Case Study: Sergei Eisenstein
Eisenstein is counted alongside Griffith as one of the two pioneering geniuses of cinema. His theoretical writings and seven completed films have, ‘had greater impact than any other body of work in the history of the medium, save Griffith’ (Cook). Eisenstein, who participated in the Revolution, trained as an engineer and was also a poster artist, set designer and theatre director before he began making films. As director for the Moscow Proletkult Theatre, Eisenstein heard lectures by Stanivlaski on realistic ‘method’ acting and Meyerhold’s counter-arguments for a stylised, non-verbal, ‘bio-mechanical’ acting style. According to Cook (1996), Eisenstein first fell under the influence of Meyerhold (who was executed for his opposition to Stalin’s demand for ‘socialist realism’ in the arts in 1940) and, later, a Futurist theatrical movement called the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEX).
At the age of twenty-five, Eisenstein was regarded as ‘l’enfant terrible’ of Soviet theatre. His enormous intellect and ‘omnivorous knowledge’ astonished all who knew him. As director of the Proletcult Theatre he was constantly evolving concepts of what he referred to as ‘Soviet Realism’. This sometimes involved elements of circus, cabaret and music hall and in one production he even projected a short film (his first) which was a parody of Vertov’s Kino-pravda newsreel. Eisenstein’s desire to produce a calculated response or ‘shock’ in his audience (he went so far as to put firecrackers under audience’s seats) reflected his interest in the findings of Freud and Ivan Pavlov as well as the Marxist agitational possibilities of theatre. However, during a production of ‘Gas Masks’ (1923) which moved around actual gas works and ended with real workers lighting their gas jets as they began their shift, Eisenstein realised that the setting of the gas works with its enormous machinery had dwarfed the actors and made the play itself seem quite false. This experience led him to realise the limitations of the medium of theatre for his purposes. He said of the experience of “Gasworks’: ‘The cart fell to pieces and the driver dropped into the cinema.’
In his first film, ‘Strike’ (1924) Eisenstein engaged the support of the Proletcult collective to produce and act in his film. It told the story of a strike in a metal works during the Tsarist regime and the climax, which intercut the murder of striker with shots of cattle being slaughtered at an abattoir, was a perfect example of what he called ‘shock attraction’ or ‘dialectical montage’. Eisenstein was fond of using the example of Japanese hieroglyphics to explain ‘dialectical montage’. In Japanese writing the combination of two figures, such as the hieroglyphics for ‘knife’ and ‘heart’ could be combined to form a third concept, ‘sorrow’. The figures for bird’ and ‘mouth’ together formed the hieroglyphic symbol for singing. So with montage: two apparently unrelated images combined could ‘explode’ into a third concept. The slaughter of the strikers, spliced with the slaughter of cows produced a shock, a synthesis of the two images into a third concept in the mind of the viewer - perhaps of ‘revulsion’ or ‘waste’ or ‘helplessness’, depending on the reading of the montage. This, of course, was not a new discovery in art. As Bordwell (1996) remarks, Eisenstein:
‘found in the cinematic technique of montage analogies to the juxtapositions of images in verse, to the inner monologue of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, to the rich ‘intercutting’ of action and dialogue in Dickens and Tolstoy.’
It is in his most famous film ‘Battleship Potemkin’ (arguably one of the three most ‘important’ films in cinema history alongside ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and ‘Citizen Kane’) that Eisenstein found the clearest expression for his theories of Dialectical Montage. To quote Cook:
‘Eisenstein saw film editing, or montage, as a process which operated according to the Marxist dialectic. This dialectic is a way of looking at human history and experience as a perpetual conflict in which a force (thesis) collides with a counterforce (antithesis) to produce from their collision a new phenomenon (synthesis) which is not the sum of the two forces but something greater than and different from them both.’
In the famous ‘steps sequence’ from ‘Battleship Potemkin’ a series of independent shots, of soldiers marching, crowds running, guns firing, knees buckling, screaming faces in close up, a pram bouncing down the steps, a Cossack slashing at the camera with his sabre, a woman’s face gashed open and so on, are edited together to form an almost unbearably dramatic montage. Eisenstein’s eloquent protest at the cruelty of the Tsarist regime (the massacre on the steps of Odessa is historical fact) climaxes with the guns of the Battleship Potemkin (controlled by striking sailors) firing on the headquarters of the tsarist generals. Three separate stone lions, one sleeping, one awake and a third roaring are edited together in quick succession to symbolise the awakening anger of the Russian people, a fitting metaphor to conclude the episode.
As Cook suggests, dialectical montage operated according to a precise manipulation of audience psychology on both the emotional and cerebral levels of experience. This method of constructing meaning in film has not been without criticism:
‘Later critics, notably followers of the French film theorist Andre Bazin, have claimed that dialectical montage is too manipulative, even ‘totalitarian’, in its selective ordering of the viewer’s response. Their objection is largely philosophical, for they believe that the analytical fragmentation of a filmed event through montage, as in the Odessa steps sequence, destroys the ‘reality of space’ (Bazin) which provides the necessary relationship between the cinematic image and the real world. They believe, in other words, that dialectical montage substitutes artificial and contrived spatial relationships for real ones. And yet it is precisely its lack of dependence upon ‘real’ or ‘natural’ spatial relationships which renders dialectical montage a symbolic and metaphoric - and therefore, a poetic-language rather than a narrative one.’ (Cook 1996)
The international success of Eisenstein’s films, ‘Battleship Potemkin, ‘October’ (1928), ‘Old and New’ (1929) ‘Alexander Nevsky’ (1938) and ‘Ivan the Terrible Part 1’ (1944) established the director and the Soviet Montage movement as a major force in world cinema. Yet, despite the sympathy and understanding for the Soviet cause won by such filmmakers, Eisenstein, Vertov, Kuleshov, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko (the great master of Russian cinema) all came under attack during Stalin’s regime. Having disposed of Trotsky and his other enemies, Stalin consolidated his power in all areas of public life, announcing:
‘The cinema is the greatest medium of mass agitation. The task is to take it into our hands.’
At the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1928 Stalin demanded greater state control of the arts, supposedly to make the arts more ‘accessible’ to the masses. Highly conservative bureaucrats were appointed to positions of power in Soviet cinema (such as Boris Shumiatski, the head of the film trust ‘Soiuzkino’) who declared an end to experimentation and ‘formalism’, in favour of ‘socialist realism’ whose most important task was ‘the Communist education of the masses’. The avant garde nature of the Russian arts in the 20s was quickly crushed under the dead hand of Stalinism in the 30s and 40s, and remained so until the early 1980s. Blatant propaganda, with heroes closely resembling Stalin were found everywhere in simple-minded film narratives shorn of any trace of the symbolic, the personal or the experimental. Brilliant and beautiful films, such as Alexander Dovzhenko’s ‘Earth’ came under absurd charges, being described as ‘defeatist’ and even ‘fascistic’. All the major directors were publicly humiliated and forced to renounce their earlier, groundbreaking films under the penalty of certain death if they did not. Revolutionary film artists were thus suffocated, or destroyed altogether, under Stalin’s regime. Even Eisenstein’s great loyalty to the Soviet system could not prevent the suppression of his last film ‘Ivan the Terrible Part ll’ in 1946 which was regarded as too critical of Ivan’s political police, the oprichniki, for a state ruled by similar means of terror. (Cook 1996)