The cinema as a graphic art : on a theory of representation in the cinema (1959)

Acceptance My dear Volodya, I am eager to accept the dedication to me of your book, for it is a pleasure to recognise that the methods of approach to the artistic problems of film creation used at the director's faculty of G.I.K.,1 of which I have been in charge for the last five years, have now extended also to the faculty of camera-men. I appreciate your effort to make the first steps towards clarification of the specific problems in the work of the camera-man considered as problems of art — that light, indeed, in which they should be faced and considered. In this way you are successfully profiting from the great experience you gained during your work as second to so great a master as Eduard Tisse on my productions " October " and " The General Line ", and also from your own successes as first camera-man during the last two years. This experience, together with the serious and scientific approach we have introduced and are trying to cultivate in our Film University — the first in the world — is what renders your book of real value and interest to everyone concerned with the work of the camera-man as an artist. Regarding him — the * man who turns the handle ' — as such is the only fair, right and useful way of looking at him. This attitude characterises your book, and is due to that principle of artistic collectivism, or ' team-work ', which is so typical of our Soviet methods of creation and contrasts so strongly with the individualist approach to art typical of the bourgeois conception. To this principle of creative collaboration we owe the most brilliant successes in the history of our Soviet cinema. I wish the book every success. S. M. Eisenstein. 1 G.I.K. — the State Institute of Cinematography. — Ed.