Here are some quotes from Eisenstein about the idea in relation to montage, from his book of essays Film Form: Building a completely new form of cinematography- the realization of revolution in the general history of culture building a synthesis of science, art, and class militancy.Īddenum: In his ideas concerning the intellectual cinema, Eisenstein relies on a concept well developed by Soviet psychologists which has been explored in the series on Bakhtin: that of inner speech. The intellectual cinema will be that which resolves the conflict-juxtaposition of the physiological and intellectual overtones. Once the physiological overtonal conflict is resolved in the intellectual will this emerge: But Eisenstein has in mind a movement towards a new kind of film, the one that turns the intellectual montage into a full-fledged intellectual movie. The overtonal is the highest form of this category, which works on the physiological (affect?) level. In true dialectic form, he believes that each state subsumes the other and enters into conflict with the one before it: metric is in conflict with rhythmic, overtonal with tonal. In Methods of Montage Eisenstein elaborates on five kinds of montage: metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual. Inter-relation of the three phases: Conflict within a thesis (an abstract idea) – formulates itself in the dialectics of the subtitle – forms itself spatially in the conflict within the shot – and explodes with increasing intensity in montage-conflict among the separate shots. In this formulation the dualistic division of Sub-title and shot and Shot and montage leaps forward in analysis to a dialectic consideration as three different phases of one homogeneous task of expression, its homogeneous characteristics determining the homogeneity of their structural laws. The shot is a montage cell (or molecule). Like how art creates dynamism by vibrant contrast of colors, arrangement of lines or postures to convey movement, or use of disproportion to draw attention to ideas like music that uses counterpoint to expand it’s theme, the montage creates dynamism by drawing out the conflict between imagesįor all this, the basic premise is: The shot is by no means an element of montage. In my opinion, however, montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots-shots even opposite to one another: the “dramatic” principle.” “According to this definition, shared even by Pudovkin as a theoretician, montage is the means of unrolling an idea with the help of single shots: the “epic” principle. The power of the images are not so much in their series, but in their relation to one another. The movement within these building-block shots, and the consequent length of the component pieces, was then considered as rhythm.”īut he thinks this is a mistake. ![]() ” The earliest conscious film-makers, and our first film theoreticians, regarded montage as a means of description by placing single shots one after the other like building-blocks. Eisenstein looks at the basic movement of image to image: the montage. He looks at the older theory of montage, which sees it as a sequential series of images to convey an unfolding of an idea. This dynamic conflict Eisenstein sees this not just as the basis of art, but all thinking: the intellectual lives of Plato or Dante or Spinoza or New- ton were largely guided and sustained by their delight in the sheer beauty of the rhythmic relation between law and instance, species and individual, or cause and effect.įinally, there is the conflict in the methodology. The ossified, inorganic, dead formalism that no longer has the power to move is in combat with an effortful move towards the new. To form equitable views by stirring up contradictions within the spectator’s mind, and to forge accurate intellectual concepts from the dynamic clash of opposing passions.”Īccording to its nature because: Its nature is a conflict between natural existence and creative tendency. “According to its social mission because: It is art’s task to make manifest the contradictions of Being. Where the dynamic force that animates art is given as a series of conflict: conflict of social mission, nature and methodology. Sergei Eisenstein adopts the theory of dialectics into art.
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