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Vol. X. No. 2 June, 1933
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
S. M. ElSENSTEIN.
(Note. — This is the conclusion of Eisenstein's article on work in the GIK — the Moscow State Institute of Cinema. The first instalment appeared in the December Close Up, having arrived after the issue had gone to press, but so great was the enthusiasm it created, decision was made to include it as a sort of seasonal message of good-will !
The second part appeared in the March issue, and now this — incentive which might well promote enthusiasm to utility — to the final expulsion of drivel from our screens ! Well might ! It rests with you who read it. Uphill work ! — Ed.)
The most interesting part of our work — it is the most important part of creative production — is the instruction of the students in the " treatment of a subject and the analysis of the procedure connected therewith.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, it is only one step.
From the sublime, basic idea, expressed in a motto, to the living production, it is two hundred steps.
And if we only take one step, we get the ludicrous results of facile trash.
The student must learn to make three-dimensional, rounded productions, starting from the flat, two-dimensional patterns; from the motto to the subject without a break.
A practical problem in connexion with the analysis of a work for the purpose of serious ideological montage once confronted the writer in connexion with his own work, though under somewhat unusual social conditions.
This was at Hollywood.
Among the " Paramount " people.
And it was in connexion with the treatment and production of a work of high quality.
Even if not devoid of ideological defects and not altogether in harmony with our own sociological standpoint, Theodore Dreiser's " American Tragedy " is a first-class work. It is even a work which has every chance of being numbered among the classics of its age and country.
The fact that this material would inevitably furnish occasion for collision between two irreconcilable points of view — that of the film bosses and our own — became apparent the moment the first draft of the libretto was delivered.
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