Film Jargon
The Film Sense. By Sergei Eisenstein. Translated and edited by Jay Leyda. (Faber and Faber. los. 6d.)
SERGEI EISENSTEIN, Soviet Russia's most famous film producer, came to film-making by way of the theatre, and to the theatre by way of the drawing board. As an engineer attached to a Red Army fortification corps he made his first contact with the drama by organising an amateur theatre group during the Civil War. Becoming a professional, he experimented for four years with new methcds of dramatic, expression, trying to synthesise dynamic relationships by placing static images in juxtaposition. Here we see the origin of a theory of film-making which in such masterpieces as Potemkin and October was to make the word montage an " open sesame " to the Bloomsbury salons of the late 'twenties. The Film Sense, with its elaborate charts and its rich and widely erudite quotations, seeks to prove that the sort of dramatic effects which result from the pattern of relationship of neighbouring film scenes can be paralleled by similar effects of juxtaposition in literature, painting apd music, and that the basic principles of all such creative relationships were known to and used by Lewis Carroll, Michael Angelo, Pushkin and Durer. Eisenstein explains in the book that his recent fi'm, Alexander Nevsky, was made according to his latest theories of what may be called contrapuntal montage—the inter-relationship of the montage of scenes, of musical montage and of the juxtaposition of objects within individual scenes. To the analysis of a two-minute section of- this film he devotes thirty pages of text and a fib:ling chart. In conclusion, he says " during the period of work one rarely formulates these`howl' and ' whys ' which determine this or that choice of ' correspondence.' In the work period the basic selection is transmuted, not into logical evaluation, as in a post- analysis of this sort, but into direct action." The reader may be tempted to take the direct action of cutting the analytical cackle and remarking that Alexander Nevsky did not seem to be so remarkable a film as all that. For Mr. Eisenstein is inclined to become tangled in verbose explanations of things which scarcely need to be explained at all. The book is, however, provocative and imagina- tive anfl contains interesting extracts from a number of Eisenstein
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