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Film Theory notes - fourth year, second semester...

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LULZZZZ im dead

Beyond the Shot (The Cinematographic Principle and The Ideogram) Pg 13-25 Sergei Eisenstein (1898 - 1948) -

Gained his early film experience on stage, through an acting troupe as a young boy and avant-garde theatre workshops He would stage circus-like plays aimed at captivating a mass audience In 1924, he started working on film, hoping to find an art form capable of a more through going realism

Strike (1924) and Potemkin (1925) used: - expressionistic camera angles - visual metaphors - non professional actors - rapid montage -

Eisenstein emphasized the disjunctive and colliding effect of montage, rather than the narrative and emotional flow His Avant Garde film techniques got him into conflict with the officials in the 1930’s, so he turned to teaching and writing about cinema He published a number of essays outlining the psychological impact of montage and other cinematic techniques. When he returned to Russia after an abortive attempt to make a film in Mexico, he tried to make peace with the government and directed Alexander Nevsky (1938) and The Terrible (1944)

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There is no cinema without cinematography Cinema is: Montage

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Hieroglyphics are an example to explain montage: Each taken separately have completely different meanings than when together with a concept.

“The combination of two ‘representable’ objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.” -

in a condensed and purified form, it is the starting-point for ‘intellectual cinema’

“The formula, the concept, is embellished and developed on the basis of the material, it is transformed into an image, which is the form.”

(Quotes because none of this makes sense to me at all) “Positivist realism is by no means the correct form of perception. It is simply a function of a particular form of social structure, following on from an autocratic state that has propagated a state uniformity of thought.” “The shot. A tiny rectangle with some fragment of an event organised within it. Glued together, these shots form montage. (Of course, if this is done in the appropriate rhythm!) That, roughly, is the teaching of the old school of film-making.” -

The shot is an element of montage. Montage is the assembling of these elements.

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The shot is by no means a montage element. The shot is a montage cell. Beyond the dialectical jump in the single series: shot— montage.

“So, montage is conflict. Conflict lies at the basis of every art. (A unique ‘figurative’ transformation of the dialectic.) The shot is then a montage cell. Consequently we must also examine it from the point of view of conflict. Conflict within the shot is: potential montage that, in its growing intensity, breaks through its four-sided cage and pushes its conflict out into montage impulses between the montage fragments;” “the conflict between an object and its spatial nature and the conflict between an event and its temporal nature.” “optical conflicts: the conflict between the frame of the shot and the object. The position of the cinema represents the materialisation of the conflict between the organising logic of the director and the inert logic of the phenomenon in collision, producing the dialectic of the camera angle.”

THE DRAMATURGY OF FILM FORM 24-40 ● ● ● ●

The projection of the same system of objects—in concrete creation—in form—produces ART. The basis of this philosophy is the dynamic conception of objects: being as a constant evolution from the interaction between two contradictory opposites. In the realm of art this dialectical principle of the dynamic is embodied in CONFLICT as the essential basic principle of the existence of every work of art and every form. FOR ART IS ALWAYS CONFLICT: ○ 1. because of its social mission.

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it is the task of art to reveal the contradictions of being. To forge the correct intellectual concept, to form the right view by sitting up contradictions in the observer’s mind and through the dynamic clash of opposing passions. ○ 2. because of its nature ■ because of its nature it consists in the conflict between natural being and creative tendentiousness. Between organic inertia and purposeful initiative. ○ 3. because of its methodology ■ shot and montage are the basic elements of film Because: the limit of organic form (the passive principle of being) is NATURE. The limit of rational form (the active principle of production) is INDUSTRY and: at the intersection of nature and industry stands ART. ○ Because: the limit of organic form (the passive principle of being) is NATURE. The limit of rational form (the active principle of production) is INDUSTRY and: at the intersection of nature and industry stands ART. The basis of distance determines the intensity of the tension: (viz., for instance, in music the concept of intervals. In it there can be cases where the gap is so wide that it can lead to a break, to a disintegration of the homogeneous concept of art. The ‘inaudibility’ of certain intervals.) The spatial form of this dynamic is the expression of the phases in its tension— rhythm. This applies to every art form and, all the more so, to every form of its expression. Thus human expression is a conflict between conditioned and unconditioned reflex. Thus, for instance, logical thought, viewed as art, also produces the same dynamic mechanism: ‘The intellectual lives of Plato or Dante . . . were largely guided and sustained by their delight in the sheer beauty of the rhythmic relation between law and instance, species and individual, or cause and effect.’

Potemkin ● “Representation of a spontaneous action. Woman with pince-nez. Followed immediately —without a transition—by the same woman with shattered pince-nez and bleeding eye. Sensation of a shot hitting the eye” ● Ten shots from the montage sequence on the “Odessa Steps” from Potemkin (1925). “The gradual succession continues in a process of comparing each new image with its common designation and unleashes a process that, in terms of its form, is identical to a process of logical deduction” (EISENSTEIN, p. 40). “The creation of a sense or meaning not proper to the images themselves but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition” (BAZIN, p. 44).

Montage ● Soviet film has stipulated this as the nerve of film ● Lev Kuleshov, regarded montage as a means of producing something by describing it, adding individual shots to one another like building blocks.

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Movement within these shots and the resulting length of the pieces were thus to be regarded as rhythm According to this definition (which Pudovkin also shares as a theorist) montage is the means of unrolling an idea through single shots (the “epic” principle). But in my view montage is not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another (the ‘dramatic’ principle). (‘Epic’ and ‘dramatic’ in relation to the methodology of form and not content or plot!!) As in Japanese hieroglyphics in which two independent ideographic characters (‘shots’) are juxtaposed and explode into a concept. We know that the phenomenon of movement in film resides in the fact that still pictures of a moved body blend into movement when they are shown in quick succession one after the other. ○ The vulgar description of what happens—as a blending—has also led to the vulgar notion of montage mentioned above. ○ Let us describe the course of the said phenomenon more precisely, just as it really is, and draw our conclusions accordingly. In this instance, in the case of stereoscopy, the superimposition of two nonidentical twodimensionalities gives rise to stereoscopic three-dimensionality. In another field: concrete word (denotation) set against concrete word produces abstract concept. As in Japanese (see above), in which material ideogram set against material ideogram produces transcendental result (concept). What does the dynamic effect of a picture consist of? ○ The eye follows the direction of an element. It retains a visual impression which then collides with the impression derived from following the direction of a second element. ○ The conflict between these directions creates the dynamic effect in the apprehension of the whole A logical development of position A for the foot leads to the elaboration of a corresponding position A for the body. ○ But from the knee up the body is already represented in position A a. The cinematic effect of the still picture is already visible here: from hips to shoulders we already have A a a. The figure seems alive and kicking! Finally, colour. A colour shade conveys a particular rhythm of vibration to our vision. ○ (This is not perceived visually, but purely physiologically, because colours 28 FILM LANGUAGE are distinguished from one another by the frequency of their light vibrations.) The nearest shade has a different frequency of vibration. From here we have only to make one step from visual vibration to acoustic vibration and we find ourselves in the field of music. We move from the realm of the spatial-pictorial to the realm of the temporal-pictorial

Visual Counterpoint ● The shot is not a montage element—the shot is a montage cell (a molecule). This formulation explodes the dualistic division in the analysis:

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of: title and shot and: shot and montage. Instead it is viewed dialectically as three different phases in the formation of a homogeneous expressive task. With homogeneous characteristics that determine the homogeneity of their structural laws. ○ The relationship between the three: conflict within a thesis (an abstract idea): ■ 1. is formulated in the dialectic of the title, ■ 2. is formed spatially in the conflict within the shot—and ■ 3. explodes with the growing intensity of the conflict montage between the shots. Herein lies the basis for a quite new conception of the problems of film form. We cite as examples of conflict: ○ 1. Graphic conflict ○ 2. Conflict between planes ○ 3. Conflict between volumes ○ 4. Spatial conflict ○ 5. Conflict in lighting. ○ 6. Conflict in tempo, etc., etc ○ 7. Conflict between matter and shot (achieved by spatial distortion using camera angle). ○ 8. Conflict between matter and its spatiality (achieved by optical distortion using the lens). ○ 9. Conflict between an event and its temporality (achieved by slowing down and speeding up [Multiplikator]) and lastly: ○ 10. Conflict between the entire optical complex and a quite different sphere For montage transition it is sufficient to imagine any example as being divided into two independent primary pieces

Film Syntax | A Tentative Film Syntax ● Each moving piece of montage in its own right. Each photographed piece. ○ The technical determination of the phenomenon of movement. Not yet composition (a man running, a gun firing, water splashing). II. Artificially produced representation of movement. The basic optical sign is used for arbitrary composition: ● Shot A and Shot B are, in terms of material, not identical. The associations of the two shots are identical: associatively identical. By analogy this dynamisation of the material produces, not in the spatial but in the psychological, i.e. the emotional, field ● FILM EXAMPLES IN TEXT BOOK TO EXPLAIN DIFFERENT IDEAS (his films)...