Eisenstein's text which was translated into English at first was a difficult book to understand with all the film lingo, and examples using films that I have never seen before. But from what I have understood the book is a great story of what Eisenstein is all about dealing with montage.
Chapter one is all about the use of montage. Montage as Eisenstein says is not a new idea but from what I read is not really used widespread. He starts by describing fragments of film as they are, and then the reconstruction of those fragments in a different way to make a unique feeling or scene. An example would be to film a forest, then you take the shots and condense them and mold them together to make something new, Eisenstein says it’s a creative molding of nature. He then goes into detail about his cinema background, and explains how he used his ideas of montage and realism to construct a fight scene in "The Mexican". In this movie he was the man responsible for organizing the boxing ring, and gathering actors for a audience. His idea was to give the sequence a feeling of realism, he did this by making the set look legit, the actors look convincing, have the actors show real and many types of emotion, and to have an increase in scene cuts which when blended all together would fool the people watching into thinking that it was a real fight. He then talked much about Mise-en-scene, this means to put it in. I had to look this term up because I had no idea what it meant. This term also is related to meaning that one must understand their audience. One only example I can think of that represents his idea would be the final scene from the film Rocky. In Rocky the ending scene has two opponents fighting for the world championship position. The scenes jump from fight to the audience constantly showing different emotions building suspense and other emotional responses until the fights end.
Chapter two was called unexpected, and it dealt with the Japanese Kabuki theater that came to Russia. From the reading it was explained that people looked down on this art form but Eisenstein had a different view. Out of this came an unexpected finding, the tying of two mediums theater and sound. This has been done before but in the Japanese play the two were fused perfectly. The fusion of music and theater gave the idea of a great sound film. He explains that the way the actors movie with coinciding tempos and music build a great interest in what will happen next. Eisenstein demonstrates this by describing a scene from his movie Battleship Potemkin(1925) where he uses many shots before the guns go off to build suspense. A parallel of this idea can be seen in Star Wars VI Return of the Jedi(1983) in this scene the hero stands on a sail barge, music plays and at every horn blow the scene jumps to show other characters at the same instance. This action gets faster and faster until the suspense can no longer be taken and action erupts.
Chapter three focuses of ideograms and the relation between them and Einstein's cinematic theory. An ideogram is defined as a written symbol that represents an idea or object directly rather than a particular word or speech sound, as a Chinese or Japanese character. He relates this to his theory, by saying that ideograms and montage are identical. Montage uses many frames blended together to form a new idea or feeling. Ideograms are the same different symbols that when put together mean a new meaning. An example would be a fish with a cross over it means no fishing, or a rock with birds means falling rocks.
Till next time PapaDavigi signing out!
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