He offers that his newest film, Old and New, was assembled differently such that each image was given equal weight, no one image was dominant, which created a “complex” “summary” effect similar to over and undertones in symphonic music (66). “The Filmic Fourth Dimension” – Eisenstein expands upon the previous essays by writing about the “orthodox” montage style, which uses a key image, usually early in the montage sequence, to guide the way audiences think about the other images present in the montage. He writes that one image invites the next because of its composition, and that when done correctly, the collision of those images can be used not only to direct emotion, as happens in many films, but also to direct thought processes (more on this later). “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” – Here Eisenstein builds upon the collision idea he developed in the previous essay to write about how montage comes from untangling the inherent conflict in a single image. There is conflict in Eisenstein’s conception that is absent in Kuleshov’s. This is in direct opposition to Kuleshov, who likens montage to links in a chain or bricks arranged to make a building.
It is this which allows for the creator’s imposition upon the events of a film, and it is that process which he refers to as a collision which is like the explosions that drive an internal combustion engine.
“The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram” – the second of the Japanese-related essays looks at how the “hieroglyphs” of Japanese writing does what montage does by combining two image-based expressions to create a wholly new expression. This is the start of his later ideas about the evolutions of montage into an organic mechanism. This first looks at kabuki theater for its “monistic ensemble,” or how each element (sound, costume, action, etc.) is interrelated. “The Unexpected” – the first of two essays looking at Japanese forms for their relation to the cinema. Here Eisenstein claims that the shot is the “minimum ‘distortable’ fragment of nature” and that the cinema derives its power from its “natural” ability to capture reality and re-present it differently via montage. “Through Theater to the Cinema” – your standard early film theory trope of distinguishing the form from other related forms. As the book is more a collection of essays, I’ll hit the highlights of those instead of trying to pull them all together here, likely missing something in the process.
He also has a clear bias towards the Soviet cinema for its ideological and formal superiority. Occasionally Eisenstein dips into uncomfortable territory, especially as he writes about the Japanese cinema and, in a somewhat strange digression, Alexandre Dumas, with an unfortunate tendency to dip into cultural and racial stereotypes. Primarily, Eisenstein affirms the value of montage (as a way of presenting inner thought via the collision of images) in opening the possibilities inherent in cinema (as opposed to other artistic media) for promoting the collectivity and solidarity of socialism. Sergei Eisenstein writes (though several of these were transcripts of speeches, too) as a filmmaker and theorist who is deeply invested in the ideological implications of the film form that he writes about. Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?
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