## Metadata: Title: Eisenstein: A Soviet Artist Full Reference: Type: Author(s): Richard Taylor, #Author/RichardTaylor Zotero Link: [Eisenstein: A Soviet Artist](zotero://select/items/@taylor_eisenstein_2019) Index: [[Index_ 🎥Eisenstein]] ## Summary: ## Notes: #LiteratureNotes > But he has also been attacked on artistic grounds for the perceived 'totalitarianism' of his montage theory [Taylor 2019:1](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=1) > The concept of attractions was central to Eisenstein's early montage theory and was to recur in different guises throughout his later career. The ends justified the means and for Eisenstein the end was always ultimately ideological (in the broadest sense of conveying an idea), even if it was frequently expressed in aesthetic terms: [Taylor 2019:5](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=5) > Each montage element, each attraction had to contribute towards the total effect of the work. [Taylor 2019:7](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=7) > It also presaged the perception of montage as a means of resolving such conflict through the Marxist notion of the dialectic (even if it had come down to Eisenstein in a rather functional, perhaps even mechanistic, version through Engels and Lenin): thesis – antithesis – synthesis. [Taylor 2019:7](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=7) > Eisenstein accused the Cine-Eyes, with their view of cinema as 'life caught unawares', of 'passionless representation', of 'the fixing of phenomena that goes no further than fixing the audience's attention' rather than 'ploughing the audience's psyche'. By implication he was here engaging in the same kind of critique of the Cine-Eyes as those who were later to accuse them of empty Formalism. Their work certainly had form, but it lacked ideological direction: 'It is not a "Cine-Eye" that we need but a "Cine-Fist." [Taylor 2019:9](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=9) - 비록 에이젠이 강한 어조로 시네 주먹이 필요하다고 이야기 하지만 이것은 직접적으로 신체와 연결된다고 보이지 않는다. 특히 그기 말기에 감정으로 이여지는 시네마의 방식에 주목한 것을 보면 주먹이 상징하는 것은 주 방식이라기 보다 방식에 의해 마련된 결과물에 지나지 않을 것이라는 생각이 든다. [[202103161440—에이젠슈테인과 시네아이, 그리고 시네 피스트]] > It was not popular with Soviet audiences who had been reared on the same diet of popular and unchallenging Hollywood films as their counterparts in the West, despite an advertising campaign describing the film as 'the pride of Soviet cinema'. [Taylor 2019:9](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=9) > Why was Potemkin so much more popular in Berlin than in Moscow, where paying audiences preferred to see Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in Robin Hood? 37 The censorship scandal was only part of the reason. [Taylor 2019:10](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=10) > Eisenstein was indulging in extraordinary naivety, because centralised planning would inevitably mean centralised political planning and increasing interference from outside the immediate cultural sphere. In this sense Eisenstein was, at least in this [Taylor 2019:12](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=12) > Planning was the only answer: 'When that happens, the freight trains will perhaps arrive at their destinations with a full and valuable load.' Here, at a crucial turning-point in Soviet cultural history, [Taylor 2019:12](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=12) > For Eisenstein the film represented the transition from the uttermost limits of the old forms to new forms that had 'by no means all yet been found'. [Taylor 2019:14](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=14) > The joint 'Statement on Sound' left matters there, but the search for a montage theory that would embrace more than the relationship between an individual shot and its context in a sequence was to occupy Eisenstein for the rest of his life. [Taylor 2019:16](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=16) > 'we actually "hear movement" and "see sound."' [Taylor 2019:16](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=16) > Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. This was precisely the aim that Eisenstein had set out in 'Our October. [Taylor 2019:17](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=17) > In Eisenstein's analysis, the hieroglyphic method of 'denotation through representation' involved 'splitting endlessly into two'. [Taylor 2019:17](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=17) > Eisenstein compared montage with 'the series of explosions of the internal combustion engine', separate 'fragments' combining into a 'dynamic'. [Taylor 2019:17](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=17) > He also isolated 'the conflict between an object and its spatial nature and the conflict between an event and its temporal nature'. [Taylor 2019:18](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=18) > It is therefore not surprising that his next major article, 'The Dramaturgy of Film Form' should have been given the alternative title 'The Dialectical Approach to Film Form'. This piece can be seen largely as a schematisation of the ideas that Eisenstein had already expressed elsewhere. [Taylor 2019:20](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=20) > However, the synthesis that montage represented 'is not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another'. [Taylor 2019:20](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=20) > The retained impression of the first image (thesis) had, thanks to visual memory, a second image superimposed upon it (antithesis) and this produced a totality that was greater than the sum of its parts, 'a completely new higher dimension' (synthesis). [Taylor 2019:20](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=20) > The rejection of the Kuleshov/Pudovkin analogy between shot/ montage and word/phrase was now complete: [Taylor 2019:22](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=22) > It would be fair to say that, with intellectual montage, he thought that he had found the common denominator of art that would enable him to construct a general theory of the centrality of montage in all forms of art. [Taylor 2019:24](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=24) > It was what he himself called 'the building to be built' and the building of it was to be his central theoretical concern for the remainder of his life in such major projects as his works on non-indifferent nature, montage and direction. 59 By 1929 the foundations for that edifice were in place. [Taylor 2019:24](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=24) > The film was also held up as the official model film because of its 'intelligibility to the millions' but for Eisenstein its significance consisted in its synthesis of the achievements of the first (poetic) and second (prosaic) five-year periods in the history of Soviet cinema. [Taylor 2019:27](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=27) > It is in the film that the mask began to slip. [Taylor 2019:34](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=34) > While it may be true that Eisenstein's theory of 'intellectual cinema' has not had a consistent impact on mainstream commercial cinema (to its detriment), it cannot be denied that, a century after his birth and fifty years after his death, Eisenstein remains a crucial figure in the history, theory and practice of cinema as an art form. [Taylor 2019:36](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IBWWSE52?page=36)