹⁰⁶

To create the artistic image or felt concept (Russian: obraz) at any of these levels, Eisenstein says we need to accumulate the proper depictions (Russian: izobrazhenie). The example he gives is the process of mentally creating the “artistic image” of “5 o’clock” simply by seeing the depiction of clock hands pointing at 12 and 5. Triggered by that image, the viewer summons images of supper, leaving work, rushing home on the metro, shops closing, the quality of light at the end of the day.¹⁰⁷

So the selection of depictions (izobrazhenie) that will dynamically, instantly cohere into felt concepts (obraz) as the film unfolds is the foundation of Eisenstein’s organic model of montage. The progression of attractions that montage creates is woven into polyphonic lines of meaning that unite as a theme, and sound is now another element in that organic polyphony, beginning with his film Alexander Nevsky:

Clearly, Eisenstein sees sound as broadening the possibilities of montage. This seems trivial today, but during the advent of sound, many prominent theorists, including Rudolf Arnheim, saw sound – dialogue particularly – as detrimental to the artistic potential of film. Incorporating sound in his theory, Eisenstein notes, began when he advocated the use of sound as a contrapuntal element in montage at the dawning of sound in the late 1920s. He points to a statement on the sound film that he signed with Alexandrov and Pudovkin, acknowledging the use of lip sync sound for entertainment in “talking pictures,” but demanding – in capital letters – that “THE FIRST EXPERIMENTAL WORK WITH SOUND MUST BE DIRECTED ALONG THE LINES OF ITS DISTINCT NON-SYNCHRONIZATION WITH THE VISUAL IMAGE.”¹⁰⁹ The difference is that his new theorizing will deemphasize conflict in image–sound relationships and look to synthesize correlations that exist in music and in image.

In his later writings, Eisenstein is more open to new, artistic uses of sound as long as they move beyond mere synchronized reproduction (i.e., the shot of a frog croaking synchronized with its croaking sound). These new uses are based in his formalist beliefs: film art does not use the combination of picture and sound as reproduction, but takes the expressive needs of the work as the starting point to build a connection between the two.¹¹⁰ The central thrust of his thinking is that image and music will form a supposed inner synchronicity given their mutual reliance on “movement.” What is “inner synchronicity”? Eisenstein’s circular definition suggests it is whatever makes image and audio “compatible” when they aspire to an inexplicable, inner synchronicity wherein picture and sound merge completely.¹¹¹

Mysterious perhaps, but potentially unmistakable, if the filmmaker can find moments of “inner synchronicity between picture and music that is as sharply perceptible to us as it already is in our perception of examples of outward synchronicity (we have already learnt to be keenly aware of the slightest failure of synchronization between lip movements and the spoken word!)”¹¹² The connection between picture and sound that will allow inner synchronicity, Eisenstein says, is obviously movement, because all phenomena (clearly, all filmic phenomena) can be reduced to movement, movement that reveals to us the hidden layers of synchronicity and the emotional associations that images contain. According to Eisenstein, movement even reveals to the viewer how it creates these phenomena: its very methodology.¹¹³ Inner synchronicity is thus part of Eisenstein’s movement away from montage as a trigger of Pavlovian “stimulus-response,” towards montage as entry into pre-logical, pre-verbal, sensuous interactions with art. Here, his thinking parallels the Associationists, psychologists of the period who saw the cognitive processes as following simple juxtaposition of imagistic precepts rather than some kind of mental syntax that mirrors language. And perhaps more importantly, Eisenstein’s notion of inner synchronicity follows the famous theories of child psychologist Jean Piaget. Eisenstein was aware of the work of Piaget, though it is not clear how extensively.¹¹⁴ Yet Eisenstein’s organic model of how montage creates meaning parallels Piaget’s thinking two in important ways:

In drawing on Piaget’s work, Eisenstein is trying, like many art theorists, to recover supralogical thinking as a part of his aesthetic process: he sees the immediate experience of montage through inner synchronicity as a process that “by-passes public syntax and creates the strongest of poetic effects.”¹¹⁷ This approach also resonates with Eisenstein’s long-standing interest in synesthesia, “a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color.”¹¹⁸ He hopes montage in his films will create organic combinations that trigger inner synchronicity and train the viewer’s eyes to “hear” and their ears to “see.”

To expand his vision for sound and image combinations, Eisenstein reverts to the musical analogy he first worked out in his 1929 typology. Thus, at the lowest level, the editor subordinates aural and visual elements to the same rhythm that emerges from the scene’s content.¹¹⁹ Metric montage in the sound film thereby has a vertical incarnation, where “stress accents” in the audio track and in the picture track – an expressive action, a change in the actor’s demeanor, a lighting cue – synchronize with each other. Rhythmic vertical montage offers expressive effects of a higher order, created, according to Eisenstein’s convoluted reasoning, by “purely rhythmic counterpoint through the formal play of non-coincident stress accents, lengths and frequency of repetitions, etc.”¹²⁰ Here, Eisenstein is proposing that a very wide range of formal editing techniques can be used to create rhythmic counterpoint; visual or aural accents, shot length or repetition. Properly shaped, these elements can release an “audiovisual image” that is a vertical montage of the rhythmic variety.

These are dubious decrees. As Bordwell points out, the range of possible variables that can participate in contrapuntal vertical montage is large – plastic material in the shot, and accent in the shot, the cut, etc. – and since Eisenstein “assumes that the subtlest expressive possibilities involve enjambement, or the non-coincidence of shot and musical measure . . . At the limit, he confesses, the subtlety of accent may yield more or less random, ‘in-between’ instances [of rhythmic vertical montage].”¹²¹

In his well-known analysis of Alexander Nevsky (1938), which he schematized in a famous chart, (Figure 5.32) Eisenstein argues for a new level of vertical montage, melodic montage, where the changing movement of the viewer’s eyes along the graphic contours of the first twelve shots in a battle sequence synchronizes with the melodic contours of the score as it is unfolding in the audio track.

He begins by laying out his case for choosing the generic name vertical montage

This is Eisenstein’s claim for melodic montage: that movement from left to right of a number of (vertically displayed) instrumental voices in an orchestral score mimics an edited picture track in which the “simultaneous movement of a number of motifs advances through a succession of sequences, each motif having its own rate of compositional progression, while being at the same time inseparable from the overall compositional progression as a whole.”¹²³ To claim that one’s eye movement across the succeeding compositional motifs in an edited shot sequence is synchronized to the visual layout of an orchestral score is audacious. The arguments against this claim are significant, since

Nevertheless, Kia Afra argues that Eisenstein’s focus on “the correlation between the graphic aspects of musical notation and the pictorial aspects of the image [is only] a means of demonstrating the importance of movement as their common basis.”¹²⁵ To synthesize an image-sound combination that moves beyond inherent synchronicity (i.e., ordinary synchronized sound) to inner synchronicity, “the filmmaker must be attuned to the fundamental thematic and structural dominant underlying a given work of art. . . Audiovisual combinations should therefore proceed from the trace of movement in a given musical or visual piece, where that work’s line and shape can become the foundation for a corresponding visual or musical composition, respectively, to the final convergence of the two in vertical montage.”¹²⁶ This process can work either way: the filmmaker can cut the image track first and let the movement of that picture sequence be the foundation for the composer’s work or, alter natively, the filmmaker can cut the image track to the existing movement within the score. With Nevsky, his first sound film, Eisenstein was fortunate to work with Sergei Prokofiev, one of the most significant composers of the twentieth century. Working in the Soviet Union and abroad, Prokofiev created over 135 original works in a wide range of genres – symphonies, operas, ballets, and piano sonatas – including Peter and the Wolf, the ballet Romeo and Juliet, and the opera Love of Three Oranges. Yet for all his fame, Prokofiev was no more immune to the political pressures of Stalinism than other artists. At the height of Stalin’s reign of terror, Prokofiev was working on an opera with Meyerhold when the playwright was arrested and shot. Shortly thereafter, Prokofiev was “asked” to compose a piece for Stalin’s 60th birthday, and he promptly obliged.

See Critical Commons, “Alexander Nevsky ‘Battle on the Ice’ (first 12 shots looped 3x).”¹²⁷

Eisenstein’s collaboration with Prokofiev was educational, since they were both novices at creating a sound film: Eisenstein had worked with sound on the disastrous Bezhin Meadow and, although Prokofiev had written three previous scores for film, this would be his first time writing cues to fit specific scenes. But both had been courted in Hollywood and had toured the studios in the late 1930s, admiring the precision of the latest sync sound technology.¹²⁸ Consequently, in some instances they followed the pre-sync methods of the Disney cartoons they both admired, in which the sound was recorded first, and the image shot and edited to the track. In other instances, Prokofiev used a metronome that marked the tempo of rushes he screened or timings supplied by Eisenstein to guarantee precise synchronization of the track. Both were among the techniques that Prokofiev had seen in Hollywood.¹²⁹

Much of what has been written about the collaboration between Prokofiev and Eisenstein focuses on the “Battle on the Ice” sequence, since Eisenstein himself made that sequence the centerpiece of his discussion of the vertical montage. There are complete analyses of the sequence using the famous graph Eisenstein produced, of which Afra’s is among the most detailed. Here, in the interest of clarity, we will concentrate on the opening five shots of the sequence to gain a basic understanding of Eisenstein’s method.

Eisenstein claims that the entire sequence is structured around two phrases: movement left to right across a curve rising in the film frame (A arc motif or arc phrase – See “Movement Pattern” in Bar Number I of Figure 5.32) and movement left to right across the bottom of the frame that does not rise (B linear motif or linear phrase – See “Movement Pattern” in Bar Number II of Figure 5.32). In the opening four shots, Eisenstein’s diagram indicates these movements alternate: that shot I (5.33) and shot III (5.35) follow the same “A arc motif” and shots II (5.34) and IV (5.36) follow the same “B linear motif.” Let us examine the “A arc motif” shots first, with the assumption, of course, that we are reading these images left to right as is common in western printed matter.

In the opening shot, Eisenstein claims that the fade in guides the viewer’s eyes across the frame as it emerges from black, first a shadowy group of soldiers with a flag, and then as the sky brightens, patches of clouds. Eisenstein claims this image mimics the arching of the diagram “Movement Pattern” in Bar Number I of Figure 5.32 due to “the curve of the shot’s gradual brightening.”¹³⁰ Eisenstein does not specifically address the “A arc motif” of shot III (Figure 5.35) in his essay, but graphically the composition of the shot clearly matches that motif because the graphic mass of the mountain with Nevsky on it anchors the left side of the frame, and the light toned curve of the cloud that arcs towards frame right. If we cut these two shots – shot I (Figure 5.33) and shot III (Figure 5.35) – together to compare the musical phrase with the image, the role of the music in creating a base from which the musical arc emerges is more apparent. See Critical Commons, “Alexander Nevsky ‘Battle on the Ice’ Arc Motif in Shot I and Shot III (looped 3x)”¹³¹ As Kia Afra points out,

Similarly, if we cut together the “B linear motif” – the “Movement Pattern” in Bar Number II of Figure 5.32 – that is seen in shots II and IV, the same linear phrasing of the music is apparent. See Critical Commons, “Alexander Nevsky “Battle on the Ice” Linear Motif in Shot II and Shot IV (looped 3x).”¹³³ In shot II (5.34), the “B linear motif,” the linearity of the image – eye movement left to right finds the cloud, pictured on the same level as Nevsky, a balancing graphic weight – is mirrored in the music – the two highest and lowest voices hold the same pitch for the duration of the measure, while the middle voice plays evenly spaced eighth notes and eighth note rests, all on the same pitch. Since the rhythm of the five notes in the middle voice is regular and unchanging, time is divided evenly, reinforcing the linearity of the shots.

This five-note “D-motif” returns in shot IV (Figure 5.36), after there is movement across the cut: in shot III (Figure 5.35) the arc of the eyes from left to right in the image follows the music from fifth sustained in the bass violins to ascending tones to the upper right-hand corner of shot III (Figure 5.35). Eisenstein describes the shot change as a “chord preceded by a strongly accented semiquaver which in shot III corresponded to a sharp fall in the vertical plane at the transition from shot III to shot IV. In the shots, all movement took place vertically, and the abrupt break in the music was interpreted as a fall (from the upper right-hand corner of shot III to the lower left-hand corner of shot IV.)”¹³⁴ Eisenstein attributes this “fall’ to elements of composition, but fails to note that Nevsky actually cues the cut in traditional fashion when he looks down over the edge of the cliff – even with all its graphic qualities, it is still a traditional cut on action, even though the action is shown in a wide shot. In the next shot, shot IV (Figure 5.36), the image is absolutely linear, a famous composition in motion picture history, where the horizon line with the mass German

armies is placed at the bottom tenth of the frame with nine tenths of sky bearing down upon them, a pointed, non-traditional framing that forces linearity.

Notice that the last note of the five-note D-motif does play out here over shot IV (Figure 5.36), but takes us to the next shot, shot V (Figure 5.37), which Eisenstein maps on to the incoming shot as coinciding with the flag atop the cliff. The objections raised against Eisenstein’s account of vertical montage are perhaps nowhere clearer than here, where the melodic contours of the written score can be matched to the graphic contours of shots, but perhaps do not match the viewer’s eye movements that closely. Here, the fifth note more or less hits the cut,¹³⁵ but processing of the shot change makes the move to the flag in the next shot (more or less eight frames later) feel “off-the-beat” of that rhythm.

As usual, Eisenstein also sees larger structures at work in these first five shots:

Eisenstein’s search for macro structures that work beyond the level of the cut is in evidence here, coupled with his intention to find multivalent uses for the notion of “montage.” Similarly, “vertical montage” will not be narrowly constrained to simple audio-visual juxtapositions in “The Battle on the Ice.” Eisenstein claims a range of graphic qualities carries the gestures of the arch (or arc) through the first twelve shots of the scene. He composes a list – annotated below – and argues

Here, we begin to get a glimpse of the richness Eisenstein sees in a shot sequence, and it seems once again that Eisenstein’s search for a fine grained understanding of montage will always be complicated, even though in some ways, the sound and picture combinations in Nevsky are not all that complex. Eisenstein’s theory of vertical montage is, in many ways, just another product of his “vast theoretical imagination, a laboratory in which the director continued to work on his films long after their premieres, imagining audiovisual possibilities and models for their analysis. Eisenstein made a career of blurring boundaries, weaving together practical method and aesthetic philosophy, and abstracting practice to serve unrealized theoretical ambitions.”¹³⁸ Numerous objections have been raised against the concept of vertical montage, centering on how the musical notation graphically replicates only the shot composition, not the temporality of the experience. So, for example, music is an art that absolutely controls the pace of the audience’s aural experience, while the film director cannot exercise the same control over the viewer’s eye movements:

Conclusion

Sergei Eisenstein was a film artist who created a groundbreaking body of film art that narrates in a unique manner: when you see an Eisenstein film, you recognize the single mindedness of its maker to grapple with the dense sensory, signifying potential of film. The films’ technical daring reflects the courage of their maker to shake the viewer awake, to amplify any approach that might impart the message. Deeply connected with his art practice is his struggle to articulate a practical theory of making and editing the material as a socio-political revolution unfolded around him. Together, the films and the theory reflect an explosively creative mind that refused to be constrained, and sought connections across cultures, across media, across art forms. David Thompson writes about seeing an Eisenstein show at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1988,

Yet, as a towering film artist and film theorist, Eisenstein made unique developments in both fields, a monumental contribution succinctly summarized by Bordwell: