It is a complex and tricky affair to disentangle the various components of film and see them as entirely autonomous functions. For each component plays off one another, gains impact through the presence or absence of the other. For example the Mise-en-scène - or what I call the activity and graphic composition in front of the camera - would not be as strong if the camera failed to support the emotions and conflict of the scene. Both components work towards a scene shaping - an aesthetic rendering of the drama, conflicts and beats of a scene. As for editing I would say that it has something of a special status among all the other components that go towards making a film. It heightens our awareness that although the cinematic image seems to reflect reality and be a window to reality film is in fact a construct.
Nothing can make this more apparent than the physical labour of sticking pieces of film together into a sequence or sitting at a computer and wading through hours of material in search of images which together might add up to making a film. I once heard Tom Tykwer talking about how he made RUN LOLA RUN. He and his editor Mathilde Bonnefoy were completely overwhelmed by the amount of material they had. So they decided to approach the material as if it were a music video and simply select the material they liked. That meant that the story itself - for this stage of the editing process - become secondary and what became more important was the material that they intuitively liked. They then began the arduous task of trying to narrate the film by using this selected material.
It is worth holding a moment longer on RUN LOLA RUN, because it highlights the most recent developments in style and editing for narrative film. Not only do we find here an incredible mix of genres, from pseudo-ethnographical documentary style to photo-stories and cartoons, but also vital dramaturgical plot points are extended and underlined by an MTV style of editing which prolongs the instance. A fine example of this is when Lola is on the telephone puzzling out why Manni is so troubled. Her superbly acted out moment of realisation that Manni has left the plastic bag full of money on the tube is drawn out by repeating the exchange of dialogue - "the bag", "the bag" - between them many times from a variety of angles. This is an incredibly artificial rendering of the emotional moment that the actors play out in real time. Ken Dancyger has called this effect “a feeling state”, meaning that moments of emotional intensity are reworked in post-production to the point that they upstage the narrative arc, and become pulsating, visceral and totally autonomous chunks of cinematic pleasure to be consumed by the spectator.
The issue of time in fact becomes a key device to the whole aesthetic approach to this film. Moments are prolonged through slow motion, music clip editing, or a combination of both. Or in other instances where whole vignettes are told in rapid fire by photo-stories which reveal key moments of far larger time frames. I am thinking in particular of the very marginal story of the woman Lola runs into at the corner of the street. There is a title card reading: "And then…". This is followed by a see a series of black and white photos which reveal this woman will lose her child to the social services, be consoled by her husband and then go on to steal a child from a pram and be chased by its parents. Added to this device of time, which has the spectator piecing together past, present and future threads of film, there is also the technique of what I would venture to call associative editing. The homeless man who finds the bag of money walks up some steps and out of the underground station, his back to us. A series of stereotypical images of tourist panoramas and famous buildings are spliced into this totally unspectacular shot giving us a sense of not only the flow of consciousness of the man, but also how his fantasy running wild is formed not by real experience of these places, but by images of those very same places. This highlights in turn what we could call the post-modern condition in which reality becomes aesthetised and conditioned by the images we have of it.
It is evident that this style of filmmaking demands a new type of spectatorship. On the one hand the film openly acknowledges its artificial dimension or "self-reflexivity", to the point of an almost childish delight in sharing together with the spectator all the various playful tools which go towards creating the story. As a result a kind of trippy form of parallel processing begins. The spectator begins to simultaneously detach itself from the film and enjoy the techniques being used, while another cognitive part of the spectator's brain experiences a flurry of neuronal activity attempting to keep abreast of the film by piecing together large and small narrative threads. And in between all this are the "feeling states" underlined by pulsating techno-music that act like rushes of pleasure.
I do an exercise with students, which tries to get them to use and exploit this Tykwer-esque approach. I get them to work with two actors and mark the end of the exposition at which point the characters apparently know what the scene is about, the emotional transition of the protagonist from plus to minus or vice versa and the apex. I then ask the students to draw up a shot list that will give them enough material in editing to elaborate and exploit the full emotional potential of these beat changes. The students are allowed to add anything to the shot list that they feel might be useful. This can be anything from extreme close-ups on a protagonist from a variety of angles, the use of slow motion at key beats, to more associative images reflecting their emotional states or flow of consciousness, or flashbacks or possible future scenarios. The point of the exercise is to extend the moment psychologically and visually without overburdening the spectator or losing sight of the narrative arc.
All in all it does not take much then to realise how editing is central to this post-modern form of filmmaking. It is also a timely moment to add that it might very well be that because our media dominated world seems to have so fully commodified and transformed our reality into images of itself, that the technique of editing becomes such a focus of attention. For if we are experiencing a "waning of affect" in culture and film, as many intellectuals say, then it is editing then can perhaps reawaken our senses.
Having accepted that film is a construct and that editing is a component that highlights this fact more than any other component, it feels appropriate now to turn to the young Russian filmmakers of the twenties. This includes such directors as Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin and Lev Kuleschov, who engaged very extensively with the debates on film and editing. To start with they did not refer to the term "editing", but "montage", as the technique of splicing a film together. It is no coincidence either that the word "montage", should have such an industrial connotation. It reminds us of chaine de montage, which means "assembly line" in French. And in this semantic and metaphorical link between the process of industrial production and film lies a central thesis of these soviet filmmakers. For just as a product is put together and completed on the assembly line, so too is film assembled from smaller pieces to create meaning. Or in other words the image gains meaning in its relation and placement within a montage structure. This is a pretty radical assumption, and one that goes towards undermining any hopes that film might somehow be able to document an empirical world outside. Like any language, film is arbitrary, subjective, and ideological. Although we would dearly like to believe that Flaherty’s NANOOK THE ESKIMO is an objective first hand documentation of the live of an Eskimo family, we know that this landmark in cinema verité was shaped and edited to fit the narrative desires of the director.
For Dziga Vertov, the radical Soviet filmmaker, who for many was and still remains the founder of cinema verité, the idea that there is an inherent link between the production process and film remained a central premise of his filmmaking praxis and theory. Film should be as "useful as shoes" and should not be aloof from productive life. He added: “the movie camera was invented in order to penetrate deeper into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena”. I think it is highly interesting to take a moment to compare and contrast Vertov to Tykwer. For like Tykwer, Vertov uses a variety of styles and techniques. In Vertov's case however this was a provacative attack on bourgeois notions of what cinema should be. In THE MOVIE-EYE for example, Vertov uses trick photography, animation, multiple exposure and "candid camera", and in MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA he experiments with various camera speeds, dissolves, split screen effects, superimposition and more. In our post-modern age it has become acceptable to use an eclectic set of styles and draw references from popular culture, music and animation. Back then though it was radical. The key difference however and one we should never lose sight of is the motivation for Vertov's experiments. He wanted film to present "a communist deciphering of the world", while in a film like RUN LOLA RUN, a unique sensual film experience immediately becomes a commodity for the market, rather than a political tool to change the world.
We can begin to sense how this generation of soviet filmmakers might approach the matter of editing. They were not seeking to hide the traces of editing, or play up to the needs of continuity and narrative. Instead they were seeking to use editing to highlight the subjective dimension of the filmmaking process in order create a new aesthetics. Kuleschov attributes the first use of editing to Griffith. He adds however that his experiments with the famous actor Mosjoukin mark the beginning of “montage theory”. What he did was to simply juxtapose the same image of Mosjoukin with a plate of soup, with a prison gate, a child's coffin, and what he discovered is that audiences felt that each time they had experienced a different emotion and a different shot of the actor. So in the first case of the plate of soup the audience "read" hunger, in the second example fear, and so on. Kuleschov believed that in the clash of the two images a third term or synthesis was formed in the mind's eye of the spectator. Now known as the "Kuleschov effect", this became the foundation for so much of the new revolutionary cinema of the Russian filmmakers. It is fitting too that Eisenstein and Pudovkin would react to the introduction of sound in film by writing a manifesto in 1928 that adamantly called for a contrapunctal use of this new component. Their fear was that the recorded use of dialogue would push cinema back into a theatrical mode of talking film: "for instead of expressing everything by the specific means of the cinematographic art, people would prefer simply to say!". Music should also work against the image rather than support it. It should reveal its presence and autonomy rather than supporting the central dramatic conflict.
As a technique of editing the "Kuleschov effect" is fascinatingly simple. Its impact however immense. We only have to call up Peckinpah’s GET AWAY to see this technique being re-used in a highly political and emotive fashion. Doc McCoy (Steve McQuin) is shown in prison, being marched to a parole hearing and sitting in his cell. The style of acting is highly economic, reducing all facial gestures to an absolute minimum. And in between the sequences of McCoy in prison we cut to images of deer and sheep grazing or McCoy's wife stroking his hair. The effect is astonishing: prison becomes the site of rationalised incarceration, where males and in particular McCoy are forced to repress their more instinctual or private desires and longings. Anyone who knows this incredible opening sequence cannot fail to remember the sound component of the textile machines slamming out their indomitable beat at a volume level which shatters any sense of it being diegetic sound. It is a contrapunctal sound that collides squarely with our preconceptions of prison being a space of confinement beyond the pale of organised and industrialised society, causing an uneasy synthesis to form in our minds that namely civilian society is a form of imprisonment,
I think a small detour here is appropriate to take of stock of how this absolutely singular moment in history of the Russian Revolution created such a productive space for filmmaking. All of sudden a young generation of artists found themselves confronted with the question of how to create a revolutionary language which could reach out to a nation of over 160 million people who were to a large extent illiterate. Moreover, because of the illiteracy the Russian language had not been standardized, which meant that different regions had their own dialects or vernaculars. To reach out to this heterogeneous population and create a sense of a consolidated revolutionary nation, the Bolsheviks turned to the medium of film. Film did not require literacy and could be reproduced and distributed on a large scale. This technical re-production of film also tied in with a proletarian notion of aesthetics, which looked to leave behind bourgeois notions of the unique masterpiece and its individual artist and find more collective forms of creation, distribution and spectatorship. This led to a central polemic that hinged on the question of what is truly a revolutionary art work. On the one hand there was the notion that any art produced by this newly empowered proletariat must reflect a communist art form, while on the other hand there was the more formalist approach that stated new forms and theoretical approaches were required to capture this radical shift in power. It is does not take much foresight to sense how Stalin would later manipulate and truncate this highly productive debate on aesthetics by establishing a state policy of socialist realism, which turned the proletarian worker and Stalin himself into its main icons to be chiselled into various narrative scenarios devoid of any critical contours. In other words a truly open discussion on art was silenced by state propaganda in the early thirties. Both Vertov and Eisenstein would become entangled in censorship debates in the thirties and would often have to compromise their positions and reedit their films to conform to the party line.
But in the direct aftermath of the revolution and for most of the twenties there was still space for experiment and dialogue between artists and the party. Lenin himself declared that “the cinema is for us the most important of the arts”, and in 1919 the Soviet film industry was nationalised. There is an anecdote that has circulated for a while that Lenin was so impressed with Griffith’s Intolerance that he actually asked him to become head of the Soviet film industry. Whether this is true is debatable. However what is fact is that Intolerance run for over 10 year in Russian cinemas. Lenin also appointed his wife to became head of the Cinema Committee, which founded the very first film school in the world. Kuleschov, who had began experimenting with montage aged 17 became a professor of the school three years later.
Having watched American cinema and Griffith in particular Kuleschov became aware of how montage and the use of close-ups could get emotional and even physical reactions from the audience. The story goes that Kuleschov and his students watched Intolerance by Griffith so many times that the film eventually fell apart. Upon which they began piecing together the film in different montage sequences to see what effect that had. It was only around 1922 that film stock actually became available. It is also worth noting that Kuleschov was, like Griffith, a war correspondent. This seems to have the effect of changing one’s cognitive understanding of space. It is no longer adequate enough to think in terms of the proscenium space of the theatre, which is the wide shot of the theatre stage and its performing actors viewed by the spectator or documented by the camera. The space of the battlefield has two sides that have to be depicted in terms of two forces surveying each other with field glasses, strategising with maps and battle plans and eventually attacking the other. So to understand both sides an audience would need to be moved around, turning their seats in one direction and then the other. As unpleasant as it might sound therefore it is very well possible that one of the origins of shot/reverse shot lies not in the field of art and cinema, but in the bloody scenario of modern warfare.
Kuleschov himself felt that the practice of montage had its antecedents in literature. Accordingly, he stated that writers such as Tolstoy and Pushkin had being using a form of decoupage without even knowing it. Eisenstein also wrote an essay entitled DICKENS, GRIFFITH AND THE FILM TODAY in which he remarked that Griffith had taken the literary devices and conventions of cross-cutting, close shots, flash-backs and simply transposed them into film equivalents. To quote Eisenstein on Griffith: “his close-ups create atmosphere, outline traits of characters, alternate in dialogues of leading characters, and close-ups of the chaser and the chased speed up the tempo of the chase. But Griffith at all times remains on a level of representation and objectivity and nowhere does he try through the juxtaposition of shots to shape import and image”.
This attack on representation and objectivity is perhaps the key to understanding the Russian filmmakers. What they were attacking was mainstream cinema's tendency to try and create "illusory imitativeness" and plot, which together produced a sense of diegetic absorption and "suspension of disbelief". They felt instead that film should be like a fair-ground or circus causing agitation, thrills and pleasures with a series of unrelated spectacles and variety acts, preventing the spectator from simply leaning back and passively enjoying the story. It is also worthwhile understanding that if this still small, but nevertheless bourgeoning group of Russian filmmakers were busy studying and experimenting with film, there was already a very strong and active circle of literary and narrative specialists trying to understand what comprises “literariness”. This meant grappling with such questions as what differentiates a piece of literature from simple text, how do metaphors and tropes work, how are meaning and signs produced in a social context, and what techniques and character functions are needed for archetypal story-telling. This academic circle included such remarkable thinkers as Vladimir Propp, Schlovsky and Bahktin. It was in these circles that the v-effect, or alienation effect (ostranenie) found its first conceptualisation, and which would be re-appropriated as a key dramaturgical tool by Brecht and the radical materialist cineastes of the seventies. Central to this post-68 film movement is of course Jean Luc-Godard and such films as UN BOUT DE SOUFFLE, LE MEPRIS and ALPHAVILLE. Their aesthetic dominant marked by an active attempt to deconceal the filmmaking process by breaking the fourth wall to allow actors to talk directly to the camera or by disrupting the unity of mise en scene by jump cuts or asynchronous sound.
This means that the Russian filmmakers were absolutely not alone in their attempts to draw up a new language of representation and spectatorship. Like the literary specialists they were searching for what could almost be called scientific laws of art. And once the thesis had been reached that “the first and foremost essential of cinematography is montage”, a whole film movement began which used this as its guiding principle. One experiment that Kuleschov avidly led was aimed at disapproving the necessity of having a diegetic space that represents a localised concrete space in reality. He would spend hours editing together objects filmed in one space with images of people looking at the object but filmed in another space. He called these “artificial landscapes” developed through “creative geography”.
Once again the issue arises as to how to make this all relevant for our current generation of young filmmakers, who are also hopefully engaging with the questions of how to create a new film language for our turbulent and transitional times. I use an exercise in my classes, which seem to work well, and which plays with the "Kuleschov effect". I ask the students to map out the value system or ideological terrain of their protagonists. In the case of an emigrant arriving in a new country these values could be: foreigner, non-foreigner, illegal emigrant, legal citizen. I then ask the students to shoot a neutral shot of their protagonist and finds shots of the before mentioned values and edit them together into an “artificial landscape”. That might mean a shot of the emigrant followed by a park where young people are talking and listening to music, followed by the neutral shot and another shot of a police cordon checking cars. We then watch the material and see what effects and emotions these montage sequences induce in us. If they seem appropriate at marking the thematic values of the student’s film they become what I call the provisional montage sketches for the credit sequence at the beginning, the mid part of the film where the story often needs a montage bridge to give the spectator a recapitulation of the film’s problematic, and finally the resolution.
It will come as no surprise then to hear that Eisenstein regularly came to Kuleschov’s studio, which was known as Kuleschov’s workshop, and work and experiment together with his young teacher on mass scenes. Since there was no film to edit these experiments were done on paper. Maybe it is a legacy of these times that the Moscow Film School still requires its students to draw floor plans and shotlists for the first two years before they are allowed to touch a camera. In an interview given in the sixties Kuleschov tenderly described his time with Eisenstein in the following way: Eisenstein got his first lessons in film direction from me. True, he didn't study with me very long - about three months - but Eisenstein himself said that any man can be a director, only one needs to study three years and another three hundred years". He adds modestly: "We had the same method and the same way of perception. Of course Eisenstein was a genius, while I was probably possessed of a certain gift; and what I was able to discover in cinema, Eisenstein's genius developed with an extraordinary power which was able to transform it into something authentically Soviet and revolutionary". What is genius is always a difficult and somewhat idealist notion. What we do know with hindsight is that Kuleschov's experiments led the way to this new approach to filmmaking. One such experiment, which was probably Kuleschov's most elaborate but least known, was his montage of a woman getting ready in front of the mirror. The face, the head, the hair, the hands, the legs, the feet were all of different women, but montaged together they created one woman. It is also worth adding that Kuleschov did make several films. One was entitled the EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF MR WEST IN THE LAND OF THE BOLSCHEWVIKS and become a box office hit in Russia, the other BY THE LAW was written in collaboration with Schlovsky, who belonged to the group of literary specialist mentioned above.
It is pretty evident why these young Russian filmmakers jumped at the driving idea behind the “Kuleschov effect”. It seemed to visually represent and implement the marxist theory of dialectics: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It is no surprise too that this form of montage became known as dialectical montage. To rephrase the theory again one could say the spectators perceive the montage sequence not sequentially but rather simultaneously. This means the signification or meaning of the montaged pieces is greater than its parts. Eisenstein would refine this “effect” even more, seeing each shot as a type of “shock” or explosion in an internal combustion engine that propels the film forward. Images, scenes, sequences and even plots were no longer to be organised in linear fashion but were to be set against each other to produce meaning and ideas. As Eisenstein put it: “The juxtaposition of two shots by splicing them together resembles not so much the simple sum of one shot plus another – as it does creation”. It is almost like two stones being struck against each other to create sparks, or in this case, a collision of aesthetic units causing a cerebral reaction. Or as Eisenstein never tired of putting it: "artistic creation develops from the interaction of contradictory opposites".
These shocks which the audience were meant to feel resonate with the experiments in conditioned reflex carried out during the twenties by the Russian behavioural psychologist Pavlov; the most common known being his experiment with a dog and a bell that was rung to announce the dog’s food was there. Similar to Pavlov Eisenstein was trying to define how stimuli affect an audience and produce cognition. The “unit of measurement” which Eisenstein finally settled upon was the “attraction”. Again it is worthwhile quoting Eisenstein - this time from his notes on theatre: “the attraction is every aggressive moment in theatre, ie. every element of it that brings to light in the spectator those scenes or that psychology that influence his experience – every element that can be verified and mathematically calculated to produce certain emotional shocks”. It is therefore not plot or story or a linear continuum that interests Eisenstein, but rather the collision of attractions sparking ideas in the spectator. And the name Eisenstein gave to this science of combining “attractions” to produce this new aesthetic experience was “montage” – the montage of attraction. Perhaps the most visceral and vivid way of understanding this concept of attraction is to trace its origins back to Eisenstein's love of the fairground attraction, and in particular the rollercoaster. Here we are taken on a pre-set journey that immediately becomes secondary to the numerous aggressive and unexpected moments we are subjected to. We can see this aesthetic device watered down and reused in numerous big blockbusters, where the narrative is often concatenated in such a way that we lose sight of the bigger picture and become immersed in an array of special effects and countless showdowns.
The question for us of course is whether this montage theory is reflected in Eisenstein’s work. If we turn to BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and the scene where the sailors under the tarpaulin are about to be shot, we see an extraordinary editing sequence in which the sailors raising their rifles are framed standing left to right, followed by a cut to the same line aiming right to left, and then to an on-looking sailor bowing his head. The real spatiality of the deck has been discarded by breaking the 180 degree rule, and instead, through the montage of attractions, those key “aggressive” moments of rifles being trained from all sides on the sailors emotionally and metaphorically define the fact that the sailors are utterly powerless. The following shot of a sailor’s head bowing produces the next emotional affect or explosion in the spectator, which is that of a sense of helplessness, pain and shameful defeat. In a different montage sequence, as Kuleschov proved with his experiments with Musjoukin, this image of a sailor bowing his head would produce a completely different meaning.
I remember reading David Mammet's notes on filmmaking and how he anxiously began preparing his first film and how to deal with actors. Having no experience at all with film acting he turned to Eisenstein’s theories for help. He describes how the montage of attraction led him to understand that he could create psychological and emotional moments by editing together oppositions. So for example Mammet wanted to express the fact that a boy is waiting for his teacher: a boy is sitting in a long empty hall, a man approaches and we cut back to the boy who is now standing. Irrespective how well or badly the boy played the scene what has been conveyed is that the boy is waiting. Of course the emotional state of the boy can be accentuated by physical gesture, long or wide lens which either isolates him from the location or join him to his surroundings, and by the casting of the actors. Eisenstein based his casting on typage - type casting - which meant casting actors according to their physiognomy, which he felt always reflected a class status. In this context Hitchcock's blunt remark that actors are little more than cattle which move across the frame becomes less vindictive. For what is being highlighted is that irrespective of whether an actor is en role or not is often secondary to how a sequence is edited or photographed.
This is a small but useful example of how montage creates a signification greater than its parts. If we turn to Pudovkin we find exactly the same theory being used: "In MOTHER I tried to affect the spectators not by the psychological performance of an actor, but by the plastic synthesis through editing. The son sits in prison. Suddenly, passed to him surreptitiously, he receives a note that next day he is to be set free. The problem was the expression, filmically of his joy. The photographing of his face lighting up with joy would have been flat and void of effect. I show, therefore, the nervous play of his hands and the big close-up of the lower half of his face, the corners of his smile. These shots I cut in with other and varied material - shot of brook, swollen with the rapid flow of spring, of the play of sunlight broken on the water and finally a child laughing. By the junction of these components our expression of prisoner's joy takes shape."
If we compare Pudovkin to Eisenstein, then we could say that Pudovkin's techniques were an attempt to heighten the emotional impact of the drama. His tropes and juxtapositions, such as the shot of a brook, were not there to create an intellectual idea, but rather to capture the essence of a dramatic beat. If we turn to Pudovkin's notes from 1926 we find for example the term “contrast”. He writes: "suppose it be our task to tell of the miserable situation of a starving man; the story will impress the more vividly if associated with mention of the senseless gluttony of a well-to-do man."
As for Eisenstein I would say that on paper he seems to be less concerned with the dramatic beat of the psychological moment than with the intellectual power of montage. His theoretical writing on montage as a shock effect – KINO FIST- and the aesthetic implementation of the dialectic seem to reiterate this time and time again. And at one level I would totally agree with this: his goal was to use montage to convey abstract thoughts to his audience and create a new collective protagonist: the proletariat. This means that we could initially summarize Eisenstein by saying he was not interested in creating a diegetic space which located characters in one space and time to enable psychological conflict, and far more interested in representing the clash of classes in the force field of social reality. In order to do this he turned to montage, or what he termed "intellectual or ideological montage" to create a unique cinema language.
However this is only one reading of Eisenstein, which does typecast him as a theoretician or intellectual director. It is always well worth remember that his writing on his own films were often completed after making his films. This means that a substantial part of the theory was interpretation and detracts from Eisenstein’s highly emotional engagement with mise en scene and editing. I personally believe that what Eisenstein introduced to film language was a highly emotionalised dramatic beat, or what he refers to as tonal montage. Lets recap: Eisenstein himself created five categories: metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal and intellectual montage. Metric refers to the length of shots relative to one another, regardless of their content. We only have to remind ourselves of the astonishing scene in OCTOBER where the soldier fires a machine gun at the crowd scattering in the street. Eisenstein is probably editing alternative single frames of the soldier and the crowds to convey the sound of the machine gun firing. Rhythmic is the relationship of the visual content to the length of the shots. The tonal is a more complex register, which embraces the metric length, the rhythm of the objects in the shot and the emotional feel or accent of the piece or sequence. For example in POTEMKIN we have the famous fog scene that has a haze and luminosity about it, acting like a shroud which is then drawn back to allow the mourners to begin descending to the quay and the bier. This tonal sequence has the emotional dominant of the aftermath of death interacting with the gentle motion of the ships and the ripple of the water. Overtonal is a term used for larger sequence that use tonal, rhythmic and metric to create the desired effect on the spectator.
This fog sequence is beautifully shot. It is also ideally positioned, giving the spectator a moment or two to settle back, reflect and prepare for the next sequences. A director who has the same brilliant sense of emotional timing is Jane Campion in THE PIANO. We only have to remind ourselves of that astonishing sequence in which Ada (Holly Hunter) stands on the cliff looking down on her beloved piano, a long lens zooming slowly past her right shoulder onto the piano, small and isolated on the beach with the tide slowly lapping up to it. This contrasts brutally with the last shot of the previous sequence in which the piano is shot from a low angle and full frame so that all we see are its two front legs and lower half. It’s a shot that resonates with Hitchcock's remark that the importance of an object is measured by its size in the frame. Back to the OS zoom that is replaced by a unique long lens travelling shot of Ada standing against what feels like a moody, ominous oil painting of the Dutch school of chiaroscuro which slowly reveals the curves of the hills behind her. Her physical separation from the piano is then given a further devastating accent as we cut to a wide shot of the gently rolling green cliffs and Ada and her daughter looking down into the bay. The piano remains of course off-screen; its absence burning an indelible sense of pain and longing in both the protagonist and spectator. This is tonal montage at its best, highlighting the dominant emotion of loss and separation. It is drawn out further by the next shot of a wide shot of a bird's eye perspective flying gently over the lush green forests. It is breathtaking beauty that successfully rubs and collides and gives stronger profile to the tonal dominant of our pain. It is edited rhythmically through a fade that suggests distance and elapse of time and is abruptly truncated by a wide shot of men's legs treading through a bog-like vegetation, followed by a child's small pair of legs making difficult headway. The shot ends with Ada's skirt fanning out left of frame like a wipe, softening the edit to the next frame of not Holly Hunter, but Harvey Keitel appearing right of frame in what would otherwise be a perfect piece of screen directional editing. All in all this is art direction, dramaturgy, lens selection and editing interwoven to a truly wonderful extent. If we now analyse the editing practice as a separate component we see a very dialectical approach being practised. The thesis of pain and loss is contrasted with the antithesis of boundless beauty resulting in a synthesis of the muddy path which is difficult to navigate, reflecting Ada's inner conflict of relinquishing what she needs most, her piano.
Intellectual montage is something we have discussed in detail and relies heavily on the concept of the juxtaposition of images. Eisenstein himself would often refer to Japanese ideograms or character-writing to clarify the idea in which a new concept is created by putting two separate terms together. “the picture of water and the picture of an eye signifies to weep; the picture of an ear near the drawing of a door = to listen; a dog + a mouth = to bark… 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”. It is however the tonal and overtonal montage that seem to me to have found a firm footing in contemporary film editing and commonly referred to as “elaboration”, or expanded time cutting. It is interesting to note too that many historians attribute this elaborated form of montage to the cubist movement in painting, where the artist attempts to give the painting a plurality of positions for the spectator, and thereby shattering any illusions of there being any one sacred point of view. If we look at POTEMKIN or OCTOBER for that matter there are countless instances where Eisenstein extends a dramatic action or beat by editing in such a way that the moment is prolonged. Two examples: the first is the sailor who washes the plate and reads the inscription on it – “Give us this day our daily bread”. The sailor moves from subordinate contend-ness to anger, smashing the plate on the table. The action of swinging the arm down onto the table two times is intercut with an extreme close up of the sailor’s face. As a result the action is extended temporally and emotionalised. The second example is the scene where the leader of the rebellion, Vakulinchuk, is cornered by an officer and shot in the head. This moment of being shot and toppling from the yardarm into the ropes is extended through a series of shots: we have the officer taking aim and an extreme close up of his face, then a medium close up on the back of the sailor as he is shot in the head, over shoulder from the officer again, then two separate full shots which extend the moment of the sailor toppling down into the ropes, where he hangs as if crucified.
Transposing these two cinematic moments back to their dramaturgical functions we could say that the smashing of the plate has only an indirect effect on narrative events. It represents the still untapped private rage of the sailors who have not yet discovered the strength of the collective. However through its elaboration it becomes a foreshadowing of the collective uprising that ensues in the next act. The killing of Vakulinchuk marks the end of the second act. At a narratival level his death links the sailors and the city of Odessa together. Once again however by elaborating the moment Eisenstein creates an emotional identification with him and the sailors. It is markedly different to Griffith's editing of Lincoln's assassination, which begins full of suspense but then happens in a split second and segues quickly into the audience reactions and the assassin trying to flee. To put it simply: Eisenstein does not rush emotional moments. Or as Von Barna succinctly notes: "Griffith told a story; Eisenstein composed a poem". Nowadays this technique of elaboration can be found almost everywhere: be it Kevin Spacey's first sighting of the blond cheerleader in AMERICA BEAUTY, or the bondman's first glimpses of Jackie Brown after leaving prison on parole, or Nicholas Cage jumping off the oil refiner/prison in FACE OFF.
Dovetailing into this technique of tonal montage is the issue of the close-up. Eisenstein believed Griffith used the close-up for illustrative effect, while his goal was to give it a symbolic edge – “to signify, to give meaning, to designate”. So in both examples I have given the emotional impact is heightened artificially to the point where it could be said that an idea is created. In the case of the sailor smashing the plate the close-up of his face represents the still untapped power of the proletariat and in the second example the close-up of the officer is used to manifest literally and abstractly the cruelty of those in power. All in all Eisenstein’s use of close-up of faces and matching POV is astonishingly sensitive. We have only to recall the officer on the Potemkin turning to watch the swinging tables in the canteen. There is however another type of close-up, which Eisenstein uses, which we might refer to today as a detail shot or cut away. I am thinking of the ship’s surgeon’s pince-nez, which he uses to inspect the rotten meat and the maggots. After the surgeon is thrown overboard, we first see a shot of meat and maggots, then the pince-nez hanging from some ropes. This last shot has the effect of becoming a synecdoche, meaning that it represents in its part a whole, which in turn gives the surgeon himself a metaphorical status – as the title card suggests “he’s gone to feed the fish”- of being rotten meat ridden with maggots.
In all these discussions about Eisenstein what often gets forgotten is the role of Esther Schub. She was very well known editor working in the twenties in Russia for the board of censors. Her job was to eliminate any “unhealthy tendencies” from films before they were released to the general public. Eisenstein regularly visited Esther Schub in her editing room at home and watched while she reedited Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse. She too was greatly influenced by Kuleschov and would edit together arbitrary fragments of film sequences to see what results could be produced. So it seems that Eisenstein probably took his first lessons from Kuleschov in 1923 and then began working with Schub in 1924. He went on to ask her to co-write STRIKE with him, which she did. However for some strange reason when he received the official go ahead for the production Eisenstein dropped Schub from the team.
Perhaps it is time for us to open up the field to some of the oppositional voices of montage theory in order understand what is really at stake. If we take Andre Bazin for example, the French intellectual prominent in the fifties, we find a theorist demanding that cinema should try and recapture something of its essence and plurality of meaning. By this he means that cinema should prioritise the mise en scene and the new techniques of depth of field developed by Tomlin and Welles in order to capture reality, rather than using the very ideological technique of forcing the spectator to see what he or she should see by using montage. For Bazin intellectual montage, and that includes fascist propaganda, rely heavily on a manipulation of reality through editing and disable the spectator from constructing their own meaning. Years later Andrei Tarkowsky attacked Eisenstein by saying that "he makes thought into a despot; it leaves no air, nothing of the elusiveness which is perhaps the most captivating quality of all art". It comes as no surprise either to hear that Andre Bazin criticised the Odessa steps massacre in BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN as a sequence which destroys the "the reality of space" needed to create a relationship between the cinematic image and the real world.
It should also come as no surprise to hear that Eisenstein wanted to adapt Karl Marx's CAPITAL and James Joyce's ULYSSES. Marx's text being an analysis of profit, capital and the relations of production between the classes, and Joyce's being a free flow of associations and images. For how best to visually represent such a revolutionary moment in history then by freely juxtaposing images in a way that ignores the limitations of psychological realism or individual perception. How utterly contemporary this all sounds too. For in our global age we all feel the limitations of psychological realism in defining a reality in which capital can invest in one country overnight and then leave the next without any sign that there is someone or subject controlling these events. And more than ever before we need an intellectual and emotional cinema that can engage with our frantic and fractured times and give us some kind of visualisation and bearings for what can best be termed late capitalism.
