Eisenstein: Intellectual Montage - The Technique of Film Editing

In Pudovkin’s silent ﬁ lms it is always the dramatic situation which remains foremost in the spectator’s mind:

the indirect comments on the story never become an end in themselves; they merely serve to heighten the drama. In Eisenstein’s silent ﬁ lms, particularly in October and Old and New , the balance between plot and com-ment is, as it were, tipped the other way. To Eisenstein — and we are here speaking of his silent ﬁ lms only — the story merely provides a convenient structure upon which to build an exposition of ideas; to him, it is the conclusions and abstractions which can be drawn from the actual events which are of ﬁ rst interest.

Eisenstein ’s methods of what he himself has called intellectual montage are fully described in his own theoretical writings. These, in translation, are often extremely obscure and, since they depend on a series of deﬁ nitions peculiar to the writer’s method, difﬁ cult to summarise. Let us therefore, before passing on to the theory, look at a passage of intellectual cinema from one of Eisenstein’s silent ﬁ lms and attempt to analyse the difference between his and his predecessors ’ editing techniques. In doing so, we shall keep faith with Eisenstein’s theo-retical approach, which was always a direct rationalisation of his practical work.

OCTOBER Reel 3

1 – 17 The interior of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Kerensky, head of the provisional gov-ernment, attended by two lieutenants, is slowly walking down the vast palatial corridor.

He moves up the stairs: inter-cut with a number of slow-moving shots of Kerensky proudly ascending the stairway, are separate titles describing Kerensky’s rank: Commander-in-Chief, Minister of War and Marine , etcetera , etcetera , etcetera.

18 C.S. A garland in the hands of one of the palace statues.

19 F.S. The whole statue, holding the garland.

20 C.S. Garland, as in 18.

21 Title: Hope of his Country and the Revolution.

22 Shooting up towards another statue holding a garland. ( The angle of the camera makes it appear as if the statue were just about to deposit the garland on Kerensky’s head. ) 23 Title: Alexander Fedorovitch Kerensky.

24 C.U. Kerensky’s face, still and intense.

25 C.S. Garland in the statue’s hands.

26 C.U. Kerensky, as in 24. His expression relaxes into a smile.

27 C.S. Garland, as in 25.

28 – 39 Kerensky ascends the stairway farther and is greeted by the Czar’s large, richly decorated footman. Kerensky, despite attempts at dignity, looks small beside this imposing ﬁ gure. He is introduced to a whole line of footmen and shakes hands with each one. What a democrat !

40 – 74 Kerensky waits before the huge ornate palace doors leading to the Czar’s private quarters. We see the Czar’s coat-of-arms on the doors. Kerensky waits helplessly for the doors to open. Two footmen smile. Kerensky’s boots, then his gloved hands, seen in close-up , moving in impatient gestures. The two Lieutenants are ill at ease. We cut to the head of an ornamental toy peacock;

it wags its head, then proudly spreads its tail into a fan; it starts revolving, performing a sort of dance, its wings shining. The huge doors open. A footman smiles. Kerensky walks through the doors and farther doors ahead of him are opened one by one. ( The action of opening the doors is repeated several times without matching the movements on the cuts. ) The peacock’s head comes to rest and stares, as if in admiration, after Kerensky’s receding ﬁ gure.

75 – 79 Cut to soldiers, sailors and Bolshevik workers, listlessly waiting in prison; then to Lenin, hiding in the misty marshes.

80 – 99 Kerensky in the private apartment of the Czar. Close shots of rows of crockery, the Czarist initial A on everything including the imperial chamber pots. In the apartments of the Czarina — Alexandra Fedorovna : more shots of rows of crockery, ornamental furniture, tas-sels, the Czarina’s bed. Kerensky lying on the bed ( shown in three consecutive shots from different angles ). Alexander Fedorovitch . More ornamental tassels, etc.

100 – 105 In the library of Nicholas II. Kerensky, standing by the desk in the Czar’s library, a very small ﬁ gure in these grand surroundings. Three more shots of Kerensky from progres-sively farther away and emphasising Kerensky’s smallness in this huge palatial room.

Kerensky picks up a piece of paper from the desk.

106 Title: The Decree Restoring the Death Penalty.

111 – 124 Kerensky, head bowed, hand in his jacket Napoleon-fashion, slowly ascends the stairs.

A servant and one of the Lieutenants are watching. M.S. Kerensky, looking down, arms folded. Statuette of Napoleon in the same attitude. The servant and Lieutenant salute.

A row of tall, palace wine glasses. Another row of glasses. A row of tin soldiers, similarly disposed about the screen .

125 C.S. Kerensky, sitting at a table. In front of him stand four separate quarters of a four-way decanter. They are standing side by side on the table; Kerensky stares down at them.

126 C.S. Kerensky’s hands manipulating the four decanter bottles into position.

127 M.S. Kerensky.

128 C.S. Kerensky’s hands.

129 M.S. Kerensky. He stares at the bottles.

130 C.U. Kerensky’s hand as it opens a drawer in the table and withdraws the ﬁ tting cap of the decanter — shaped like a crown — from the drawer.

131 M.S. Kerensky; he raises the crown before his eyes.

132 B.C.U. The crown.

133 M.S. Kerensky; he places the crown on top of the bottles.

134 B.C.U. The crown, now ﬁ tting over the decanter.

135 A factory steam whistle blowing steam.

136 B.C.U. The crown. 161 – 186 Shots of grotesque religious efﬁ gies, temples, Buddhas, primitive African masks, etc.

187 Title: For 188 Title: Country

189 – 199 Close shots of medals, ornate uniforms, ofﬁ cers ’ lapels, etc.

200 Title: Hurrah !

201 The pedestal of a statue of the Czar. (The statue itself was torn down by workers in the ﬁ rst reel.) Fragments of the torso of the statue, lying on the ground, swing back into position on top of the pedestal.

202 Title: Hurrah!

203 The same action seen in 201 from a different angle . 204 Title: Hurrah !

205 – 209 Six short images of the religious efﬁ gies seen earlier. They appear to be smiling.

210 – 219 Other fragments of the torn-down statue of the Czar reassembling. Finally, the sceptre and then the head of the statue wobbles and settles back into position.

220 – 233 Several shots of church spires, tilted , as before. Church spire, upside down. Censers swinging. Head of Czar’s statue, proudly back in position. A priest, holding a cross.

234 – 259 General Kornilov, leader of the anti-revolutionary army, sits on his horse and surveys his troops. A statue of Napoleon, astride a horse, his arm stretched forward. A similar shot of Kornilov as he raises his arm. Kerensky, still in the palace, staring at the crown at the top of the decanter, arms folded.

Title: Two Bonapartes. Several more images of the statue of Napoleon. A head of Napoleon facing left. A head of Napoleon facing right. The two heads on screen together, facing each other. Two grotesque ﬁ gures — seen earlier — facing each other. More shots of Napoleon and another sequence of religious efﬁ gies.

260 Kornilov, on his horse, giving the command to march.

261 A tank moves forward, hurls itself over a ditch.

262 Kerensky, in the Czarina’s bedroom, hopelessly hurls himself on to the bed.

263 Fragments of the bust of Napoleon, lying scattered on the ground.

Eisenstein ’s aim in making October was not so much to recount an historical episode as to explain the signiﬁ -cance and ideological background of the political conﬂ ict. The ﬁ lm’s appeal, therefore, comes from the man-ner in which Eisenstein has exposed certain ideas rather than from its excitement as a dramatic story. Indeed, as a piece of narrative , the passage we have quoted is extremely unsatisfactory. The incidents are loosely con-structed and do not follow each other with the dramatic inevitability which a well-told story demands: we are not, for instance, shown Kerensky’s character through a series of dramatically motivated episodes but through a number of random incidents, each suggesting a further aspect of Kerensky’s vanity or incompetence. The time relationship between consecutive shots and scenes is left undeﬁ ned and no sense of continuous devel-opment emerges: the cut from 108 to 109 , for example, takes us — without reason or explanation — from the Czar’s study to a staircase somewhere in the palace. No attempt is made to explain or to conceal the time lapse between the shots, as could easily have been done with a dissolve. The reel abounds in similar examples, showing Eisenstein’s lack of interest in the simple mechanics of story-telling and his ruthless suppression of any footage not directly relevant to his thesis.

This contempt for the simplest requirement of a story-ﬁ lm — the ability to create the illusion of events unfolding in logical sequence — is manifested in Eisenstein’s ﬁ lms in another way. Just as in the cut from 108 to 109 he jumps forward through time, so on other occasions he may play a scene for longer than its natural duration. In the well-known sequence of the raising of the bridges in October , Eisenstein photographed the action from two viewpoints: from beneath the bridge and from above. Then, in editing the material, he used both these series of shots and thereby considerably extended the screen time of the actual event. Clearly, this creates a laboured effect: the extreme emphasis Eisenstein meant to place upon the event is achieved at the expense of drawing the spectator’s attention to an artiﬁ cial device.

A similar instance occurs in the reel we have quoted. When Kerensky is about to enter the Czar’s private quarters, the incident is stressed by repeating the shot of the opening doors without matching the cuts, i.e., by cutting back to an earlier stage in the movement of opening the doors than that with which the previous shot ended. (The whole question of matching cuts is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 14.)

Eisenstein ’s aim in thus breaking away from the narrative editing methods of his predecessors was to extend the power of the ﬁ lm medium beyond simple story-telling. “ While the conventional ﬁ lm directs emotions , ” he wrote, “ [intellectual montage] suggests an opportunity to direct the whole thought process as well. ” ¹⁸ How he, in practice, availed himself of this opportunity, we shall perhaps most easily assess from his own analyses of the sequence we have quoted in detail.

18 Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein. Dobson , 1951 , p. 62.

Eisenstein describes his intentions at the opening of reel 3 (shots 1 – 27 ) as follows:

Kerensky’s rise to power and dictatorship after the July uprising of 1917. A comic effect was gained by sub-titles indicating regular ascending ranks ( “ Dictator, ” “ Generalissimo, ” “ Minister of Navy and of Army, ” etc.) climbing higher and higher — cut into ﬁ ve or six shots of Kerensky, climbing the stairs of the Winter Palace, all with exactly the same pace. Here a conﬂ ict between the ﬂ ummery of the ascending ranks and the hero’s trotting up the same unchanging ﬂ ight of stairs yields an intellectual result: Kerensky’s essential nonentity is shown satirically. We have the counterpoint of a literally expressed con-ventional idea with the pictured action of a particular person who is unequal to his swiftly increasing duties. The incongru-ence of these two factors results in the spectator’s purely intellectual decision at the expense of this particular person. ¹⁹ In addition to this consciously satirical staging of the scene, Eisenstein achieved a further ironic effect by contin-ually cutting back to the statues holding the ornamental garlands as if just about to place them upon Kerensky’s head. The whole passage is typical of Eisenstein’s method: its “ plot ” is almost non-existent — Kerensky is simply walking up a staircase; it is in the comments and symbolic allusions that the meaning is conveyed.

The next incident is relatively simple: more ridicule is heaped upon Kerensky in a straightforward narrative passage. After this, in 40 – 74 , Eisenstein resumes his oblique approach: throughout this section Kerensky stands still and all the signiﬁ cant meaning is conveyed by the sequence of close shots — gloves, boots, door-locks, the peacock — which produce ironic overtones quite outside the range of a more conventionally staged scene. Then, after a brief glimpse of the revolutionary ﬁ ghters, Eisenstein returns to the attack, this time exposing Kerensky’s petty enjoyment of the Czarist palace, seen side by side with his inability to assume the responsibilities of a ruler.

There now follows a satirical rendering of Kerensky’s dreams of power. The image of Kerensky is compared with a shot of a bust of Napoleon, but the row of wine glasses, followed by the similar row of tin soldiers, promptly throws scorn on the empty pretence: the continuity suggests how temporary and meaningless are Kerensky’s present surroundings and implies that his position is that of a ﬁ gurehead, not in command of any real forces or authority. The image of the crown-shaped decanter stopper becomes a symbol of Kerensky’s ambition ( 136 – 153 ) and this is inter-cut with the shot of the factory whistle — the symbol of the power of the revolutionaries. The conﬂ ict, it will be noted, is not established in terms of armies or political statements but by symbols of the two opposing ideologies. The potential drama of the situation is rendered as a clash of ideas.

Up to this point, though the continuity has abounded in side-allusions, all the images which have been used for symbolic effect were taken from Kerensky’s actual surroundings. From here onward Eisenstein chooses his images at random, without reference to the story’s locale. Having established that Kornilov represents the mil-itary danger, he proceeds to discredit the regime which, under the banner “ For God and Country, ” is about to attack the Bolsheviks (see 157 – 186 ).

Kornilov’s march on Petrograd was under the banner of “ In the Name of God and Country. ” Here we attempted to reveal the religious signiﬁ cance of this episode in a rationalistic way. A number of religious images, from a magniﬁ cent Baroque Christ to an Eskimo idol, were cut together. The conﬂ ict in this case was between the concept and the sym-bolisation of God. While idea and image appear to accord completely in the ﬁ rst statue shown, the two elements move further from each other with each successive image. Maintaining the denotation of “ God, ” the images increasingly disagree with our conception of God, inevitably leading to individual conclusions about the true nature of all deities.

19 Ibid., pp. 61 , 62.

In this case, too, a chain of images attempted to achieve a purely intellectual resolution, resulting from a conﬂ ict between a preconception and a gradual discrediting of it in purposeful steps. ²⁰

Here , the whole narrative structure of the story-ﬁ lm is thrown aside and a continuity of purely intellectual signiﬁ cance is constructed. Each cut carries forward an idea instead of continuing the action of the previ-ous shot: in continuity, the images convey an argument, not an incident. The same method is maintained in the next few shots ( 189 – 219 ) when the idea of “ Country ” is rendered in terms of the outdated military paraphernalia and, later, as the battered statue of the Czar reassembling itself. The separate threads of the argument are then tied together in 220 – 259 and the two ﬁ gures of Kornilov and Kerensky are reduced to insigniﬁ cance by satirically identifying them with “ two Bonapartes. ”

The ﬁ nal touch ( 261 – 263 ) is achieved by a (not altogether lucid) device which Eisenstein describes as follows:

. . . the scene of Kornilov’s putsch , which puts an end to Kerensky’s Bonapartist dreams. Here one of Kornilov’s tanks climbs up and crushes a plaster-of-Paris Napoleon standing on Kerensky’s desk in the Winter Palace, a juxtaposition of purely symbolic signiﬁ cance. ²¹

In examples of this sort Eisenstein saw pointers to what could be achieved by “ [liberating] the whole action from the deﬁ nitions of time and space. ” ²² He envisaged that experiments along these lines would lead “ towards a purely intellectual ﬁ lm, freed from traditional limitations, achieving direct forms for ideas, systems and concepts, without any need for transitions or paraphrases. ” ²³

Pudovkin , in his theory of constructive editing, claimed that a scene is most effectively presented by linking together a series of specially chosen details of the scene’s action. Eisenstein emphatically opposed this view. He believed that to build up an impression by simply adding together a series of details was only the most elemen-tary application of ﬁ lm editing. Instead of linking shots in smooth sequence, Eisenstein held that a proper ﬁ lm continuity should proceed by a series of shocks; that each cut should give rise to a conﬂ ict between the two shots being spliced and thereby create a fresh impression in the spectator’s mind. “ If montage is to be compared with something, ” he wrote, “ then a phalanx of montage pieces, of shots, should be compared to the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its automobile or tractor: for, similarly, the dynam-ics of montage serve as impulses driving forward the total ﬁ lm. ” ²⁴ And again: “ the juxtaposition of two shots by splicing them together resembles not so much the simple sum of one shot plus another — as it does a creation. ” ²⁵ How the ﬁ lm-maker should set about producing and controlling these “ creations ” Eisenstein explained by pointing to analogies between the cinema and the other arts. He stated the principle of intellectual montage most succinctly by comparing it with the workings of hieroglyphs.

. . .the picture of water and the picture of an eye signiﬁ es to weep; the picture of an ear near the drawing of a door ⫽ to listen; a dog ⫹ a mouth ⫽ to bark; a mouth ⫹ a child ⫽ to scream; a mouth ⫹ a bird ⫽ to sing; a

21 Ibid., p. 58.

22 Ibid., p. 58.

23 Ibid., p. 63.

24 Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein. Dobson , 1951 , p. 38.

25 Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein. Faber & Faber , 1943 , p. 18.

20 Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein. Dobson , 1951 , p. 62.

knife ⫹ a heart ⫽ sorrow, and so on. But this is — montage! Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots that are depictive , single in meaning, neutral in content — into intellectual contexts and series. ²⁶

A number of obvious instances of this method occur in the excerpt we have quoted from October : “ Kerensky’s essential nonentity ” is shown by juxtaposing shots of his ceremonial ascent of the palace staircase with the titles ( “ Dictator, Generalissimo, ” etc.) and with the shots of the statues holding garlands; his ambition is ren-dered in the contrast with the shots of the bust of Napoleon; the shot of the tank hurling itself over a ditch followed by Kerensky, ﬂ inging himself on a bed, conveys the impression of Kerensky’s incapacity as a ruler.

Eisenstein believed that the director’s function was to evolve series of shot conﬂ icts of this sort and to express his ideas through the new meanings which arose from them. He held that the ideal ﬁ lm continuity was one in which every cut produced this momentary shock. There is nowhere in his ﬁ lms any attempt at smooth cutting: his continuities proceed by a series of collisions, giving an impression of a constantly shifting and developing argument.

Eisenstein classiﬁ ed the various kinds of conﬂ icts possible between adjacent images in terms of contrasting composition, scale, depth of ﬁ eld, photographic key and so on. Any feature of the picture could be abruptly varied in adjacent shots in order to give rise to the desired conﬂ ict. Here, for instance, is his description of

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