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THE DOCUMENTARY FILM OF IDEAS
The brief analyses of sequences from Eisenstein's October in the first chapter give a clue to the way a silent film director set about the task of expressing ideas in the film medium. Although Eisenstein's silent films all had a rudimentary story to tell, it was the speculations arising out of the plots which seem to have interested him most and which remain the films' most notable feature. Eisenstein repeatedly allowed himself (in October and Old and New) screen time for, as it were, intellectual cadenzas for which he had to evolve his own system of film montage. He assembled series of physically unconnected images and linked them according to their intellectual content : he built sequences not so much about an event or a piece of action as about an idea. One of the difficulties of this approach, as we have already seen, was that the intellectual passages were undramatic and were therefore not easily assimilated into a film narrative.
Eisenstein himself was aware that the montage of ideas was a difficult and in many ways inadequate method of expression. He wrote in 1928 : " The tasks of theme and story grow more complicated every day ; attempts to solve these by methods of ' visual ' montage alone either lead to unresolved problems or force the director to resort to fanciful montage structures, arousing the fearsome eventuality of meaninglessness and reactionary decadence."1 As a result, he welcomed the advent of sound, claiming that, used contrapuntally — " treated as a new montage element (as a factor divorced from the visual image) " — sound would enrich the expressiveness of his montage methods. Unfortunately, the change of policy in the Russian film industry which was initiated in the early 'thirties and the fact that Eisenstein was never allowed
1 Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein. Dobson, 195 J, p. 257. The quotation is from " A Statement,"" written in August, 1928, and signed by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov.
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