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The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram

Eisenstein

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Introduction

  • Cinematographic traits of Japanese culture that lie outside Japanese cinema
  • Cinematography is, first and foremost, montage
  • Japanese cinema unaware of montage
    • However, the principle of montage can be identified as the basic element of Japanese representational culture
  • Representational writing - hieroglyph
  • The combination of hieroglyphs creates a new concept - they are not regarded as their sum
    • Each is separate image unto itself, its own object, but their combination corresponds to a new concept
    • Thus - the ideogram
    • Combination of two depictables is able to represent something that is graphically undepictable
  • This is montage! (Kuleshov)

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Montage

  • Haikus as montage phrases - shot lists
  • Psychological
  • Emotional quality
  • System of characters (denotative) or independent creation of graphics (depictive)?
    • Dual mating of depictive by method and denotative by purpose
  • Disproportion exists in Japanese masks, in film editing, child drawings, etc.
    • Not interested in absolute realism…
  • “The shot is by no means an element of montage. The shot is a montage cell”
    • Microorganism in an embryo
    • Conflict, Collision of two given factors arises a concept
    • Not brick by brick, wall by wall
    • Linkage is merely a possible special case, most collisions are not so!
  • Series of montages = series of explosions of an internal combustion vehicle driving it forward

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Conflicts

  • Conflicts in the frame
    • Scales, volumes, masses, depths, event and duration, darkness and lightness, etc
  • Conflicts of acoustics and optics
  • Frame of the shot and the object
    • Organizing logic of the director and the inert logic of the object in collision - dialectic of the camera angle
  • We don’t distinguish between shot-content and montage
    • It’s all in collision and conflict with each other
  • Japanese and slow tempo

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Conclusion

  • For Eisenstein, “brick” (Kuleshov & Pudovkin) mentality (continuity) doesn’t produce good art; the world’s all too familiar (you need defamiliarization!)
  • Do not predigest the world for the audiences
  • Exert control over the world through montage (breaking it into components)
  • Shock the audiences through real raw emotional stuff (montage of attractions)
  • Control the way audiences feel/ react to the movie
  • Transformative/explosive happens when you put images in conflict
  • Dialectics: thesis + antithesis = synthesis (thesis for another argument and so on…)
    • Process based on opposition / tension / conflict
    • Juxtaposition from which the audiences have to make the connection / link / meaning

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Clips