SOURCE: An introduction to Nonindifferent Nature by Sergei Eisenstein, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. vii-xxi.

Sergei Eisenstein dedicated Nonindiffferent Nature to "poor Salieri," who, in Alexander Pushkin's dramatic poem, laments: "… True tone I smothered, dissecting music like a corpse; I test with algebra pure harmony.…" It was Eisenstein's intent, though, to vindicate Salieri by arguing that the spontaneous and intoxicating act of artistic creation must be followed by "ever-increasing, precise knowledge about what we do." Thus, Nonindifferent Nature not only represents the most advanced stage of Eisenstein's thinking on the structure of film, but it is the creator's attempt to demonstrate, once again, the validity of his own personal lifelong synthesis of creative art and theoretical analysis, a synthesis not always viewed positively by official Soviet criticism.

Eisenstein's films of the 1920s, Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October (Ten Days that Shook the World), The Old and the New (The General Line), captured the attention of the world with their daring approach to film montage. Eisenstein clearly was not satisfied to represent the world from without, as if through an illusionist window on "reality"; he wanted to assault the viewer with his own particular perceptions, understandings, and emotions. The mental state to be produced in the viewer, and not the object to be represented, was at the center of Eisenstein's film practice and of his later theories. He broke down "reality" into signs and symbols and reassembled it into films that, to this day, represent a unique approach to the art.

By the late 1920s, however, Eisenstein's experimental work was no longer a preferred form for the conservative bureaucracy that ultimately prevailed in Soviet cultural policy and ushered in the officially sanctioned style of "socialist realism." Eisenstein remained a hero of Soviet culture on the international scene, but at home his planned films were delayed or shelved. Scholarship, theorizing, and teaching occupied his attention increasingly, as film scripts and projects awaited authorization. Beginning in late 1928, and for two decades afterwards, Eisenstein articulated and broadened the theories of montage for which he is now so famous. Because Eisenstein considered the cinema to be the highest stage of the arts, a complex synthesis of literature, drama, the visual arts, and music, his theoretical speculations, backed by prodigious reading, ultimately became a theory of culture and art as a whole. In his expositions and discussions, examples came from the works of writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians as often as they did from filmmakers, and his sources ranged from psychologists, natural scientists, and philosophers to theoreticians and historians of art, music, and theater. This breadth of interest, and Eisenstein's constant emphasis on art as communication through signs, led the Soviet linguist V. V. Ivanov to devote a major portion of his Notes on the History of Semiotics in the USSR (1976) to Eisenstein's thought.

Eisenstein's work on montage as a collision of signs began appearing in 1928 with an article on Kabuki theater and an afterword to a book on Japanese cinema. In these articles, Eisenstein drew close parallels between the principles of montage and the ideograms of Japanese writing, where separate signs, originally representational, are superimposed to create new signs whose meaning is the result of a metaphorical operation (for example, the ideographs for "knife" and "heart" are combined to form the ideogram "sorrow"). In Kabuki Eisenstein was fascinated by the "decomposition" of reality into independent visual and aural signs and their free recombination: A verbal text is read offstage; onstage an actor mimes, while elements of makeup represent character traits and emotional moods. In essence, Eisenstein was in agreement with the Russian formalist theoretician Yuri Tynyanov, who wrote: "The visible person, the visible thing, is only an element of cinema language when it is given in the quality of a semantic sign."

In his articles of the late 1920s (including the famous programmatic statement, signed by his colleagues the directors Pudovkin and Alexandrov, about the function of sound in cinema not being reduced to the mere recording of dialogue), Eisenstein emphasized the collision of disparate and conflicting elements in montage in order to produce, in the synthesis, new concepts and emotions. Eisenstein coined such phrases as "overtonal montage" to refer to modulations on such levels as lighting and color, and "intellectual montage" to describe collisions produced by the juxtaposition of objects with rich cultural implications (thus, Eisenstein, in October, seeks to discredit Orthodoxy by juxtaposing its religious icons and idols with Asian and African statues, which for his European audience would connote the primitive and the superstitious).

In the mid-1930s, Eisenstein turned increasingly to the problem of modeling "inner speech," of creating in cinema an analogue for both the "thematic-logical" and the "image-sensual" aspects of thought. According to Eisenstein, cinema could recover the organic and syncretic qualities of primitive culture, simultaneously integrating impulses along a number of different tracks. These concerns led Eisenstein to the problems of "pathos constructions" and of "vertical montage," which are the principal themes of Nonindifferent Nature.

Although the first outline for the entire monograph Nonindifferent Nature dates from 1945, the articles that clearly anticipate it appeared during 1939-41, the period of Eisenstein's collaboration with the composer Prokofiev on the film Alexander Nevsky. Three articles from that time were, in fact, revised and included in Nonindifferent Nature: "On the Structure of Things" [published first in the journal Iskusstvo kino (The Art of Cinema) in 1939], "Once More on the Structure of Things" (which appeared in the same journal in 1940), and "Poor Salieri" (written as an introduction to a planned edition of Eisenstein's articles but unpublished until its appearance in the posthumous Collected Works of Eisenstein in 1964). In 1940, Eisenstein also wrote three articles for The Art of Cinema entitled "Vertical Montage," which form an important introduction to some of the considerations in Nonindifferent Nature. (These articles constitute most of the volume entitled The Film Sense, published in English in J. Leyda's translation in 1942.) The remaining portions of Nonindifferent Nature, which constitute the majority of the monograph, were written by Eisenstein in the years 1945-7, after his work with Prokofiev on Ivan the Terrible. The volume is thus highly representative of Eisenstein's most pressing artistic concerns during the very active and energetic final decade of his life. It also brings to the fore quite eloquently those central concerns that unify Eisenstein's work from the 1920s to the 1940s.

From the earliest period of his work in theater and film, Eisenstein wrote of techniques for causing the viewer to experience the emotions linked to a particular content; even then these techniques involved the use of separate elements of mise-en-scene, gesture, and sound to carry the chain of emotions to the audience. In his famous article "Montage of Attractions," published in the journal LEF in 1923, he stated: "The attraction (in our diagnosis of the theater) is every aggressive moment in it, i. e., every element of it that brings to light in the spectator those senses or that psychology that influence his experience." In Eisenstein's directorial practice, as in that of his teacher Vsevolod Meyerhold, "leaps from one type of expression to another" were common—from elements of the set to features of costume to the acrobatic movements of the actors. The "vertical montage" that Eisenstein devised fifteen years later was an application of this same principle to the cinema. He wrote in 1939: "The juxtaposition of these partial details in a given montage construction calls to life and forces into the light that general quality in which each detail has participated and that binds together all the details into a whole, namely, into that generalized image, wherein the creator, followed by the spectator, experiences the theme."

In "On the Structure of Things," Eisenstein designated by the term "pathos" the heightened emotional state produced by works of art. Such works must possess qualities that arouse passion in their receivers. Eisenstein asserted that this could occur only by means of "a compositional structure identical with human behavior in the grip of pathos" (taking the term in its original Greek meaning). Such behavior entailed a leap out of oneself, ex stasis, ecstacy: "To be beside oneself is unavoidably also a transition to something else, to something different in quality, to something opposite to what preceded it." The problem then was to fuse the structure of human emotional behavior with the receiver's experience of the content.

Eisenstein looked to both physiological and psychological manifestations of emotions, from irregular breathing, quickened heartbeat, and emphatic gesture to metaphorical and poetic speech. The structural elements of such phenomena would have to be recreated in the composition of the work of art. Seeking them, Eisenstein analyzed his own films Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Alexander Nevsky (1939), as well as Emile Zola's prose, Alexander Pushkin's poetry, and the painting The Boyarina Morozova by V. I. Surikov. From these comparative studies, Eisenstein derived two key principles: organic unity and the leap to a new quality.

Although the notion of organicity might seem to be somewhat of a cliche, Eisenstein took the concept quite literally and specifically: "The organic unity of a work, as well as the sense of organic unity received from the work, arises when the law of the construction of this work corresponds to the laws of the structure of organic phenomena of nature." In Batleship Potemkin, Eisenstein found that all five parts of the film, as well as the film as a whole, are governed by the same structural law (evidence of a general organic order). In each part, revolutionary brotherhood grows from a small incipient "cell" into a manifestation of greater intensity or larger scale, and there is a turning point (Eisenstein terms it a "caesura"), when the action "leaps over" from a quieter protest to a more angry and violent clash: The approaching execution under a tarpaulin of resisting sailors "leaps over" into the shipboard mutiny; the mourning for the martyred sailor Vakulinchuk "leaps over" into an angry demonstration; the peaceful fraternization between ship and shore turns suddenly into a massacre with the scream of a woman and the appearance of a rank of firing tsarist troops at the top of the Odessa steps. From the points of transition at these caesuras Eisenstein derived an important principle:

And it is also remarkable that the jump at each point—is not simply a sudden jump to another mood, to another rhythm, to another event, but each time it is a transition to a distinct opposite. Not contrastive, but opposite, for each time it gives the image of that same theme from the opposite point of view and at the same time unavoidably grows out of it.

The caesuras in each of the film's parts echo a central caesura in the film as a whole: the sequence of mourning for the dead Vakulinchuk. At this point, the stormy actions of rebellion are replaced by near stillness, and the theme of universal revolutionary embrace must begin to build again to its climaxes in the second part of the film: the spread of the rebellion to the city, and then to the entire tsarist fleet.

It was "the leap to a new quality," however, that became for Eisenstein the most important characteristic of the pathos construction. It was to this subject that he devoted the series of chapters written in 1946-7, entitled "Pathos," which comprise most of the first half of Nonindifferent Nature. These studies constitute a detailed elaboration of the leap into a new and opposed quality (in particular, the leap from the literal into the metaphorical) and of the merging of opposites into the organic unity of the whole. Eisenstein points to instances of these structures in his films The Old and the New (1929) and Ivan the Terrible (1944), as well as in the work of various writers (Zola, Whitman, Zweig, Pushkin), performers (the actor Freddrick Lemaitre, the poet Mayakovsky reciting his own verse), and artists (Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, El Greco, Leonardo da Vinci).

Eisenstein argues that in The Old and the New, his filmic paean to collectivization and the mechanization of agriculture, pathos constructions per se are more distinguishable than they are in Potemrkin where the theme of revolution itself already carries much of the pathos. The task in The Old and the New was to create the pathos of the machine through expressiveness and composition alone; Eisenstein's techniques led French critics of the day to refer to the film's "epic lyricism" over "those terrestrial gifts that derive their inspiration from the machine" and its rendering of "everyday phenomena … in themselves insignificant" with "Dionysian lyricism." Eisenstein focuses his attention on the sequence "Testing of the Milk Separator" in which he embodied, structurally, the property of continually leaping from one state to another of different quality. What played a crucial compositional role was the ability of the wide-angle lens to distort perspective, enabling objects "to go beyond themselves, beyond their natural bounds of volume and form." As the collective farmers wait to see if the separator will work, Eisenstein moves from group shots to two-shots to close-ups of faces. "Their movement is caught up by shots of spinning disks and the feed pipes of the separator, appearing all the more frequently at various angles." "Shots of intensifying hope" use gradually brighter lighting, whereas "shots of aggravated suspicion" gradually become darker. As the change from bright to dark frames occurs more often, the disks spin faster and faster. A drop at the end of the separator pipe begins to swell.

Finally the drop falls, hitting the bottom of the pail in a starlike spray. Eisenstein describes the ensuing montage as follows:

And now unchecked, at furious pressure bursting from the body separator, a jet stream of thickened white cream thuds into the pail.

By now, through editing, the spurts and spray pierce through the stream of enthusiastic closeups with a cascade of snow-white streams of milk, a silvery fountain of unchecked spurts, a fireworks display of unceasing splashes.

And then, as if in answer to the involuntary comparisons emerging on the screen, after the explosion resulting from the first spurts of milk, the sequence of these milk streams is interjected by what appears to be foreign matter flooded with light…Aquatic pillars of shooting fountains.

The fountains of milk then leap over into a new dimension, into images of an actual fountain, and then leap again into an image of fireworks, produced by coloring separate shots of the shooting water streams and intercutting them rapidly. The sequence finally reaches a purely formal climax: a totally black field with intermittent "lightening" flashes of white. As Eisenstein puts it:"… the structural system itself skipped over from the sphere of the representational to its opposite sphere of the nonrepresentational. "Nonrepresentational leaps on the level of color also occur in Ivan the Terrible (Part II), where the sequence of the boyar conspiracy (in gray tones) leaps over into the banquet sequence wherein the tsar sets in motion his passionate and bloody response (in a color sequence dominated by reds and golds), and then leaps again into the murder in the cathedral (almost entirely in stark contrasts of black and white).

In Zola, Eisenstein finds that the emotionally moving descriptions are produced by a hyperbolic multiplication of everyday objects possessing a particular quality—the descriptions seem to "eject out of one another" in a rising level of frenzy. The repetitions represent a diversity of manifestations of a single thesis. Then, suddenly, the metonymic accumulation of detail leaps into metaphor. Zola ends by describing not the literal event but his own emotional passion over it.

Eisenstein argues that the unity of opposites is strikingly portrayed in the style of the great nineteenth century French actor Frederick Lemaitre, the literal meaning of whose words was often completely contradicted by the emotional qualities of his delivery. Thus, the qualities that Lemaitre could convey were often described by his contemporaries as, in fact, oppositional pairs: "energy and sensitivity," "cunning and good nature." Eisenstein terms this "the dynamic unity of mutually exclusive antithetical principles within a character." The same can be said of Dostoyevsky's heroes, for "one is often struck not only by the duality, but especially by the at times unmotivated collapse of a character into another extreme.…" This, says Eisenstein, is what inspired him in his creation of Ivan the Terrible: "… the construction of pathos effects by the direct charging of elements ecstatically exploding into each other with constantly increasing intensity"

Two of the most intriguing analyses in the pathos section of Nonindifferent Nature concern the art of El Greco and of Piranesi. In both cases, Eisenstein describes meticulously the structural "explosion" of an early variant to yield a more ecstatic (and justifiably more famous) later variant. He explores the harmonic transition of certain forms into other forms; a sequence of forms "overflowing" into new forms. Entire movements in art show a similar mechanism: The Gothic "explodes" the preceding features of Romanesque architecture; impressionism and cubism explode the contours and the spatial bounds of realism's objects.

Artists make such leaps, notes Eisenstein, when they themselves are overcome by ecstacy, obsessed by certain ideas. This ecstacy, which approaches madness (in El Greco and in Piranesi), is akin to the state induced by opiates, for "the dynamics of these construction elements overflowing into each other promote the feeling of emotional seizure."

Eisenstein, with his training in civil engineering and his early experience as a set designer, is himself obsessed by the symbolic meaning of architectural forms, a potential he utilizes so brilliantly in Battleship Potemkin and in Ivan the Terrible. He compares architectural composition to cinematic montage, sees in Gothic churches ecstacy embodied in stone, and in the buildings of the reign of Tsar Nicholas—"the image of absolutism." Architecture speaks in "the strongest figurative rhetoric of its epoch … of its system or of its inner aspirations."

Eisenstein's own personal ecstacy over Piranesi's work is reflected in this discussion, where insights are expressed not only in structural diagrams of the spatial and graphic "explosions," but also in the poetic and metaphorical quality of Eisenstein's prose. The inspiration of Piranesi is evident as well in Eisenstein's set designs for Ivan the Terrible, where a system of receding "wings" forces our eyes deeper and deeper into the distance, while at the same time the foreground of shots is occupied by close-ups of parts of heads. All of this, Eisenstein asserts, is based on the effect of the telescope, of one thing thrusting out another. He draws analogies also to recent "accelerations upon accelerations" in science: nuclear chain-reaction explosions and multistage rockets, in which a new leap in magnitude accompanies each successive stage.

From architecture and science, Eisenstein returns again to literature (via Gogol's little known article in the miscellany Arabesques on "The Architecture of Our Time.") Gogol's preference for the ecstatic Gothic is no accident, states Eisenstein, for the very same process of forms metamorphosing into other forms, of contrastive metaphors leaping from one dimension to another, is as characteristic of Gogol's prose as it is of Gothic architecture.

Eisenstein finds the tendency of things to grow out of one another in a diversity of other cultural phenomena as well: in the structure of toys (like the chain of sticks that, in changing their angles, produce a jack-in-the-box thrust, or like the Russian matrushka dolls that emerge out of one another), in the practice of Yucatan cultures that built pyramids directly over previous pyramids, in the spiral repetition of features in design motifs in many cultures. Moreover, notes Eisenstein, there are important similarities between the structure of pathos and the structure of comedy. When there is a sign of growth, but, instead of a leap into a new quality, we get merely the repetition of the same thing, the effect is comic. Thus, concludes Eisenstein, the formula for construction of extreme versions of phenomena is the same, whether in science or in art:"… this formula is nothing but the moment (instant) of the culmination of the dialectic law of the transition of quantity into quality."

"Why are pathos constructions in all of these varied art forms essentially the same?" asks Eisenstein. Because they must correspond to a basic "formula for pathos" in the emotive (nonlogical) centers of the brain. They depend not on psychological factors, but on a psychic state. The basic laws governing change in natural phenomena are imprinted in this psychic state, which in turn determines the structuring of the material in an ecstatic work of art. The art work's ecstatic structures in turn produce a vivid experience in the receiver.

When the artist is first inspired by some object that produces in him an intensity of experience, his ecstacy, in itself, is objectless and formless; it cannot be described verbally. However, the artist reconstructs the process of ecstatic movement through his structuring of the material of his theme, thus communicating the very same pathos to his audience. Thus, the process, for Eisenstein, is rooted in the more primitive functions of the brain. Ecstacy is a state prior to thinking, and there is no means of expressing that state other than by simple signs, that is, either by an analogue of the state (in semiotics, an "icon") or by a recreation of a part of the state itself (the semiotic "index").

As a postscript to the "Pathos" study, Eisenstein concluded the first half of Nonindifferent Nature with a revised version of his article "Once Again on the Structure of Things," first written in 1940. The subject of the article is "the way the general dialectic position on the unity of opposites is applicable to the area of composition." As a twenty-six-year-old filmmaker, Eisenstein reminds us, he was faced with the challenge of surpassing the highly popular American films of the day, with their clever intrigues and their glittering "stars." Instead of using a direct assault, he went in the opposite direction: the rejection of traditional plot and the denial of the isolated individual as hero (the masses themselves become the basic dramatis personae). Of course, on a deeper level, these "formally" opposite solutions reflect basic ideological oppositions.

A decade later, in the film Chapayev (1934), which dates from the period of Soviet film's return to classical narrative, the pathos embodied throughout Potemkin by a leap away from plot and the hero is now accomplished by means of a reversal of the leap. The hero Chapayev, although the main protagonist, does not push forward ahead of the others; he remains a man of the people. What is conventionally spoken in elevated emotional speech, he, instead, talks in simple conversational words. If Eisenstein's style was a leap into the poetic, the Vasiliev brothers (directors of Chapayev), accomplish a leap from poetic expectations into conventional speech.

The second half of Nonindiffferent Nature, actually written in 1945, consists of the extended study "The Music of Landscape and the Fate of Montage Counterpoint at a New Stage." It is the culmination of Eisenstein's work on the subject of "vertical montage" and polyphonic structure, a study begun in a series of essays in Iskusstvo Kino during 1939-40 and published in English in 1942 as The Film Sense. Eisenstein used the term "vertical montage" to indicate the process of superposition and integration of the various structural levels of cinema: landscape and scenery, mise-en-scene, gesture, music, lighting, and color. In the articles on vertical montage, Eisenstein claimed that all of these levels should reflect the dominance of a unified theme, one which governs all the choices in all the participating "lines":

The juxtaposition of these partial details in a given montage construction calls to life and forces into the light that general quality in which each detail has participated and which binds together all the details into a whole, namely, into that generalized artistic image, wherein the creator, followed by the spectator, experiences the theme. (The Film Sense)

Eisenstein's work with Prokofiev, with the cinematographers Tisse and Moskvin, and with the actors in Ivan the Terrible was to embody this process, for the architectonics of the set, the framing, the lighting, the camera angles, the costuming, the intonation and gestures of the actors, and the musical score all figured in a montage construction wherein integration had to take place not only horizontally (in collisions from shot to shot) but also vertically:

Through the progression of the vertical line, pervading the entire orchestra, and interwoven horizontally, the intricate harmonic musical movement of the whole orchestra moves forward.

When we turn from this image of the orchestral score to that of the audio-visual score, we find it necessary to add a new part to the instrumental parts: this new part is a 'staff' of visuals … where shot is linked to shot not merely through one indication—movement, or light values,… or the like—but through the simultaneous advance of a multiple series of lines, each maintaining an independent compositional course and each contributing to the total compositional course of the sequence. (The Film Sense)

In the last period of his life, with his work on Ivan the Terrible, on Nonindifferent Nature, and on a series of essays on the use of color in cinema, Eisenstein turned increasingly to the specific problems of vertical montage—the problems of identifying and elaborating the features according to which such a synaesthetic montage could proceed. In the second part of Nonindifferent Nature, Eisenstein is inspired by the use of nature in Soviet silent cinema, where it was hardly "indifferent," but served to create emotional mood through an "inner plastic music." This task fell to landscape because it was "the least burdened with servile, narrative tasks." Like music, it could express emotionally what was inexpressible by other means and, like later musical sound tracks, it could interweave with the narrative portions of the film.

Indeed, the silent films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Kozintsev and Trauberg often began with a landscape "prelude," setting up certain motifs that would then resonate with landscape inserts later in the film. Eisenstein himself, in his writing on "overtonal" montage in 1929, had provided a detailed analysis of the "harbor mist sequence" in Battleship Potemkin. After the body of the martyred sailor Vakulinchuk (leader of the successful rebellion) is taken to shore and placed in a tent, there is a seascape suite consisting of shots of the fog-enshrouded harbor, with outlines of ships, buoys, and seagulls barely visible through the mist. Eisenstein analyzed the modulations of gray lighting, the vibrations of the light within the fog (echoed by the rippling motion of the waves), as homologous to the mood of sorrow.

In "The Music of Landscape," Eisenstein parallels such cinematic techniques to those of Chinese and Japanese poetry, based on the calligraphy of symbols that are, in themselves, ideograms. It is not so much a poetry of sound as a poetry of graphics, "music for the eye." Just as words with different meanings and different sounds can rhyme graphically in this poetry, so elements of landscape or background can rhyme visually with one another, a process Eisenstein terms "plastic rhyme." Such "plastic" correspondences produce semantic effects; the images in which they occur stand in the same figurative relationship induced for rhymed words in poetry.

In Chinese landscape painting (scroll painting), one finds such "musical" composition, based on the interplay of a limited set of symbolic elements of nature (which correspond to the musical notes in Eisenstein's analogy) appearing in various combinations along the scroll (just as they would in the measures of a musical score). The art historians whom Eisenstein quotes consistently discuss these scroll paintings in musical terms, for the identical landscape motifs and elements are combined as they would be in a polyphonic composition: The theme goes through numerous variations, built upon resonances and "echoings."

The complementary principles of segmentation and continuity figure in Chinese landscapes as they do in a number of disparate cultural forms (Eisenstein cites, for example, Indian spiral painting and Greek "oxfurrow" writing). Elements that are distinct in their oppositions to one another are integrated into a continuous whole along a linear chain; they form a polyphonic stream. Film art, for Eisenstein, not only embodies these properties but raises them to the greatest complexity in terms of the number of different kinds of "lines" or different signifying systems that are integrated.

In all of these art forms, Eisenstein contends, it is the human personality and its attributes that are conveyed in metaphorical terms, whether through the details of landscape (as in Chinese painting), through the fantastic anthromorphism of nature (as in mythology), or through the disparate voices of narrators and characters (as in the "polyphonic" novel as analyzed by Bakhtin). Thus, the compositional devices themselves must also be rooted in the nature of the human mind and human behavior.

Eisenstein's excursions into anthropological theory are quite fascinating, for he contends that artistic syntax is dependent on two instinctive principles that provide the foundation for human culture: plot as pursuit (manifested early in culture as hunting) and interweaving (appearing in the construction of baskets). The hunt can easily be seen as the basis for adventure and mystery plots, but many other narratives retain the quest or riddle structure as well (somewhat later, the French structuralist theoretician Roland Barthes would also name the drive to answer questions, what he called the hermeneutic code, as one of the fundamental structures of literature). The inclination to interweave, that is to say polyphonic structure, Eisenstein locates in diverse human activities, from the tying and untying of knots, to the magician Harry Houdini's escapes, to the word weaving of poetry, to the plot complications of novels and plays:

Something of this longing of each knot to be unraveled corresponding to the yearning to tie knots, as we have seen, sits deeply in the psyche of man.…

It is all the same, whether it occurs in the graphic knots of Leonardo and Durer,

in the frequencies of vibrations of vowels that wind into the phonetic knots of Dante,

or in the peripeteias of the arrangement of the sequence of scenes that attract equally Pushkin, Joseph Conrad, and Orson Welles!

These are the methods that Eisenstein himself employed in Ivan the Terrible, developing the image of the tsar as a unity in variety, expressed through the integrated flow of his graphic contour and makeup, and the lighting and camera angles for the shots. The visual properties of the image (the "landscape" in the broadest sense of the term) echoes the emotional state of the tsar. Eisenstein indeed sees his work on Ivan the Terrible as the third (and culminating) stage of film montage. During the first historical stage, there was the shooting of long-shots, from one setup and with no editing; the second stage (exemplified by his own work in the 1920s) exhibited a separation of distinct signifying elements, but with a use of sharp divergence and opposition in their combination (Eisenstein's famous "collision montage"); only in the third stage (Ivan the Terrble) is there harmonious counterpoint that eschews "paradoxes and excesses." Eisenstein's disavowal of his work of the 1920s as excessive should be taken here with a grain of salt; because the "collision" theory of montage was related to the Russian formalist valorization of "making strange" as the basis of art, and because that formalism had been condemned with the onset of the Stalinist period, Eisenstein might be seen as politically circumspect in distancing himself somewhat from this "formalist" period. Thus, Eisenstein tells us in 1945 that many of the devices in Battleship Potemkio could be described as the "exposed nerve" of montage, whereas the "harbor mist sequence" represents "a fused structure of contrapuntal currents" that anticipates the polyphonic montage of Ivan the Terrible.

But Eisenstein does not want to completely disavow the shock tactics of his early "montage of attractions"; rather, he now sees those diverse sensual attractions as more primitive realizations of what can be achieved, in the third stage, through more subtle audiovisual means: "This is one more reason why we are not only interested in analyzing what has been done in Ivan the Terrible, but also in tracing retrospectively how what was done in this direction in Ivan, is derived in method from what had been done in Potemkin." Thus, what Eisenstein in the 1920s termed collisions of opposed elements to form attractions, he now calls a "systematic unity of diverse components." The basic principle of an integrative montage structure, a synthesis of diverse "contrapuntal" stimuli, remains the same. Eisenstein simply expands and reformulates his ideas so as to put some distance between his theories of 1945 and his politically disreputable "formalist" past.

The centerpiece of Eisenstein's discussion of polyphonic montage is his analysis of the mourning scenes in Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible. In the latter film, Ivan is mourning the death of his beloved Anastasia. She has been poisoned by his aunt Ephrosinia Staritskaya, but Ivan does not know this. He sees the death as possibly a condemnation from God. He is subdued, repentant, depressed, and, at this scene's nadir, virtually crushed (he seems to cower below the funeral bier). Suddenly, from somewhere deep within himself, a resistance, a rebellion, a self-affirmation arises—at the scene's climax. This complex interplay of moods and drives is rendered by diverse levels of the audiovisual montage. The sharp camera angles (the sequence opens with a panning shot from above that reveals Ivan kneeling at the foot of Anastasia's catafalque), the graphic lines of the mise-en-scene, Ivan's gestures, and a multivoiced sound track all contribute to the vertical montage. Eisenstein breaks down the movements of Ivan into a "distinctive orchestra of parts," a decomposition of the human figure into signs. The elements of mise-en-scene are a poetry of significant shapes, of light and shadow, which match the timbers, melodies, and rhythm of the sound track.

That track itself is very complex, interweaving several voices: a choir singing a funereal dirge, Metropolitan Pimen (Ivan's enemy) reading about man's hubris and insignificance (passages from the Book of Lamentations), Malyuta (Ivan's loyal servitor) reporting the defection of Ivan's "friend" Prince Kurbsky to the enemy, the encouraging words of Ivan's oprichniki (personal guard) the Basmanovs, and Ivan's own voice—which varies greatly in its modulations. The respective voices of Pimen and Malyuta ultimately constitute an antithesis that develops along two lines:

The line of death and constraint of will enters with the immobile face of the dead Anastasia, passes into the constrained, immobile shots of Ivan, develops in the theme of Pimen's reading ("exhausted from wailing," "my throat dried out," "my eyes grew weary"), and is crowned by shots of the vehicle of the theme of death and its actual culprit—the poisoner Staritskaya.

The line of affirmation—Malyuta's line—is taken up by the Basmanovs (father and son), the inflammatory nature of the old man's speech passes into the fiery "Two Romes fell, and a Third stands" of the tsar, and ends with the flight of servants in the real fires of the torches.

Quite clearly, Eisenstein feels that every level of a physical manifestation can be broken down into distinctive features, systems of opposites. To grasp something, we might analyze and describe these oppositions (as the theoretician does) or we might extract a synthetic image, a gestalt that captures the basic tonality of the whole complex (as the artist does). The latter method underlines Eisenstein's theory of typecasting ("the process of selecting types"). He searched for faces where the expressive "resonance" is "absolutely precise, like a chord or note," and "this precision … expressed with maximum clarity and directness, so that a certain image of a completely defined human characterization could be formed from a short, momentary appearance to the viewer's perception." Thus, for example, in the "suite" of shots of grieving faces over Vakulinchuk's body, each face bears not only a note of grief but also a sign of social class and of other everyday life experiences. The effect of this suite is a portrait of the universality of the grief over Vakulinchuk's death.

Eisenstein stresses that vertical montage also affects linear montage to a significant degree, since each "line" must realize its own rhythmic pattern, must carry its own melody, while at the same time integrating itself with the other accompanying lines.

In discussing the vertical montage in Ivan the Terrible, Eisenstein also has frequent recourse to analogies with the structure of verse, strongly echoing the views of the Russian formalist theoretician Yuri Tynyanov, who in the 1920s compared the "turn" from one shot to the next with the turn from one compact verse to the next. Accents within each shot come from the various visual and audial lines (changes in light tonality, actor's abrupt gestures, sudden shifts in vocal intonation or music); these accents, in Eisenstein's view, are most effective when the visual accent counterpoints the musical accent, so that the pattern produced is analogous to that of bricklaying (where the junctures of the bricks at one level should not coincide with the junctures on the next). The effect is akin to enjambment in poetry, where the metrical and syntactic orders or organization do not coincide, thus producing the special semantic tensions of the verse form. In film editing where the accents on the various levels regularly coincide, states Eisenstein, the correspondence becomes mechanical and a comic effect is likely to be produced.

At the conclusion of Nonindifferent Nature, Eisenstein brings the two halves of his study together by identifying "emotional landscape" as another bearer of pathos, since it provides an image of "the mutual immersion of man and nature into the other.… in the miracle of a genuinely emotional landscape we have a total unity in the mutual interpenetration of nature and man with all the overflowing variety of his temperament." Such a total unity of a landscape with the soul of its creator is achieved in works such as El Greco's Storm over Toledo.

In the "Epilogue" to Noninddifferent Nature, Eisenstein sought to justify his own role in the development of Soviet cinema in the light of the theories he presented in the volume:

Ancient writings contained a whole series of books under the general title "didactic."

I also look on my films as being "didactic" to a certain extent; that is, those which, besides their immediate aims, always contain researches and experiments in form.

These researches and experiments are made so that—in another interpretation and from another individual point of view—they could be used later collectively by all of us working on the creation of films in general.

Characteristically, Eisenstein admits, on the one hand, the validity of the criticism that he sometimes carried his structural passions too far; on the other, he asserts a much more important fact: Those very experiments and his postanalysis of them had an immense and indelible impact on the development of the cinema as an art form.