Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century

6. Eisenstein, Constructivism, and the Dialectic

EISENSTEIN, CONSTRUCTIVISM AND THE DIALECTIC , 279 6 T hat, then, is a capsule description of the theory of dialectical materialism —it describes, in a particularly rich fashion, the relations among technology, history, social formations, and ideology. The Constructivists treated dialectical materialism, a theory of history, as though it were mainly a prescription for aesthetic materialism—that is, for the view that the nature of an art medium determines which forms are appropriate to that medium. This was a major confusion—so, though we cannot treat the topic as fully as its importance deserves, we must consider how the Constructivists understood Marx’s philosophy at some greater length. The Marxist theory of the dialectic was a key source of Constructivist artistic theory —at least, it was among the sources they admitted to (for, as we shall soon see, some sources for their art they did not admit). Recognizing the role that the idea of the dialectic played in Eisenstein’s theories (and in his filmmaking) has enormous methodological importance. Any critique of Constructivist cinema must confront the fact that any acquaintance with Eisenstein’s films suggests that his artistic career fell into two sharply contrasting periods. The first was the period of the “mass dramas” of the 1920s, which are so specifically cinematic and which rely on a diachronic conception of montage (i.e., on the belief that the conflict between successive units provides a jolt—which Eisenstein initially referred to an “attraction”— to the viewer’s mental faculties). The second was the period of grandiloquent Eisenstein, Constructivism, and the Dialectic 280 MODERNISM AND REVOLUTION dramas that focused on an individual and that relied on a synchronic and polymorphic idea of montage. These films were dramas whose increasingly operatic character reflected Eisenstein’s developing interest in the Gesammtkunstwerk . A homologous division appears in Eisenstein’s theory: the theoretical works of the first period culminated, apparently, in the notion of intellectual montage; those of the second period encapsulated the ideas of vertical montage and monistic ensemble. In 1975, David Bordwell provided what is still the most cogent explanation of the changes in Eisenstein’s artistic style and of the profound changes of belief that produced them. In“Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift”he accepted the common view that Eisenstein’s films underwent a marked change; he also presented an uncommonly well-defined criterion for discriminating between the two periods. Bordwell claimed that the earlier films and writings subscribed to a dialectical model resting on ideas drawn from reflexology whereas the later films and writings depended on an associationist psychology and replaced the idea of the dialectic with that of organic unity.1 In his later book, The Cinema of Eisenstein, Bordwell repudiated the view he offered in that earlier article, insisting instead on the fundamental continuity of Eisenstein’s oeuvre , both theoretical and practical. Yet the evidence of change in Eisenstein’s film theory and in his filmmaking is just too striking to dismiss—which argues that Bordwell’s earlier view was the more nearly correct. An adequate understanding of Eisenstein’s oeuvre must keep in view the difference between the early and later films, and the early and later theoretical writings, even while delineating the conceptual ligatures that bind together the different elements of his output as a whole. To trace the evolution of Eisenstein ’s thought and to identify the changes it underwent, we must identify the fundamental principles that drove his work, both theoretical and practical— for it is the evolution of those principles that accounts for the profound differences between Stachka (The Strike), Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin) and Oktyabr (October) on the one hand and Aleksandr Nevski (Alexander Nevsky) and Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) on the other. THE FACT NATURE AND ITS TRANSFORMATION A problematic question that Eisenstein’s theory of cinema addressed, from its origin to its conclusion, was this: How can a graphic sign (or, in his later work, an iconic sound) that, owing to its resemblance to its referent, possesses a natural , direct, and immediate signification, be transformed into a sign that possesses conventional signification and thus be made open to the possibilities of narrative and drama? The importance of this question is such that it is still the fundamental problem of film semiotics.Yet among film semioticians, only the EstonianYuri Lotman made it central to his semiotic theory. Eisenstein did recognize the crucial importance of...