Soviet Film Theory & Eisenstein

The essential elements of film theory were developed in the silent era by Soviet filmmakers intent on explaining the power of this new medium and in making of it a political and social tool, one that could be used in furtherance of the aims of the Soviet state. Indeed, the film theory that developed after 1917 mirrored the dialectics of Hegel, with successive shots seen as offering opposing ideas from which a synthesis was then produced that would have a certain effect on the viewer. Sergei Eisenstein represented one branch of Soviet film theory, a revolutionary branch that was exemplified in his films from the beginning and identified with his ideas of montage, or the ordering of individual shots to produce an effect. Eisenstein was a theorist as well as a filmmaker and was extremely influential through his writings on film as well as through the films he directed. He would fall out of favor in the Soviet system during the Stalinist era, but he would remain at the forefront of world cinema, with a strong reputation based in particular on his classic works Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible: I and II.

A contemporary of Eisenstein, director Grigori Kozintsev, said of his colleague:

In Eisenstein's case the most important thing to consider is not so much his place in the history of the contemporary cinema, but in the history of modern culture as a whole. to say that Eisenstein was one of the greatest film directors of our time is to say something both ve

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t at which the dream became a reality and the film was actually shot. The fourth stage was the montage stage, and this was of singular importance: On the cutting-table the filmed material revealed many surprises and accidental intrusions which had to be eliminated or modified where they threatened to obscure the original vision. But in the final stage the "first vision" itself underwent deliberate modifications, necessary corrections. A new vision was born, and in accordance with this new, superior vision, Eisenstein--past master of montage "in hindsight"--virtually recreated his film (Barna 77). Eisenstein's film theory was always political in nature, shaping the demands of the aesthetic to the superior requirements of politics, all in keeping with his stated view that we transcend the limitations of life to the degree that we serve society at large. He suggested that the Soviet cinema would create a new film language, and clearly he intended to be part of that process and to offer his insights into what that language should entail: I believe that only now can we begin to hazard a guess concerning the ways in which a genuine Soviet cinema will be formed, i.e. a cinema which not only will be opposed to bourgeois cinema in

Category: Film - S