aeternity

It's interesting that Eisenstein breaks cinema down into a process of montage applied to the SHOT. That is, why the shot, and not the frame? After all, not all shots are still frames, in fact, most have duration of whatever length. Why then take the shot as the material from which a transcendental result can be drawn, once it is montaged against other shots?

I don't mean to descend into pedantry or linguistic hair-splitting. On the contrary, if what is at stake is transcendence of the material, then how does Eisenstein position himself as Marxist? Reading Benjamin together with Eisenstein throws this matter into sharp relief -- whereas Eisenstein looks for ways in which cinema might structurally fulfill its revolutionary potential, Benjamin writes from the perspective of an orthodox historical materialist.

Still, it seems to me that if we are to take a film as a cultural artifact, a work of art, or historical material, we must at some level draw an abstraction to place the film within its cultural, aesthetic, and historical context. Thus Eisenstein begins to define cinema itself as montage, and Benjamin works to show how the conditions of production define cinema as unique in the history of art.

Of course, my primary question for this week remains how these theories apply today. We have subsumed mechanical reproduction within information processing/digital reproduction/electronic reproduction. Likewise, "special" effects are now as much a part of cinematic performance as costumes, set, and so on. We have culturally rigid genres marked out, each with a different set of characteristic shots, cuts, and so on. And "green screen" acting has changed the relation of performer and audience.

The move to shooting a "film" digitally has updated some of the basic arguments both Eisenstein and Benjamin, placing them in a new aesthetic, philosophical, and political context. We have seen the rise and fall of high modernism, structuralism, existentialism, and perhaps postmodernism since these essays. The mode of global production has moved beyond both the capitalism and the communism of their time. So what engages us about these ideas today? Is it nothing more than their influence on later thinkers and filmmakers? Or is there something else in these writings that remains fundamentally true about our subject, nearly eighty years later?