Sergei Eisenstien

(1898 - 1948)

The son of an affluent architect, Eisenstein attended the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd as a young man. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, he worked as an engineer for the Red Army. In the following years, Eisenstein joined up with the Moscow Proletkult Theater as a set designer and then director. The Proletkult's director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, became a big influence on Eisenstein, introducing him to the concept of biomechanics, or conditioned spontaneity. Eisenstein furthered Meyerhold's theory with his own "montage of attractions"--a sequence of pictures whose total emotional effect is greater than the sum of

its parts. He later theorized that this style of editing worked in a similar fashion to Marx's dialectic. Though Eisenstein wanted to make films for the common man, his intense use of symbolism and metaphor in what he called "intellectual montage" sometimes lost his audience. Though he made only seven films in his career, he and his theoretical writings demonstrated how

film could move beyond its nineteenth-century predecessor--Victorian theater -- to create abstract concepts with concrete images..I'[Montage] Considered the father of the cinematic montage, he often used heavily edited sequences for emotional impact and historical propaganda (his most famous being the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (1925).

MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS

Considered that while shot and montage are the basic elements of cinema, art must always be in conflict, according to its methodology.
Argued that montage, as a specific form of editing, was the essence of cinema.
Believed that montage had the ability to create ideas that extended beyond the meaning and power of individual (constituent) images.
Theorized that the "collision" of film shots could be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience and create film metaphors.
He believed that an idea should be derived from the juxtaposition of two independent shots, bringing an element of collage into film.
Eisenstein's five "Methods of Montage:"

(1.) Metric

(2.) Rhythmic

(3.) Tonal

(4.) Overtonal

(5.) Intellectual

RELATED STUDY NOTES

Poststructuralism -- an extension and critique of structuralism, especially as used in critical textual analysis. Contends that knowledge can be centered on the beholder (spectator)
Ideology -- a system of ideas and ideals, especially one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
Soviet montage theory -- an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing