Amos Vogel, en Film as a Subversive Art, Random House, New York, 1974. Adaptación web *. Disponible aquí (emule). escribió:The revolutionary film avant-garde in soviet RussiaThe genius of Soviet cinema was Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein. Filmmaker, teacher and theoretician, his writings on film constitute brilliant syntheses of philosophy and aesthetics amidst a morass of mediocrity. Member of a minority nationality (a Jew born in Riga), cosmopolitan by nature and a man of wide culture, this complex internationalist proved too sophisticated and perverse for the earthy conservatism of Stalin. His life therefore reads like a tragic caricature of the successful, frustrated, eternally haunted artist. Though he left us
Strike (1925),
Battleship Potemkin (1925),
October (1927),
The Old Man and The New (1929),
Alexander Nevsky (1938) and
Ivan the Terrible (1944-46).
Eisenstein's life was an unbroken series of abandoned projects. His films were shelved by official fiat; they were banned, mutilated, or worse, self-censored. His was a life of powerful and uncertain official position, of compromise and emasculation, of abject selfcriticism and isolation within triumph. Eisenstein is the archetypal tragic artist who cannot "fit" into any establishment; his ill-fated ventures in the USA (Dreiser's unfilmed
An American Tragedy) and in Mexico (with Upton Sinclair) testify to his inability to co-exist with capitalism as well. In the end, emasculated by the bureaucrats in the East and the financiers in the West, one of the few authentic geniuses of cinema died in embitterment and impotence.
Strike, his ill-fated first film -- a veritable compendium of experimental cinema -- is not even supposed to exist. Attacked in Russia and renounced in later years by Eisenstein himself, banned in several countries, not shown in others, it was officially declared "lost" under Stalin and "rediscovered" in the Soviet archives only after his death. A major work, it prefigured in embryonic form the major tenets of Eisenstein's aesthetic. As such it is indispensable for understanding film as a subversive art.
Expressionism, Commedia dell'Arte, a love of the bizarre, and a strong feeling for visuals and compositions converge in this extraordinary shot of Lumpenprotelarians emerging from their "homes" to become police provocateurs against the striking workers.Editing as the essence of film artThe essence of film art for Eisenstein lies in the creation of a new psychological reality by means of creative editing (montage). Increasingly dissatisfied with the too limited (because static) realism of theatre. Eisenstein had made a final abortive attempt to force immediacy by staging the play
Gasmasks inside a factory. He then turned to cinema under the slogan: "Away from Realism -- to Reality!" A profound, possessed adherent of visual culture, he firmly placed the image at the center of his filmic ideology, but only as it existed in relation to subsequent or preceding shots; cinema was seen as an art of conflicts between images. A technical process (the ordering of strips of film into logical, narrative sequence) was thus transformed into an aesthetic act. The cinema became an art of the laboratory, not of the act of shooting: events, seen in real life as a continuous, integrated flux of objects in motion, were "cut" by the director-editor into discrete segments (mere snatches of reality), then dynamically joined in combinations designed to create a new reality.
In a not entirely tenable analogy with Japanese character writing, Eisenstein explains creative editing as a multiplication rather than addition of separate effects. Just as the Japanese character for "dog" and another for "mouth" form, when juxtaposed the character for "bark", so the juxtaposition of two shots creates an entity greater than the sum of its components (as in Gestalt psychology). Each shot is an object: but in their combination, shots create concepts -- metaphors, symbols, a new grasp of underlying intellectual concepts.
Montage works by the collision of two pieces of film, not by their mere "joining". Eisenstein insists on the presence of montage, conflict and contradiction in all the arts -- surprises, disproportion, distortion, unexpected combinations, and, most importantly, irregularity. As the brain is confronted by the unexpected, it moves back and forth in confusion and excited agitation in an immediate, inevitable search for relationships and does not come to rest until a new "understanding" is reached. Here Eisenstein parallels the Surrealists' insistence on unexpected juxtapositions. Thus editing is not peaceful, but rather like "a series of explosions of the internation combustion engine to drive a car (film) forward ... " The conflicts between shots or even within a single shot might be those of scales, volumes, masses, graphic direction, close-up as against long-shot, darkness against light, image against sound. Each of these tensions is, as Gyorgy Kepes puts it, "resolved into a meaning configuration. These configurations in turn serve as a basis for further tensions: consequently for further configurations. Contradiction is the basis of dynamic organization of the associative qualities of the image."
Editing, then, is not merely combining what is visible in individual shots, but making conscious invisible concepts arising from their combination -- the chains and clashes of psychological associations diabolically contrived by the artist for maximum shock.
To Eisenstein, the concept of collision was the expression in art of Marxist dialectics -- the movement of all nature from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. It also represents the subverting of objective reality and of the unwilling spectator, who is thereby raised to new levels of comprehension by the manipulations of the director.
In
Strike, this emphasis on "collision" is carried out in almost every one of its thousands of shots by such technical devices as changing the size of the image within the frame, unorthodox dissolves and iris effects even to the combining of the two), split screen, slow and reverse motion, unexpected camera movements and angles, double exposures, the use of masks to hide or reveal portions of the image, the sudden intrusion of objects and limbs into the frame, the introduction of new locales and/or characters without prior explanation. Even the titles interspersed throughout form part of the montage, since their wording, typography, length, and positioning (precisely specified by Eisenstein) are integrated into the rhythm of the film. Throughout, there is deliberate visual manipulation and mystification to put the spectator into a state of permanent psychological tension.
The best example of Eisenstein's montage methods occurs in the famous sequence in which the four capitalists dealing with the strike are seated in the plush comfort and isolation of their mansion, smoking and drinking. Through cross-cutting, we now see, in this order: workers at a clandestine strike meeting; the capitalist putting a lemon into a juice extractor; the workers discuss their demands; the handle of the juice extractor descends to crush the fruit; the workers are charged by mounted police; the boss says in an inter-title: "Crush hard and then squeeze!"; the workers are attacked; a piece of lemon drops on to the well-polished shoe of the capitalist; disgusted, he uses the paper containing the workers' demands to wipe it off. The juice extractor both embodies the force used to crush the strikers and simultaneously implicates the bosses in the action.
Aesthetic and formalist preoccupations of Soviet film avant-garde join with ideological content: the hands of striking workers, raised in supplication or self-defense against the attacking police. Dynamic utilization of frame area.Stylization and typageFrom his life-long preoccupation with circus, music hall, Commedia dell'Arte, and Kabuki Theatre, Eisenstein derived the concept of "typecasting". This entailed the creation of composite "stock" types -- worker, capitalist, spy -- a distillation of the most significant traits of a particular social "type". Eschewing subtlety or the "building" of character as bourgeois individualism, Eisenstein portrayed the "essence" of social types for purposes of propagandistic art. In
Strike, capitalists are fat, smoke cigars, wear top hats, grimace frequently, are vicious, oppressive, spoiled, and sensual (a peculiar equation of sex and the ruling class); to increase their grossness and power, they are frequently photographed from below. In a similar manner the stock characters in Commedia dell'Arte, Punch and Judy shows, and the films of Chaplin (whom Eisenstein greatly admired) move through pantomime and slapstick to portray easily identifiable "types".
Since Eisenstein, "typage" has become a favorite tool of propaganda films, used by political systems of every persuasions to attack their enemies in the most direct, most simplistic manner possible.
The Ruling Class: plush comfort, cigars (excessively used), reclining figures sure of being "on top". As in Commedia dell'Arte -- a life-long influence on Eisenstein -- the director works with easily identifiable stock types. Strong formal composition avoids superfluous decor and concentrates action in the center.Substitution of collective man for individual heroCustomary bourgeois tales of individual sorrow or sex, eternal triangles, and unrequited or orgiastic love affairs were eliminated by Eisenstein in favor of dramas involving the movement of classes or masses. In
Strike, the protagonist is "collective action" -- an episode of mass struggle in pre-revolutionary Russia. Despite its propagandistic intent, the film is suffused with an aestheticism that proved anathema to the regime and later to Eisenstein himself. A work of youth -- free, exuberant, passionate, full of "errors" -- it reveals a genius exploring a new language in a gushing excess of imagination. Clearly the story itself -- the suicide of a worker leading to an ill-fated strike -- seems in retrospect secondary to his basic preoccupations. But Eisenstein was never to systemize his structuralist concern with the new vocabulary and syntax of cinema, though he continued to explore them in his films, his teaching and writing.
Publicado: Mié Oct 06, 2010 2:52 pm
Stachka (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1924) DVDRip [Carlotta].avi [1.15 Gb] 
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