Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein

Author:Sergei Eisenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

[1935]

The Structure of The Film

This is an Art

Which does mend Nature: change it rather, but

The Art itselfe, is Nature.

SHAKESPEARE, The Winter’s Tale

All is in man—all is for man.

GORKY1

LET US say that grief is to be represented on the screen. There is no such thing as grief “in general.” Grief is concrete; it is always attached to something; it has conveyors, when your film’s characters grieve; it has consumers, when your portrayal of grief makes the spectators sorrow, too.

This latter result is not always obligatory for your portrayal of grief: the grief of an enemy, after his defeat, arouses joy in the spectator, who identifies his feelings with those of the conqueror on the screen.

Such considerations are obvious enough, yet beneath them lies one of the most difficult problems in constructing works of art, touching the most exciting part of our work: the problem of portraying an attitude toward the thing portrayed.

One of the most active means of portraying this attitude is in composition. Though this attitude can never be shown by composition alone. Nor is it the sole task of composition.

I wish to take up in this essay this particular question: how far the embodiment of this attitude can be achieved within narrowly compositional means. We have long since realized that an attitude to a portrayed fact can be embodied in the way the fact is presented. Even such a master of “attitude” as Franz Kafka recognized physical viewpoint as critical:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.