SOURCE: "The Closed Mind of Sergei Eisenstein," in The Kenyon Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, Fall 1961, pp. 687-94.

The great success of the 1925 Moscow film season was not Potemkin, but some undistinguished Hollywood colossus; some thirty-five years later, Eisenstein had his season in New York. His huge presence looms even larger now than then; somehow, the twilight casts a more enhancing shadow than the dawn. The Museum of Modern Art Film Library is perforce becoming a mausoleum. Where will one today find a work so vast, so ambitious, as to challenge the pre-eminence of the early classics? Is it only twilight that descends, or some more permanent darkness?

Which is, perhaps, a somewhat elaborate way of saying that things are not so good, and, perhaps, suggesting that they were not ever so good as it may now seem. The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective Eisenstein exhibition struck me as being as significant of our past excesses as of our present dearth. We still do not really know what has been genuinely important in the brief, tragical history of the film; at least, we seem incapable of discriminating it from the flamboyance of mere specious success. It is not the forest that the trees obscure; rather, the other trees, those closer to the center. The presence looms large; with the Soviet Union's release of Ivan the Terrible, Part II, for cultural export, the recent rediscovery of Strike, his first and previously almost forgotten film, and the present availability of his writings, Eisenstein stands before us whole. The figure imposes upon our imagination, demanding judgment. There once was a man named Sergei Eisenstein, and, somehow, we must attempt to come to terms with him.

Eisenstein once called All Quiet on the Western Front a good Ph. D. thesis, and Dwight Macdonald has described The Film Sense as a bad Ph. D. thesis. Events have now, I suppose, come full circle; Eisenstein is dead, Macdonald a regular film reviewer for Esquire, and Milestone is still making movies. Even those for whom Eisenstein was a modern Shakespeare (always excepting the Jay Leydas, for whom, presumably, Shakespeare was a premature Eisenstein) have tended to dissociate Eisenstein the filmmaker from Eisenstein the theoretician. Even Eisenstein himself, whose sympathies are rather more with the Jay Leydas, remarks, with his customary heavy-handed wit, upon his deficiency as a literary stylist. And, certainly, what could be further from the stunning virtuosity of Potemkin than the gnomic phraseology and leaden pedantry of The Film Sense, or, for that matter, Film Form as well. Eisenstein on pars pro toto is a hilarity too good to be missed. One is tempted to say, as Eric Bentley has remarked of another artist become theoretician, that Eisenstein begins a new paragraph every time he does not have a new idea, which is usually a good many times per page. Yet this kind of writing is what George Bluestone has found to be related to Susanne Langer's analysis of symbolic thinking, and to Merleau-Ponty's application of phenomenological psychology to cinema. I am reminded of the famous, if, perhaps, apocryphal, doctoral dissertation on The Function of Cleaning the American Living Room, in which it was discovered that there was a Definite Correlation between the Spatial Relationships Factor of the area in question and the Furniture Quantity Factor in determining the Cleaning Time Function.

Perhaps the most likable quality which Eisenstein displays in his writings is an honest admiration for his own films. With some justice, he treats Potemkin as a classic; it is nothing if not that. Alexander Nevsky receives similar reverence, perhaps somewhat less deservedly. Less honest is the vein of disingenuous self-congratulation that runs through his writings, usually expressed in rallying cries in praise of the Soviet cinema in general. More disturbing still is the impersonal way in which he speaks of his "mistakes." Thus of Strike:

… our enthusiasm produced a one-sided representation of the masses and the collective; one-sided because collectivism means the maximum development of the individual within the collective, a conception irreconcilably opposed to bourgeois individualism. Our first mass films missed this deeper meaning.

Thus a sequence in October was an "error." Is this a man, not to say an artist, or a committee speaking?

And Eisenstein is not above urging that the cinema is the greatest of arts, an extravagance scarcely inclined to diminish his own reputation.

Here we shall consider the general problem of art in the specific example of its highest form—film.

The inexhaustible potential of all art, having achieved its highest level of development in the form of cinema …

He quotes Lenin's famous remark that "the cinema is the most important of all the arts to us," leaving off the "to us." He devotes one article to a condescending consideration of the limits of all other arts, explaining how the older arts are subsumed and augmented by cinema.

Moreover, the cinema is that genuine and ultimate synthesis of all artistic manifestations that fell to pieces after the peak of Greek culture, which Diderot sought vainly in opera, Wagner in music-drama, Scriabin in his color-concerti, and so on and on.…

How narrow is the diapason of sculpture.… How frustrated have been those efforts by composers … How bound is literature.… How imperfect and limited, too, is the theater in this respect!…

As for their expressive means, escape here lies in a transition to a more perfected stage of all their potentialities—to cinema.

He will speak patronizingly of Joyce in order to establish a point in favor of cinema.

When Joyce and I met in Paris, he was intensely interested in my plans for the inner film-monologue, with a far broader scope than is afforded by literature.…

The most heroic attempt to achieve this in literature was made by James Joyce in Ulysses and in Finnegan's Wake.…

… None of the "previous" arts has been able to achieve this purpose to the full.

He carefully explains that the film-maker must necessarily be a supreme master of all the arts.

No one, without learning all the secrets of mise-en-scene completely, can learn montage.

An actor who has not mastered the entire arsenal of theater craft can never fully develop his screen potentialities.

Only after mastering the whole culture of the graphic arts can a cameraman realize the compositional basis of the shot.

And only on a foundation of the entire experience of dramaturgy, epos, and lyricism, can a writer create a finished work in that unprecedented literary phenomenon—film-writing, which includes in itself just such a synthesis of literary forms as the cinema as a whole comprises a synthesis of all forms of art.

The least one might hope for in reading Eisenstein on film theory is a clear exposition and definition of montage. For those who share Eisenstein's belief that there are such things as knowable "fundamental laws of art," there may be some accomplishment in his positing five categories of montage—metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual—but certainly this is only the prelude to a definition. And when that definition comes it is either absurdly self-evident:

Example 3 (from Potemkin):... In the thunder of the Potemkin's guns, a marble lion leaps up, in protest against the bloodshed on the Odessa steps. Composed of three shots of three stationary marble lions at the Aluppka Palace in the Crimea: a sleeping lion, an awakening lion, a rising lion. The effect is achieved by a correct calculation of the length of the second shot. Its superimposition on the first shot produces the first action. This establishes time to impress the second position on the mind. Superimposition of the third position on the second produces the second action: the lion finally rises.

or densely metaphysical:

An example: the "fog sequence" in Potemkin (preceding the mass mourning over the body of Vakulinchuk). Here the montage was based exclusively on the emotional "sound" of the pieces—on rhythmic vibrations that do not affect spatial alterations. In this example it is interesting that, alongside the basic tonal dominant, a secondary, accessory rhythmic dominant is also operating. This links the tonal construction of the scene with the tradition of rhythmic montage, the furthest development of which is tonal montage. And, like rhythmic montage, this is also a special variation of metric montage.

You have to admit that's a lot of… montage. The fog sequence remains one of the most beautiful passages in Eisenstein—significantly, one without people—reminiscent of a Ryder mystical seascape, and, perhaps, a reminder of how much the best in Eisenstein owes to Tisse, his photographer. What Eisenstein claims for it, however, is quite simply beyond human ken. Probably, no statement is so frankly revealing on the subject of the mystique of montage as Eisenstein's casual reference, in another context, to "Fira Tobak, my wonderful, long time montage assistant"—like Shakespeare and his wonderful, long time dialogue assistant! With characteristic bureaucratic bluntness Hollywood has reduced "montage" to a special effects sequence. In France and Italy, it just means editing.

There is, of course, behind all of Eisenstein's theoretical writing, a dazzling display of erudition. But what is one finally to say when he cites Flaubert, Kabuki, haiku, the whole of Japanese culture, Plato, Dante, Spinoza, Newman, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Debussy, King Lear, the fundamental principles of thought and speech, Polynesian birth customs, Milton, Leonardo, El Greco, and Walt Whitman in order to establish precedent for … montage! All extant culture becomes fair game when a point must be proved. At this point, however, one must distinguish between the intellectual, the mind which is open, free, inquiring, and skeptical, and the idealogue, the mind which is closed, committed, and intent on marshalling all knowledge only toward the end of ratifying its own preconceptions.

As Robert Warshow has observed, the real hero of the classic Russian movies was neither the individual nor the masses, but, as every good Hegelian knows, history. (Always, of course, excepting Peter, Nevsky, Ivan, and Stalin, Riders of the Purple Zeitgeist.) When history is the hero, the best the individual can hope for is to recognize the forces at work, and, if he is lucky, sacrifice himself to them when the right opportunity arises. Vakulinchuk, the martyr of Potemkin, simply senses the tremor of revolutionary excitement in the air, seizes upon it, and sets inevitable events into motion. His individual destiny is simply to die at a good time, and in a good cause. More important, he makes a good symbol, and lies in state with the legend "For a spoonful of soup" pinned to his chest. His death has meaning only as it serves higher purposes: provoking a mass demonstration, and providing Eisenstein with a good montage sequence. It is occasionally difficult to tell which of these consequences is the more important; it is, perhaps, not inapposite to note that the Peoples' State came to suspect it was the latter. Reading Eisenstein on the sequence of the Odessa steps is, in this respect, particularly illuminating. For him, the famous moment in which the woman with a pince-nez is wounded in her eye is a good instance of Example 2: an illustration of instantaneous action (under) Capital Letter A. Logical (under) Roman Numeral II. An artificially produced image of motion (under) Heading: a tentative film-syntax. Photographs of the trampled child and the mother carrying the dead child advancing to meet the soldiers are reproduced above the captions "Graphic Conflict" and "Conflict of Planes," respectively. His detailed analysis of the "pathos" and "organic-ness" of the entire sequence concludes:

Then the chaos of movement changes to a design: the rhythmic descending feet of the soldiers.…

Suddenly the tempo of the running crowd leaps over into the next category of speed—into a rolling baby-carriage. It propels the idea of rushing downward into the next dimension—from rolling, as understood 'figuratively," into the physical fact of rolling. This is not merely a change in levels of tempo. This is furthermore as well a leap in display method from the figurative to the physical, taking place within the representation of rolling.…

Chaotic movement (of a mass)—into rhythmic movement (of the soldiers).…

Stride by stride—a leap from dimension to dimension. A leap from quality to quality. So that in the final accounting, rather than in a separate episode (the baby-carriage), the whole method of exposing the entire event likewise accomplishes its leap: a narrative type of exposition is replaced (in the montage rousing of the stone lion) and transferred to the concentrated structure of imagery. Visually rhythmic prose leaps over into visually poetic speech.

Need one be a socialist realist to cry "Formalism!" Eisenstein's approach to his material is supremely that of a metteur en scene. Masses enter on left—"then the chaos of movement changes to a design"—and arrange themselves in stunning patterns; soldiers come on and perform an exquisite massacre—"chaotic movement (of a mass)—into rhythmic movement (of the soldiers)." And so another montage is born. What is this if not the conception of a decorator? Now a healthy art has a place for its decorators (e. g. Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock); sometimes, as in the case of a Rene Clair, the decorator may combine taste, wit, sensitivity, and elegance to a point at which he may, occasionally, become indistinguishable from a complete artist. But it is one thing to decorate with Labiche, even Goethe, and quite another to arrange human beings and catastrophic events into merely pleasing or exciting pictorial patterns. To reduce Faust to pretty pictures may be merely frivolous, but to make a beautiful arrangement of terror-stricken, dead and dying people is, in addition, aesthetically and morally irresponsible. Robert Warshow has called the films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin "a triumph of art over humanity." Perhaps, it should be added, the remark was not intended as praise.

Montage: it has so long been the shibboleth of intellectual enthusiasts of the cinema, for whom attendance at a silent Russian film is in the nature of a sacrament, that one who similarly considers himself a partisan of the medium cannot but utter the word without stirrings of pride. At last, irrefutable, invincible proof that the film is an art. And so we behold a massacre of peasants intercut with the butchering of a bull in Strike. ("As a matter of fact, homogeneity of gesture plays an important part in this case in achieving the effect—both the movement of the dynamic gesture within the frame, and the static gesture dividing the frame graphically.") And so the famous sequence intercutting shots of stock exchange and battlefield in Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg. A bridge is raised in October, and a dead woman's hair hangs over the edge, while a dead horse dangles limply from its harness over the river below. To what extent do such sequences enlarge and illuminate the human experience? Rather, to what extent do they simplify and diminish such meaning? Don't ask! It's montage! Perhaps as significant a comment as one can make on such episodes is merely to note that, in lieu of "movie magic," a real bull and horse were slaughtered for their occasions. One need not respond sentimentally to this fact, but one might reasonably wonder if, given the opportunity, Eisenstein wouldn't mind similarly slaughtering a few extras, providing they might "die" better.

"Down to feed the maggots," flashes the title, while the image is of a pince-nez belonging to the Potemkin's doctor dangling from a rope along the ship's side. The title is adequate to the image; another bourgeois has been disposed of, and by an ingenious display of pars pro toto (which Eisenstein enthusiastically submits to protracted analysis) we don't even see the body. Another life has been adequately converted into a slogan. In a sense, it is no different from Vakulinchuk's motto, "For a spoonful of soup." All grist for the same revolutionary mill, in which all experience is relieved of its individual dignity and meaning outside of its value to a cause. History is our hero, and for history one individual is pretty much like another, only the slogans change. It really is the triumph of art over humanity. In the cinema, it is always impolitic to talk politics. But pinning a slogan to a corpse would have equally been an act of moral crudity, emptiness, and barbarism in democratic Athens. Only it wasn't done in democratic Athens. Even Socrates was allowed to possess his own death. For human beings, individuals, change but one slogan is pretty much like another.

And so, in the West, where the notion of the individual is given some currency, however debased, it was possible to regard Eisenstein's political circumstances as a "tragedy," albeit in the modern mode of "unheroic tragedy." In Russia, it must have seemed more nearly just another comedy, bureaucratic comedy. Eisenstein was no Meyerhold, and no one had the right to ask him to be. And so the dismal chronology of public declarations.

The intellectual cinema… is too vulgar to consider. The General Line was an intellectual film. [1935]

There was a period in Soviet cinema when montage was proclaimed "everything." Now we are at the close of a period during which montage has been regarded as "nothing." Regarding montage neither as nothing nor everything, I … [1938]

The formalist temptations left me. The Gordian knots untied themselves. [1939]

We artists forgot … those great ideas our art is summoned to serve.… We forgot that the main thing in art is its ideological content.… In the second part of Ivan the Terrible we committed a misrepresentation of historical facts which made the film worthless and vicious in an ideological sense … We must fully subordinate our creations to the interest of education of the Soviet people. From this aim we must take not one step aside nor deviate a single iota. We must master the Lenin-Stalin method of perceiving reality and history so completely and profoundly that we shall be able to overcome all remnants and survivals of former ideas which, though long ago banished from consciousness, strive stubbornly and cunningly to steal into our works whenever our creative vigilance relaxes for a single moment. This is a guarantee that our cinematography will be able to surmount all the ideological and artistic failures … and will again begin to create pictures of high quality, worthy of the Stalinist epoch. [1946]

As Robert Warshow has observed, "if there is one thing we should have learned from history—and from the history of the Russian Revolution above all—it is that history ought to be nobody's hero."

And so in the year 1958, a dismal body described as "117 film historians" (everyone knows there just aren 't 117 film historians) solemnly, and to the surprise of no one, put its collective head together, reaffirmed the opinion of thirty-three years' abdication of intellect, and cast its ballot for Potemkin as The Best Film of All Time. And so it goes with an audience that still cannot distinguish what is merely brilliant and clever from what is great; that mistakes its innovators for its creators, its artisans for its artists, its hacks for its geniuses. So it goes with an audience for whom historical and aesthetic importance are synonymous, committed irrevocably to the notion of a cultural hit parade. Such an audience always gets its Eisensteins. It always gets what it deserves.