This paper is an examination of the theoretical shift which Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein made in his epistemology of film. Eisenstein focused specifically on the essential importance of montage in the syntax of art, eventually changing his views on the role and purpose that montage plays in the creation and perception of a work of art. In his earlier writings, he sees montage, the ways in which images and other elements are combined by the artist and presented to the audience, as a conflict which should be designed to provoke specific thoughts. In his later writings, he began to view montage's purpose as a means of producing harmony and emotional response, beyond the specifically political. An epistemology is concerned with a way of knowing, and Eisenstein's theories of the way in which film allows the viewer to know changed from believing principally in rationalism to arguing that knowing comes more forcefully through empirical experience. In many respects, his epistemological shift represents a maturation of understanding, as he began to embrace the broader perceptions that art makes possible, including the notion that the artist cannot exert total control but must instead include the viewer in order to complete the process.
David Bordwell was one of the first film theorists to propose the existence of "a marked schism in Eisenstein's oeuvre: one autonomous theory dominates the 1923-1930 phase of his career, another dominates the 1930-1948 phase" ("Shift" 32-33). Bordwell argues that the schism represents an epistemological shift from a materialistic, dialectical view to an empiricist focus on the importance of inner speech and a "relapse into Romanticism" ("Shift" 41). Previous theorists had taken Eisenstein's prolific musings on the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of art as a single body of discussion, with his later essays simply serving to expand and deepen his earlier considerations of the subje...