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Overview
Originally published in 1982.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691642000 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1200 |
| Pages: | 252 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Film Essays and a Lecture
By Sergei Eisenstein, Jay Leyda
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1982 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-00334-4
CHAPTER 1
A Personal Statement
written for a Berlin newspaper, 1926
I am twenty-eight years old. Before 1918 I was a student for three years. At first I wanted to become an engineer and architect. During the civil war I was a sapper in the Soviet Army. While doing that work I spent any free time in studying questions of art and theatre: in particular theatre history and theory. In 1921 I entered the Proletcult organization as a theatre designer. The Proletcult Theatre busily sought new art forms that would correspond to the ideology of the new Russian state structure. Our troupe was composed of young workers who wished to create genuine art; they brought to this aim a quite new kind of temperament and a new viewpoint on the world and on art. At that time their artistic ideas and demands fully concurred with mine, though I, belonging to another class, had arrived at their deductions only through a process of speculation. The next years were a fierce struggle. In 1922 I became director of the First Moscow Workers' Theatre and completely broke with the views of the Proletcult administration. The Proletcult staff adhered to Lunacharsky's position: to maintain old traditions and to compromise on the question of prerevolutionary artistic efficiency. I was one of the most unbending supporters of LEF (Left Front), where we wanted the new, meaning works that would correspond to the new social conditions of art. We had on our side at that time all the young people and innovators, including the futurists Meyerhold and Mayakovsky; in the most rigid opposition to us were the traditionalist Stanislavsky and the opportunist Tairov.
In 1922–23 I staged three dramas at the Workers' Theatre: in principle their staging was a mathematical calculation of the elements of affect, which at that time I called "actions". In the first production, The Sage,I tried to dissect cubistically a classical play into separately affective "attractions". The action took place in a circus. In the second production, Do You Hear, Moscow?, I used fundamentally technical means in trying to realize theatrical illusions with mathematical calculations. This was the first success of the new theatrical affects. The third production, Gas Masks, was staged in a gas factory, during working hours. The machines worked and the "actors" worked; for the first time this represented the success of an absolutely real, highly objective art.
Such an understanding of theatre led in a straight path to cinema; only the most inexorable objectivity could be the sphere of cinema. My first film was begun in 1924; it was produced with members of Proletcult and was entitled Strike. The film had no story in the generally accepted sense: there were the progressive stages of a strike, there was a "montage of attractions". According to my artistic principle, we did not depend on intuitive creativeness but on a rational construction of affective elements; each affect must be subjected previously to a thorough analysis and calculation: this is the most important thing. Whether there are individual elements of affect within the story (in the generally accepted sense of the term) or whether they are strung along the "story carcass", as in my Potemkin, I cannot perceive any substantial distinction here. I myself am neither sentimental, nor bloodthirsty, nor at heart lyrical, as I have been occasionally in Germany accused of being. Yet all these elements are, of course, familiar to me, and I am quite aware that temptation is all that is needed to combine these with whatever is at hand to arouse the required reaction and to achieve the greatest tension. I am sure that this is a purely mathematical matter and that "sincerely creative genius" has no place here. No more readiness of wit is needed here than in the design of the most utilitarian building of reinforced concrete.
As for my view on cinema in general, I must confess that I understand it as bias and only bias. In my opinion, without a clear presentation of the "why" one cannot begin work on a film. It is impossible to create without acknowledging on what latent feelings and passions you wish to speculate — excuse the expression, I know that it is not "nice", but it is professionally and by definition exact. We goad the passions of the spectators, but we also employ a safety valve, a lightning-rod, and this is — bias. To ignore bias and to waste energy I consider the greatest crime of our generation. For me and in itself bias is a great artistic potential, though it need not always be as political, as consciously political, as in Potemkin. When it is completely absent, when the film is regarded as a simple time-killer, as a sedative or hypnotic, then such an absence of bias can be interpreted as quite biased in the maintaining of tranquillity and keeping the audience satisfied with conditions as they are. Just as if the cinema "community", similar to the church community, had to train the good, the well-balanced, the stripped-away wishes of the citizens. Isn't this the philosophy of the American "happy ending"?
It has been alleged against me that the German adaptation of Potemkin weakens the power of its political tension, makes it too pathetic. But, after all, aren't we people with temperament, with passions? Is it possible for us to be unaware of duties or aims? The success of the film in Berlin and in post-war Europe, sinking in the twilight of a shaky status quo, must have been heard as a summons to whatever of dignified humanity that has survived. For this, isn't pathos justified? The bias of this film demands that one lifts one's head and feels oneself a person — a human, becoming human.
Battleship Potemkin was made for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution, and had to be ready by December 1925: three months for production — even in Germany this might be considered a record production schedule. Two-and-a-half weeks were left to me for the montage of the film, for the editing of 15,000 metres of film.
Even if all roads lead to Rome — even if all genuine works of art come, in the long run, to the same intellectual level — I must emphasize that neither Stanislavsky and the Art Theatre, nor Proletcult, for that matter, can create anything at present. I have not worked in Proletcult for a long time. I have completely moved into cinema, while the Proletcult people stay in the theatre. It's my opinion that an artist must make his choice between theatre and cinema; he cannot be "possessed" by both at the same time if he wants to really create.
There are no actors in Battleship Potemkin, there are only real people in this film and the director's task was to find the right people; instead of looking for creative revelations of talent, he sought the correct physical appearances. Such a filming method is possible in Russia, where each and every matter is a government matter. The slogan of "All for one — one for all!" is more than a sub-title on the screen. If we are making a naval film, the whole fleet is at our service; if a battle film, the whole Red Army; when we make an agricultural subject, various Commissariats give us assistance. The point is that we film not just for ourselves, nor just for you, not for this or that person, but for all.
I am positive that the cinema collaboration of Germany and Russia could have great results. The fusion of German technical potentialities and Russian creative fire could produce something extraordinary. But for me personally to work in Germany is extremely doubtful. I could not forsake my native soil, which gives me the strength to create. Perhaps I can make myself understood more easily by reminding you of the myth of Antaeus rather than giving a Marxist explanation of the links between artistic creation and the social economic base. Furthermore, there is in the German film industry a tendency to follow stereotypes and to aim at profits that could create for me quite impossible working conditions. There have been, of course, German films that one must respect, but now I can see that a Faust or a Metropolis had to fight its way through distracting trivialities; pornography on the one hand and sentimentality on the other. German films are not audacious. We Russians either break our necks or win the day, and more often than not we win.
And so, for the present, I'll stay at home. I am at the moment making a film on the economic struggle in the countryside, an intense struggle for a new agricultural policy.
The appealingly brash tone of this statement (written during a brief visit to Berlin at the time of Potemkin's triumph there) is characteristic of Eisenstein's youthful writings. He knew that his revolutionary ideals for the theatre and cinema would excite opposition, and he made each of his public declarations as challenging as a performance. His earliest manifesto, "Montage of Attractions", appeared in 1923, just before his theatre work led him to apply the same method of "a montage of attractions" to films. Two years later another important declaration grew from his first film, Strike.
The Method of Making Workers' Films
There is one method for making any film: montage of attractions. To know what this is and why, see the book, Cinema Today, where, rather dishevelled and illegible, my approach to the construction of film works is described.
Our class approach introduces:
1. A specific purpose for the work — a socially useful emotional and psychological affect on the audience; this to be composed of a chain of suitably directed stimulants. This socially useful affect I call the content of the work.
It is thus possible, for example, to define the content of a production. Do You Hear, Moscow?: the maximum tension of aggressive reflexes in social protest. Strike: an accumulation of reflexes without intervals (satisfaction), that is, a focusing of reflexes on struggle (and a lifting of potential class tone).
2. A choice of the stimulants. In two directions. In making a correct appraisal of the class inevitability of their nature, certain stimulants are capable of evoking a certain reaction (affect) only among spectators of a certain class. For a more precise affect the audience must be even more unified, if possible along professional lines: any director of "living newspaper" performances in clubs knows how different audiences, say metal workers or textile workers, react completely differently and at different places to the same work.
Such class "inevitability" in matters of action can be easily illustrated by the amusing failure of one attraction that was strongly affected by the circumstances of one audience: I refer to the slaughter-house sequence in Strike. Its concentratedly associative affect of bloodiness among certain strata of the public is well known. The Crimean censor even cut it, along with — the latrine scene. (That certain sharp affects are inadmissible was indicated by an American after seeing Strike: he declared that this scene would surely have to be removed before the film was sent abroad.) It was the same kind of simple reason that prevented the usual "bloody" affect of the slaughter-house sequence from shocking certain worker-audiences: among these workers the blood of oxen is first of all associated with the by-product factories near the slaughter-house! And for peasants who are accustomed to the slaughter of cattle this affect would also be cancelled out.
The other direction in the choice of stimulants appears to be the class accessibility of this or that stimulant.
Negative examples: the variety of sexual attractions that are fundamental to the majority of bourgeois works placed on the market; methods that lead one away from concrete reality, such as the sort of expressionism used in Caligari; or the sweet middle-class poison of Mary Pickford, the exploited and systematically trained stimulation of all middle-class inclinations, even in our healthy and advanced audiences.
The bourgeois cinema is no less aware than we are of class taboos. In New York City's censorship regulations we find a list of thematic attractions undesirable for film use: "relations between labour and capital" appears alongside "sexual perversion", "excessive brutality", "physical deformity" ...
The study of stimulants and their montage for a particular purpose provides us with exhaustive materials on the question of form. As I understand it, content is the summary of all that is subjected to the series of shocks to which in a particular order the audience is to be exposed. (Or more crudely: so much per cent of material to fix the attention, so much to rouse bitterness, etc.). But this material must be organized in accordance with a principle that leads to the desired effect.
Form is the realization of these intentions in a particular material, as precisely those stimulants which are able to summon this indispensable per cent are created and assembled — in the concrete expression of the factual side of the work.
One should, moreover, keep in mind the "attractions of the moment", that is, those reactions that flame forth temporarily in connection with certain courses or events of social life.
In contrast to these there are a series of "eternal" attraction phenomena and methods.
Some of these have a class usefulness. For example, a healthy and integrated audience always reacts to an epic of class struggle.
Equal with these are the "neutrally" affective attractions, such as death-defying stunts, double entendres, and the like.
To use these independently leads to l'art pour l'art so as to reveal their counter-revolutionary essence.
As with the attraction moments, one ought to remember that neutral or accidental attractions cannot, ideologically, be taken for granted, but should be used only as a ethod of exciting those unconditioned reflexes that are necessary to us not in themselves but in the training of socially useful conditioned reflexes that we wish to combine with certain objectives of our social aims.
When this manifesto appeared in Kino, on 11 August 1925, the Eisenstein group had put aside the planned sequels to Strike and were shooting a film to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution. Out of the broad scope of The Year 1905 came the concentrated drama of Battleship Potemkin, the first world-wide triumph of the Soviet cinema.
The subject to follow Potemkin was not an easy choice. There was a plan for First Cavalry Army, with the help of Isaac Babel, and a plan for Zhunguo, a Chinese epic with a script by Sergei Tretiakov; the group finally went to work on a dramatization of the new agricultural policy. This film, The General Line (eventually released as Old and New), was interrupted in 1927 to make October, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.
In 1928, during the final cutting of October and before returning to the revised agricultural film, Eisenstein enjoyed an interval of writing and teaching. Joseph Freeman invited him to contribute a cinema chapter to a volume on Soviet arts that was published two years later in the United States as Voices of October. Following is the article as it appeared there, with a few passages restored from Eisensteiris manuscript.
Soviet Cinema
In a militant and active culture, the subject of this book, bookkeeping and statistics cannot occupy the central place. In this matter one must be intolerant, implacable, fundamental. Nor is this a question yet to be shelved in archives. We must be prepared daily for quarrels, mistakes, corrections and fresh mistakes.
I shall use the section of the book that has been allotted to me for an analysis, according to my principles, of that section of Soviet culture where I have worked for seven out of its ten years of existence (three years in the theatre and four years in the cinema).
Thus you have before you, not a mere report, but a militant programme.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Film Essays and a Lecture by Sergei Eisenstein, Jay Leyda. Copyright © 1982 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. v
- Preface, pg. 1
- Foreword, pg. 7
- A Personal Statement, pg. 13
- The Method of Making Workers' Films, pg. 17
- Soviet Cinema, pg. 20
- Perspectives, pg. 35
- The Dynamic Square, pg. 48
- GTK-GIK-VGIK; Past–Present–Future, pg. 66
- Lessons from Literature, pg. 77
- The Embodiment of a Myth, pg. 84
- More Thoughts on Structure, pg. 92
- Charlie the Kid, pg. 108
- Mr Lincoln by Mr Ford, pg. 139
- A Close-Up View, pg. 150
- Problems of Composition, pg. 155
- Sources and Notes, pg. 184
- APPENDIX A. The Published Writings (1922-1982) of Sergei Eisenstein with notes on their English translations, pg. 188
- APPENDIX B. The Prometheus of Mexican Painting, pg. 222
- Index, pg. 233