Return to ALL ARTICLES

 One of the most iconic film theorists since the art’s inception, Eisenstein’s ideas on the cinema are still massively influential nearly a century later.

When thinking about the cinema, Eisenstein believes that what sets this art form apart from others, and therefore defines its essence, is the idea of montage. However, in his writings, he makes it clear that montage is more than people considered it to be at the time when he was working in cinema. Generally thought of as a way of stringing shots together in a certain rhythm that, over the course of the film, build an idea, Eisenstein’s writings and his films make it clear that he saw montage as something more than this- as a dynamic practice involving the collision of ideas to create a new meaning that, when done right, can enlighten people by subconsciously accessing their intellect. Eisenstein saw conflict as something that had been defining art since its birth, but which cinema, through montage, best encapsulated. Not only this, but he believed that, through the correct use of montage, artists could change not only how cinema was used but people’s ideology and much more by extension.

Eisenstein opposed previous ideas of montage that were held by a number of his peers, who were also prominent film makers and theorists, and also, as one can see in the films produced at the time, the Hollywood system. This system involved seeing individual shots as simply a small part of a whole, a whole that is constructed through connecting these parts in a way that slowly builds on those previous to formulate an idea. This way of thinking saw the shot as just ‘an element of montage’ as Kuleshov describes, a ‘brick’. These ‘bricks’ are then linked to form a story, Kuleshov again describes this process, calling shots ‘links in the dramatic chain’ suggesting that any story, ideology, emotion that the film creates is a result of a lengthy process and a particular ‘rhythm’.

Eisenstein criticises this method, saying that it is limiting in that the film is stuck in a rhythm that is unable to shock or deeply affect the audience through conflict, allowing itself only to build slowly on what has previously been presented, he says the method ‘dooms one to mere evolutionary “perfecting,” in so far as it gives no bite into the dialectical substance of events’.  As a result, films that follow this theory of montage steadily build to a film that fails to fully take advantage of the form, either by an obsessing over the editing that leads to a sense of insincerity or over indulgence, or by the film simply not hitting dramatic plot points and deflating. Eisenstein says, the evolutionary use of montage ‘leads either through refinement to decadence or, on the other hand, to a simple withering away due to stagnation of the blood’. This method he labels the ‘epic principle’.

Eisenstein disagrees with this idea on a much more fundamental level, as he believes an epic method such as this opposes the nature of art as a whole, stating that conflict is ‘the fundamental principle for the existence of every artwork and every art form’.  Eisenstein describes this principle in three forms: social mission, nature and methodology. In doing this, he makes the claim that conflict is inherent in all art and, consequently, it should be seen as inherent to the cinema. He describes just how important this idea is in that cinema itself is made possible through the basic principle of conflict-i.e. the imposition of one idea onto another. While many people saw the illusion of movement as created by ‘two motionless images, following one another’, instead, to create this effect, the images are not ‘perceived next to the other, but on top of the other’. This means that the second image is not building on the first, rather that the two static images interact in way that forms a third meaning- movement. Therefore, cinema should not be constructed in a way that involves evolution, but a way that involves conflict and collision.

In this sense, Eisenstein sees ‘the shot’ not as a building block to slowly build an idea, but as a ‘montage cell’, going on to describe how even a shot in of itself can be a form of montage if constructed correctly. This is done again through conflict, whether this be of planes, volumes, graphic nature, etc, a shot itself can express a basic ideology of montage. However, real montage occurs when two shots ‘collide’ as Eisenstein puts it, saying that while ‘conflict within the shot is potential montage’, when a single shot collides with another, the resulting effect that arises is montage-an effect greater than the two shots when viewed individually. Eisenstein says, ‘montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots- shots even opposite to one another’. It is the collision and conflict between two shots that leads to the rise of a new concept. Furthermore, he sees these shots as two separate ideas that, through their opposition, produce a third, new ideology.  He describes in terms of creating a synthesis, ‘arising from the opposition between thesis and antithesis’, it is this synthesis that drives the film forward in bringing new ideas to the audience. This is what he calls the “dramatic principle” in terms of editing because each shot brings forward a new revelation and way of seeing the film and wider subjects.

One film that achieves this is in modern cinema is Hunger. At the end of the film, we see that the character Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) is dying having not eaten for a considerable amount of time. He looks past the camera to the ceiling of his hospital room as he struggles and the shot that follows is of a night sky as birds fly from a tree, instead of a reverse shot, which is what would usually be expected if following the diegesis. However, the collision of these completely different shots - in subject, colour, angles and movement- come a meaning that transcends both. Birds flying away have been used in film as an image off death since The Passion of Joan of Arc and here the combination of a man on his death bed and the birds flying implies the soul leaving the body as we literally watch Sands’ last breaths. The darkness of the shot implies the misery of this death as his efforts to change the treatment of his people has failed at the time and we see this (as a result of the following shot of the birds) reflected in his expression. Here, because of the thesis of a man struggling for breath collides with the antithesis of birds flying from a tree, we get a synthesis of the shots that shows a man’s hopeless dying breaths.

Eisenstein criticises the style of editing used previously to his writings by not only pointing out how this fails to punctuate dramatic plot points, but also its inefficiency in pursuit of emotional effect. He describes how events will be dissected extensively in order to achieve ‘an all-embracing complex of emotion feeling’ . When editing, this emotive effect was what Hollywood and other cinemas of the time aimed to achieve. Instead, Eisenstein believed that events should not be shown so extensively, but in ‘materializing the idea’ with the implication of the action. This is montage in action, with the collision of these shots causing the idea of an event in a way that is more efficient and dynamic that the concentrated and overpopulated style used in other films in aiming for this emotional effect.

In writing these pieces, Eisenstein aimed to try and evolve cinema away from the epic principle and creating ‘emotive’ cinema into a form of cinema that would instead move past the emotional and into the intellectual. He says, ‘we must mention here also the case of the same conflict-tension serving the ends of new concepts-of new attitudes, that is, of purely intellectual aims.’. Eisenstein saw in cinema an opportunity to present views in a way that was favourable to audiences and convince them of certain ideologies. As a filmmaker who supported the communist revolution at a time that the large country of Russia was still undergoing the massive political change that this historic event entailed, he saw in cinema an opportunity to instil a mindset into the people without the use of open propaganda or force. ‘While the conventional film directs emotions, this suggests an opportunity to encourage and direct the whole thought process, as well’.

Return to ALL ARTICLES