THROUGH THEATER TO CINEMA

Sergi Eisenstein

Early 1920sThe Soviet cinemaTwo of its features

Primo: photo-fragments of nature are recordedSecundo: these fragments are combined in various waysThe shot (or frame) and montage

Photography: system of reproduction to fix real events and elements of actuality

Abstract formalism, with remnants of reality

Class-determined tendency An arbitrary cinematographic relation

to the object placed

The frame is much less independently workable than the word or the sound

Considering as material for the purpose of composition, the shot is more resistant than granite

Montage becomes the mightiest means for a really important creative remolding of nature

The minimum “distortable” fragment of nature is the shot; ingenuity in its combinations is montage

Not opposed to nor can they replace The problem of story

Cinema principles

His film career is said to have begun with his production of Ostrovsky’s play, Enough Simplicity in Every Sage, at the Proletcult Theatre (Moscow, March 1923). Not true: based solely on the fact that

this production contained a short comic film

True: based on the character of the production

The first sign of a cinema tendency: one showing events with the least distortion

Beginning 3 years earlier The Mexican (from Jack London’s

story) The play’s climax is the prize-fight Take place backstage

The bull-fight in Carmen First move: propose that the fight be

brought into view

Trailer

Full movie

Working in the Stanislavsky system In turn was used as a means to affect

the audience In the fight scene the audience was

excited directly Employed realistic, even textural

means - real fighting

His realization that he had struck new ore, an actual-materialistic element in theater

The tendency developed From illusionary acting movement Acrobatics

A gesture expands into gymnastics rage is expressed through a somersault exaltation through a salto-mortale lyricism on “the mast of death.”

“real doing” & “pictorial imagination” Tretiakov’s Gas Masks (1923-24) “on the shelf” October is pure “typage” The overwhelming passions The production of The Sage: the

stage was shaped like a circus arena The dialogue thus colliding, creating

new meanings and sometimes wordplays

“Cutting” increased in tempo Never became comical for comedy’s sake,

but stuck to its theme, sharpened by its scenic embodiment

A piece of film How neutral it remains Wise and wicked art of reediting the work of

others Esther Schub, the Vassiliyev brothers,

reworking ingeniously the films imported after the revolution

One montage tour de force of this sort, executed by Boitler Danton

2 tiny cuts reversed the entire significance of this scene

An “aroma” of montage in the new “left” cinema

Flaubert gave us one of the finest examples of cross-montage of dialogues

Madame Bovary The young man was explaining to the

young women that these irresistible attractions find their cause in some previous state of experience

Whose climax is reached through a continuation of this cross-cutting & word-play

“Chase tempos”

(1991) Trailer (2015) Trailer

Meyerhold had not yet worked out The actors on roller skates carried

themselves about: the stage, “piece of city”

The intersection of man and milieu The cubists The “urbanistic” paintings of Picasso

were of less importance here than the need to express the dynamics of the city – glimpses of facades, hands, legs, pillars, heads, domes

Special cubism of Gogol

Close-ups cut into views of a city A film element that tried to fit itself

into the stubborn stage Double & multiple exposure –

“superimposing” images of man onto images of buildings

“infantile malady of leftism” existing in these first steps of cinema

Potemkin Not by trickery or double-exposure or mechanical

intersection But by the general structure of the composition

In the theater, the impossibility of the mise-en-scѐne

Sculptural details seen through the frame of the cadre, or shot, transitions from shot to shot, appeared to be the logical way out for the threatened hypertrophy of the mise-en-scѐne

Born the concept of mise-en-cadre As the mise-en-scѐne is an interrelation of people

in action, so the mise-en-cadre is the pictorial composition of mutually dependent cadres (shots) in a montage sequence

Theater accessories in the midst of real factory plastics appeared ridiculous

Strike [1924-25] reflected our production of Gas Masks

Insist on an understanding of the mass as hero

No screen had ever before reflected an image of collective action

Deviation: natural & necessary Screen be first penetrated by the general

image, the collective united & propelled by one wish, “individuality within the collective”

1924 “Down with the story & the plot!” The story “an attack of individualism,”

returns in a fresh form, to its proper place

Lies the historical importance of the third half-decade of Soviet cinematography (1930-35)

The “story” film & the embroynes of the “plotless” film are calming down

Filmic diction, technique of the frame, theory of montage

Have another credit: traditions & methodology of literature

The cinema embodies the philosophy & ideology of the victorious proletariat

The new quality of literature Forward to the synthesis of all the

best done by our silent cinematography, towards today along the lines of story & Marxist-Leninist ideological analysis

The phase of socialist realism Typage: the Commedia dell’arte In audience conditioning