The Cine Technician (1943 - 1945)

118 THE CINE-TECHKICIAX September— October, L943 NEW BOOKS REVIEWED The Film Sense, by S. M. Eisenstein. Edited and principally translated bv Jay Leyda. Faber & Faber. 10/6d. Any theoretical writing by Eisenstein is a veritable parade of erudition, as scintillating as the Disney reflection of a peacock's tail in the water, which he cites on Page 117. Russian, English, French, German and Spanish are at his tongue-tip. The literatures of these and other languages, the histories of Asiatic and primitive peoples, a score of sciences — all these are levied to illustrate his points. All this tends rather to put off the ordinary film man. There is among practical film-workers outside U.S.S.R. almost an anti-cultural and antihumanistic tradition. Essentially decadent, it seems to regard interest in any technical field besides machinery (or maybe chemistry and physics) as in some sense unmanly. It has something akin with fascism or, more exactly speaking, with that morass of the mind that forms the humus in which fascist ideas spread their mycelium. Highly abominable, but there it is. There are many readers who, having reached, if they get as far, Page 52, to find Eisenstein quoting large tracts of Milton and explaining that he does so because he doubts " whether many of my British or American colleagues are in the habit of dipping often into Paradise host, although there is much in it that is very instructive for the film-maker," will discard this book with the exclamation: " What the hell, anyway! Eisenstein's theoretical contribution is in the realm of aesthetics. There *is probably no living man who has written so profoundly, so originally and so instructively in this field, relating the separate methodologies of the separate arts, synthesizing a general " art " methodology on the basis of common and parallel experiences of means and effect among each of them. There will always be a rea< bionarj school which will reject altogether the necessity for aesthetics. in. M innovations and achievements may, it is true, he attained quite unconsciously. Wl.it did 1>. W. Griffith and de Mille. to nan nl\ two supreme masters of cinematic effect, know awarely of the methodology they employed? Thus mankind in prescientific days achieved miracles of plant and animal breeding, br< ad bearing wheal and rnilk-yielding cows, accumulating lore and habil bul wuthoul reallj any .communicable understanding of what had been done, or iio\.\ it came to p.iss. But the cur) n! o| advance oi man lies in Eis mastery over nature by conscious knowledge, by communicable science, and Eisenstein's contribution to this advance by his analyses, based on Marxist understanding of methodology and nature, is prodigious. All film people must take pride in the fact that it is on the basis of experience in film creation that this contribution to general aesthetic theory has been made possible. But from what I have said it will already appear that, beneficial from the general cultural standpoint as a study of this book must be to all, it would be a misunderstanding to suppose that even its complete absorption is necessarily directly helpful in their professional work to all engaged in cinema under Western conditions. The complex of cultural ideas that forms its background is general cultural possession, through the scientific aesthetic, and philosophic curriculum in the Soviet State Cinema College, of most Soviet film men. But, alas, to how many impresarios, manag< rs accountants and the rest in our Western world are they utterly incommunicable, and therefore of not \er\ practical use here for explanation and defence of our creative notions in production. With all this very necessii;\ Eon go ng warning and definition, let me now praise this volume in the highest terms. It is not that general monograph on the cinema and production methods that we are entitled to expect one day from Eisenstein, but which he has as yet never got down to writing. It is a group of four essays, all of importance. though varying in their significance for film men. Outstanding is the first — Word and I»ia<^c — in which, the conception of montage is analysed and conclusively established, not as a mere snipping with the scissors in the cutting room, but as a method o! artistic expression, expressive in all the arts, if not the most essential of all availab art. and deriving its powei Erom parallelism the mode of apprehension fchroug I senses nature, .No thoughtful creative film worker can fail to be stimulated l>\ it. The second and third are essays showing the existence ol a correspondence and inter-influence between the var senses, and the hollowness of claims for abso significance for particular colours, the choice of colour Eor significance being properh dictated by t ho ci mtent oi the associaH tons ■ particular context and not by any arbitrary and constant absolute. Tb-ese two are pi cial film in terest, althouj i their general relation to the filn makers' task air obvious Finally, the tour a minute •■ \aiuiuat ion of the composition