"The Film Sense", Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a Soviet filmmaker and film theorist. Known for his writings and practice of montage applied on his films, his filmic work shows an artist with total dominion of the plastic aspect of the cinema, causing a singular psychological effect through the collision of shots with carefully thought-out compositions. For the aesthetic avant-gardism of his works and contribution to the cinematographic technique, he is now regarded as one of the highest exponents in the history of cinema. He was a lover of Kabuki theater and classic literature, who influenced his way of thinking about films.

A student of architecture, he joined the Bolshevik revolution, collaborating as a painter, decorator and director in the Proletcult Theatre (1920-1924), the aesthetic instrument of the new regime. Then he made the highly acclaimed Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), whose unusual camera angles and dynamic use of cinematography and montage made them much more than political propaganda. He undertook a trip to the United States, where he never made a complete film. He was not allowed to direct an adaptation of An American Tragedy reflecting on American social relations and how they can lead to crime, and he left unfinished ¡Que viva México! (1930), whose production was abandoned and suffered commercial modifications. In 1938 he returned to filmic activity in Soviet Union with Alexander Nevsky (1938). He ended his cinematographic career with two parts of an unfinished trilogy about Ivan, the Terrible (1944), until he died in 1948 of a heart attack.

The Film Sense, published in 1942, is the first of his books that assemble his essays on film editing, where he states the effect he tried to achieve in certain scenes of his films, and through what means. Among many essential thoughts on general art, Eisenstein is capable of finding cinematic aspects in poetry and painting.

Excerpts:

"The basic fact was true, and remains true to this day, that the juxtapositibn of two separate shots by splicing them together resembles not so much a simple sum of one shot plus another shot-as it does a creation."

"But poetry also provides us with another outline, which has a powerful advocate in Mayakovsky. In his 'chopped line' the articulation is carried through not to accord with the limits of the line, but with the limits of the 'shot.'

Mayakovsky does not work in lines:

Emptiness. Wing aloft,

Into the stars carving your way.

He works in shots:

Emptiness.

Wing aloft,

Into the stars carving your way.·

Here Mayakovsky cuts his line just as an experienced film editor would in constructing a typical sequence of 'impact'.

"We are not afraid to use close-ups in films: to portray a man as he sometimes seems to us, out of natural proportions, suddenly fifty centimeters away from us; We are not afraid to use metaphors, that leap from the lines of a poem, or to allow the piercing sound of a trombone to swoop out of the orchestra, aggressively."

Link to the complete book in PDF:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cZpWrfHsj-X2diT7XKMfptpSlgOHF7uI/view?usp=sharing

Sergei Eisenstein