In his essay from Film Form, Sergei Eisenstein offers an explanation of film by equating our understanding of shots and montage to that of the symbol and abstract concept of Japanese hieroglyphs. I thought his way of tracing the transcendental result (abstract concept) of colliding material ideograms (symbols in Japanese text and shots in film) was particularly useful in thinking of film, or its structure, as a language, as we have discussed in class. Eisenstein wants us to understand the single framed shot as a symbol in Japanese script that only evolves into an abstract concept when it is understood in conjunction with another independent symbol, or, in the case of film, a single framed shot. He writes: “As in Japanese (see above), in which material ideogram set against material ideogram produces transcendental result (concept). The incongruity in contour between the first picture that has been imprinted on the mind and the subsequently perceived second picture – the conflict between the two gives birth to the sensation of movement, the idea that movement has taken place” (Eisenstein 27). While I think this is a useful way of explaining montage for Eisenstein’s purposes or for his own personal view of montage, I can’t help wondering how he reconciles the potential complexity of a single framed shot with the simplistic representation of a single Japanese, or other pictorial symbol. He goes on to highlight the importance of leaving the gaps between the shots for the audience to interpret and fill in. Although, I might have just missed it in the reading, but for Eisenstein, can montage only be a series of short still frames? Can his view of pure montage hold up in the long shots we saw in Umberto D last week? Is there room for variation in the style of montage for Eisenstein, or is his definition the authoritative example of art? Is this a critique of realism? How would Bazin’s emphasis on mise-en-scene fit into Eisenstein’s focus on montage?
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I also notices Eisenstein's analogy to language, especially at the end of Eisenstein's piece when he says, "why then, should cinema in its forms follow theatre and painting rather than the methodology of language, which gives rise, through the combination of concrete descriptions and concrete objects, to quite new concepts and ideas" (Eisenstein, 38). I found this particularly striking when contrasted with Bazin's observation that " . . . in the silent days, montage evoked what the director wanted to say; in the editing of 1938, it described it. Today we can say that at last the director writes in film . . . the film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist" (Bazin, 53). Eisenstien is praising montage for similarities to language, for the way that individual - and perhaps unrelated - pieces come together to make a coherent whole. Bazin, writing twenty years later, dismisses montage for almost the same reason. It tells the audience what to think by drawing direct parallels between unrelated things. There is less for the audience to interpret and less potential for audience involvment. For Bazin, sound film and deep shots are more like language because the new (at the time) kind of cinema becomes " . . . capable once more of bringing together real time, in which things exist, along with the duration of the action , for which classical editing had insidiously substitued mental and abstract time" (Bazin, 53). The arguments are compelling, though it doesn't seem to me that it's an either/or proposition. Rather, they represent two different ways of communicating with the audience and manipulating the point of view of the camera. Montage is more direct and, perhaps, more controlling. It's metaphors are more explicit, but no less poignant for that (I'm thinking of the drawn-out drawbridge sequence in October).
ReplyDeleteI agree that the way Eisensten equates a potentially complex shot with a single, most likely simple, symbol is a stretch. On the other hand, Bazin seems too dismissive of montage as an art form. Looking at your specific questions - and it's possible someone else noticed something I missed - I see very little room for variation or for Bazin's emphasis on mise-en-scene in Eisenstein's piece. Perhaps it would be better to say that I see no room for Bazin in Eisenstein given that Bazin wrote later, but both have significant theoretical commitments to their viewpoints. Maybe it is only from our perspective that it is easy to say that both (or maybe all, I'm drawing something of a false binary here) types of film are language - or if one is a language, the other is too, even if it is a langauge that has adapted or evolved.