1 Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein. Dobson, 1951, p. 257. The quotation is from “ A Statement, ” written in August, 1928, and signed by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov .
2 Notes by Basil Wright .
First: What does it set out to say? Broadly speaking, it says (or implies) that there is a powerful impact of Western machines, methods and commerce on the life of Ceylon; that this impact, for all its apparent surface signifi cance, may not be as deep as it seems; and that the benefi ts of Western civilisation may be less than they are commonly supposed to be.
Second: How does it set out to say it? By bringing together completely incongruous elements in picture and sound. It is only by the principles of montage employed that the incongruous elements become congruous and then only when they unfold in sequence .
It is not easy to choose a brief excerpt for analysis because the reel depends on the continuity of visual-cum-sound effect. Wherever one breaks off, one is leaving things in the air. However, here is a brief passage from the opening of the reel.
SONG OF CEYLON Extract from Reel 3
After the title, Voices of Commerce , we hear the whistle and puffi ng of a locomotive which begins before the fade-in. The fade-in reveals that the camera is on a train travel-ling through the jungle. There are several shots. We pass a woman walking beside the railway track; then a small station. A slow dissolve takes us to a shot of an elephant pushing against a tree, clearing the jungle. The sound of the locomotive gets slower and slower as the elephant continues pushing (the sound of the locomotive was produced artifi cially in the studio in order to get the exact speed to coincide with the elephant’s movements). The train has nearly come to a standstill when its sound is drowned by the splintering and creaking of the tree as it is uprooted and tilts over. The tree crashes;
as it hits the ground, there is the stroke of an enormous gong (a recurring motif ), the vibrations of which continue over the subsequent shot — the elephant and his mahout towering over the prostrate tree.
Almost at once a voice comes in briskly: “ New clearings, new roads, new buildings, new communications, new developments of natural resources. . . . ” Meanwhile, the scene changes to a procession of elephants breasting a steep hill in single fi le, each carrying a block of granite. Their trumpetings (the sound was purposely produced artifi -cially in the studio) are cross-cut with the sound of the clatter of typewriters.
The scene dissolves to a long shot of a boy coming through a coconut grove towards camera; we hear three different voices, inter-cut rapidly with each other, all dictating business letters. These are so timed that when the boy gets to the foot of the tree he is just about to climb and raises his hands in prayer to the god of the tree, the three voices repeat, one after the other, “ Yours faithfully. . . . ” The boy starts to climb the tree and now the sound is the music which, in Reel 2, was used with the villagers praying to the priest. This is drowned almost at once. . . .
This short excerpt, incomplete and approximately described though it is, should be suffi cient to give an impression of the technique employed. The juxtaposition of sound and picture is such that the two unrelated factors produce an entirely new quality which neither has on its own. There is in many instances no physi-cal connection between them but the simultaneous impact of soundtrack and images — the boy praying and the business man dictating “ Yours faithfully, ” for example — produces overtones of meaning which, if perhaps
not fully comprehended, are nevertheless felt by the spectator. There is no simple continuity of action in the editing (much less in the sound): the effect of continuity is achieved through a continuous fl ow of ideas and emotion.
Although Song of Ceylon itself has an emotional quality rare in any fi lm, it is as well to consider how far its method is universally applicable. The objections to Eisenstein’s fi lms can be equally raised here. Much of the meaning of Song of Ceylon remains elusive on fi rst viewing — a fact which is as much due to the complexity of the theme as to the director’s way of expressing it. Certainly, it requires a trained sensibility on the part of the spectator if it is to be fully grasped. While this is in no way an adverse criticism of its montage methods, it makes it unlikely that they will be extensively emulated by many other fi lm-makers: minority fi lms of this kind have, unfortunately, come to be a rare luxury.
But a further, more important question suggests itself in connection with Wright’s use of a sound-track which operates independently of the picture. How widely is the method applicable?
The theme of Song of Ceylon is the essential duality of life in Ceylon: on the one side the Western infl uence; on the other, the traditional behaviour and life of the Sinhalese. The theme itself is, in this sense, peculiarly well suited to the treatment. Wright uses — not altogether consistently — the sound and picture to evoke respectively the two dif-ferent aspects of life in Ceylon. Throughout Reel 3 we are shown in the picture the routine of native life in Ceylon and in the sound-track the sounds associated with the Europeans who control it — as if unseen forces were guiding the natives ’ lives. It is only by making the rhythm of the sound-track conform to the rhythm of the images that a kind of physical unity is preserved. (The most obvious instance of this is the timing of the sound of the locomotive which is artifi cially made to harmonise with the rhythm of movements in the picture — i.e., the elephant pushing against the tree.) Bearing in mind the special circumstances of the theme of Song of Ceylon , one may conclude that the highly complex montage method employed in Reel 3 is only of a limited application, and that a more conser-vative approach to fi lm continuity (such as the fi lm employs in other sequences) is of more general use.
Here , for instance, is another continuity, quite clearly expressing a complex of ideas (and emotions), but which uses a simpler editing scheme.
DIARY FOR TIMOTHY 3 Excerpt from Reel 3
An imaginative fi lm essay about the war and its impact on the lives of ordinary people in Britain. The whole fi lm is presented in the form of a diary recorded for a child born late in the war. The commentary (written by E. M. Forster and spoken by Michael Redgrave) intro-duces the various events as if addressing the child.
After a shot of the baby, Timothy, the commentator introduces various activities taking place up and down the country, fi nishing with a land-mine being exploded on a beach.
3Director: Humphrey Jennings. Editor: Alan Osbiston. Crown Film Unit, 1945.
Ft.
recover his wits there; or, if he do not, it’s no great matter there. from here, rising at an angle of 45 degrees, to a height of 60 miles;
it travels at 300 m.p.h. —
36
Ft.
It is not easy to analyse in detail the niceties of idea and emotion conveyed by this passage. A sequence of this kind is made by the director to express the complex of thoughts and feelings in the manner it does, precisely because the same effect cannot be achieved in any other way: verbal description is therefore bound to fall short of capturing the complete meaning. The inter-weaving pattern of the continuity creates an effect which is not to be described in words, for the fi nal impact on the spectator is more complex than the mere reception
of two parallel events: the construction and timing of the images fuse the two events in the spectator’s mind in a manner only possible in the cinema. The passage, in other words, is so purely cinematic that a description of the way it achieves its effect cannot begin to describe the effect itself. Bearing this in mind, we can merely analyse the form of the presentation without doing justice to the content.
Diary for Timothy sets out to portray and assess the various forces at play in war-time Britain, and a part of the intention of cross-cutting the stage performance of Hamlet with the scene in the canteen is to convey the simple fact that the two events occur simultaneously: side by side with the spirit of war-time Britain (mani-fested, in this case, by the man’s ingenuous interest in the mechanics of destruction and apparent indifference to the actual physical danger) went a marked revival of interest in the arts. Jennings ’ intention in presenting the scenes in this way is, presumably, to suggest that the two things are not entirely unconnected.
But beside this surface connection, there is a deeper level of contact between the two streams of action. The Grave-digger’s reference to England ( “ Why was he sent into England? ” “ Why, because he was mad; he shall recover his wits there ” ) is, one feels, a comment on the scene in the canteen.
Again , Hamlet’s lines in shot 10 provide a poignant commentary on the events of shots 9 and 11 : the direc-tor’s subtly nostalgic feeling towards the scene in the canteen — and, by implication, to the whole period — is made to reach the spectator in Hamlet’s words.
To stress the unity of emotion between the two streams of action, the cuts are sometimes made to coincide with straight verbal links. For instance, the phrasing of the lines in shot 7 ( “ . . . D’you know? ” ) is such that Hamlet appears to be answering the question in shot 8.
Similarly , the cut from 8 to 9 ( “ Alas, poor Yorick! ” . . . “ Had to walk all the way home ” ) creates a verbal con-tinuity with exactly the kind of affectionately ironic overtone which characterises the whole of the fi lm.
The unity between the two actions is further emphasised by smoothing over all the transitions between them.
This is done either through the verbal links we have already mentioned or by making an actual sound carry over the cut (see the laughter over 5 – 6 , the sound of explosion over 9 – 10 ). In this way the two scenes are knit together so closely as to come over to the spectator as a complex but homogeneous continuity. In con-trast with the Eisenstein approach to editing, the cuts do not so much make points themselves; they switch the argument about and keep it going at different levels.
Clearly , the continuity of Diary for Timothy exemplifi es an entirely different approach to the fi lm of ideas from that employed in Song of Ceylon . The effects are not achieved by the collision of shot with shot, but through a deliberately smooth continuity. The sound is not physically independent of the picture. It is, instead, in each case the sound of the scene being played on the screen and the effect is achieved by inter-cutting the scenes themselves. But this is not a completely representative instance of Jennings ’ usual technique, for, in addition to actual sounds, Jennings employed a commentary in most of his fi lms. Family Portrait , for instance, his last fi lm, which is a personal essay on the genius of the British people, has a commentary throughout. Here Jennings is dealing with highly complex ideas which it would have been impossible to convey in pictures alone. His commentary does not so much describe what is happening on the screen, as speculate on the signifi cance and ramifi cations of the images. It leads, in a sense, just as much a life of its own as does Wright’s sound-track, but it does so in words. Unexpected visual associations — for which Jennings had a particular talent — which
would be all but meaningless without comment are given point by a hint from the commentator. The words and images interweave, now the one, now the other becoming the dominant.
What Jennings seems to have realised was that, to express ideas of a certain complexity, it is not possible to rely on pictures alone. If an idea is to be raised, then it must be done in the fi rst instance in words. He seems to have been well aware of Eisenstein’s “ fanciful montage structures arousing the fearsome eventuality of meaninglessness, ” and therefore guided his audience by using an economical and highly suggestive commen-tary. The point really is that Jennings ’ commentaries are always suggestive, never descriptive. The few words preceding the passage we have quoted — and they are not a particularly good example — do not explain what is happening; they set the key, so to speak, to the kind of thinking the spectator will be expected to do in the next few moments. Jennings ’ commentaries almost invariably deal with universals while his images deal with particulars. This is perhaps most spectacularly borne out in Words for Battle , where quotations from the English poets are heard while scenes of everyday life in war-time Britain are shown on the screen.
It is likely that if the intellectual fi lm essay is to develop in the future, it will have to do so along the lines used by Jennings rather than those envisaged by Eisenstein. The kind of abrupt, shock-packed continuity which Eisenstein’s “ intellectual montage ” inevitably entails is entirely out of tune with the current tradition of fi lm-making. Moreover, there is a marked difference in level between Eisenstein’s and Jennings ’ fi lms. (This is no disparagement of Eisenstein’s fi lms which were designed to appeal to a broader, less sophisticated audi-ence, although even to that, parts of October and Old and New proved unacceptable.) The long montage in October ridiculing religious ceremonies or the repetitive passage suggesting Kerensky’s vanity, manages to con-vey only relatively simple ideas. Jennings ’ fi lms work at an altogether higher level, yet they have a direct, easily assimilated appeal. For the fi lm of ideas to be commercially possible, Jennings ’ synthesis of simplifi ed montage effects and suggestive commentary seems to offer an ideal solution.
The short sound continuity from Song of Ceylon which we have examined makes scarcely any use of actual sounds. Basil Wright uses his sound-track to throw oblique comment on his images rather than to add a fur-ther realistic dimension to his presentation: actual sounds, fur-therefore, are irrelevant to his purpose.
Another instance of a similar use of commentative sound occurs in Pare Lorentz’s The Plough that Broke the Plains . A sequence examining the state of American agriculture during the 1914 – 1918 war shows a series of shots of the countryside with farmers working on the land. Behind this we hear a military march, the steps of marching sol-diers, gunfi re and a commentary spoken as if on a parade ground. Partly, of course, this implies that the steady, regular routine of the farmer’s year goes on while soldiers are fi ghting at the front. But there is an additional overtone of meaning: the continuity suggests that war-time farming had assumed something of the urgency and controlled discipline of an army. These sentiments are not directly expressed in the commentary: the comment provided by the contrast in the rhythm and content of the sound and images in itself conveys the desired effect.
Since similar experiments are comparatively rare in fi ction fi lms, the use of commentative sound in ways akin to those described has become one of the most noted features of documentary fi lm-making. British documentary directors of the thirties gave serious attention to the ways the sound-track could be employed to enrich a fi lm’s fi nal appeal; as far as an imaginative use of sound is concerned, they pursued an altogether more adventurous policy than their studio colleagues. Part of the reason for this may have been simple necessity.
Financial considerations often made it impossible — even where it would have been otherwise desirable — to take sound equipment up and down the country. Further, as Rotha pointed out, “ Sound-trucks are . . . large and cumbersome objects. They attract attention, disturb the natural character of the material being shot and upset the intimacy which the documentalist tries to create between himself and his subject ” 1 Thus the temp-tation to make do with a straightforward track of actual sounds in many cases did not even arise.
A more important reason for the wide experimenting with commentative sound lies in the nature of docu-mentary fi lm-making itself. The visual continuity of documentaries is often necessarily rather fragdocu-mentary