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12: The Music of Landscape: Eisenstein, Prokofiev, and the Uses of Music in Ivan the Terrible
- Indiana University Press
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12 The Music of Landscape Eisenstein, Prokofiev, and the Uses of Music in Ivan the Terrible Joan Neuberger Sergei Eisenstein wrote repeatedly about sound and music in cinema, from his contribution to the collective “Statement on Sound,” co-authored with Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov in 1928, through his discussion of audiovisual cinema and “vertical montage” in the montage essays of 1938 to 1940, to his late-1940s articles on Sergei Prokofiev, and color and sound.1 Each of these built on the earlier work and confirmed his original commitment to sound as an active element in film art rather than a naturalistic underpinning for realism or affect. From his initial insistence on sound “as a new element of montage,” Eisenstein developed increasingly complex multimedia, multisensory ideas about the ways sound contributed to producing meaning and experience for film viewers. In this regard, it is surprising that more attention has not been paid to his eponymous chapter in Nonindifferent Nature, subtitled “The Music of Landscape and the Fate of Montage Counterpoint at a New Stage.”2 In that chapter, music is less a subject for analysis than it is the reigning metaphor for his current understanding of the structures of artistic composition. Written in 1944 and 1945, while editing part 1 of Ivan Groznyi (Ivan the Terrible, part 1, 1944; part 2, 1958] and finishing part 2, Eisenstein developed his earlier thoughts on montage and the “montage image,” incorporating many of the insights he gained through work on the film.3 The subject matter expanded far beyond the role of film sound and montage counterpoint, however, to explore the structures of artistic composition that make it possible to communicate thought and feeling in art and elicit responses from the audience. In short, Eisenstein argued that for a work of art to achieve universality and immortality, its composition must, first of all, correspond to our physical and psychological structures of feeling and cognition.4 The artist must be able to break down a subject or idea into constitutive parts that are resonant with one another in multiple ways that then allow the viewer to reconstitute the parts into a new, higher, unified emotional and intellectual The Music of Landscape | 213 experience. That synthetic unity, which he called the “montage image,” contained an abstract understanding of the subject at hand that derives from the process of joining disparate elements: Montage counterpoint as a form seems to correspond to that fascinating stage of the evolution of consciousness, when both preceding stages have been overcome, and the universe, dissected by analyses, is recreated once again into a single whole, revives by means of connections and interactions of separate parts, and appears as an excited perception of the fullness of the world perceived synthetically.5 Eisenstein found this “principle of unity in variety” in nature, in Chinese landscape painting, in select scenes from Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), and in Ivan the Terrible, to name a few of the main examples he analyzes in this chapter. The processes of fragmentation and subsequent reconstruction into a higher unity grew out of Eisenstein’s earlier ideas and practices, but he also found examples of such thinking about the abstract and the concrete in a typically diverse range of sources, from the painter Juan Gris to Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Alfred Hitchcock.6 In Nonindifferent Nature, unity in variety is first of all discussed in emotional-cognitive terms. For example, Ivan the Terrible differs from previous films in that it represents a “knitting together into a more compact fabric” that does not revert to pre-montage cinema but rather develops montage from the mere juxtaposition of shots to what he calls “perceptible montage,” or the accumulation of various kinds of sense responses into multifaceted, audiovisual images.7 He sometimes calls this process of perception “synaesthesia,” which he defines here as “the ability to gather into one, all the variety of feeling brought from different areas by different organs of sensation.”8 What makes it possible to gather all this diverse material into one unified work is a structure of underlying emotional resonances: [M]ainly, it is necessary that everything, beginning from the actor’s performance and ending with the play of the folds of his clothes, be equally immersed in the sound of that single, increasingly defined emotion that lies at the basis of the polyphony of a whole multifaceted composition.9 The key phrase here is the “sound of . . . emotion,” a more traditional use of...