2.2. Eisenstein's Montage

The use of montage as a radical and effective technique which has some sort of realist register can be mapped in the experiments and practices of the Russian avant-garde following the 1917 workers revolution. The Constructivists recognised that by appropriating and recombining fragmentary photographic elements into a new synergetic form they could create a 'new iconography of representation'69 which would provide an important bridge from 'abstraction to material' and from the illusionistic and the 'symbolic general to the concrete and real particular.'70 The re-orientation of the avant-garde's practice from its former abstract work to direct representational imagery71 can be seen as an attempt to engage with notions of the 'everyday' as a site of ideological and political struggle which saw everyday reality essentially as contradictory and open to change. For Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis and El Lissitzky, photomontage was a useful tool for revolutionary propaganda with its potential to bring 'abstract political and social ideas, commands and necessities...within the scope of comprehension of even the most illiterate peasant.'72 But this also marked an attempt by the avant-garde to resist the emerging 'house style' of figurative socialist realism and continue with an experimental, transformational view of arts role in society. As John Roberts describes, it became 'a synecdochal expression of revolutionary transformation itself.'73 In many ways, one of the most interesting exponents of montage during this period was not in the field of photomontage but rather in the medium of film.

It was Sergei Eisenstein who saw the ability of montage to reveal the hidden, 'fabricated artificial character of the assembled spatial structure' of film, and that it replaced the perceptual space of Renaissance vision with a 'fragmentation and multi-faceted changeable space.'74 Drawing on early modernist practice (Charles Dickens, W. Griffiths), Eisenstein developed sophisticated montagist principles including his theory of the montage of attractions and the montage of oppositions. As a director, he saw that the use of montage

presupposes a level of general culture.. allowing him not only to be familiar with life but also to understanding it correctly, presupposes his capabilities to observe life, to cope with observations, to think about them independently and finally, it presupposes a certain degree of artistic ability, which enables him to transform the inner, hidden context of real phenomena into a bare, clearly visible and immediately comprehensible context.75

Eisenstein saw montage as capable of 'revealing the real' by means of consciously engaging the viewer to construct their own meanings, within a certain set of parameters defined by the producer. Not only was montage the convergence of disparate and dissimilar elements organised into a spatially disorientating form but became the very nature of the 'unifying principle'.76 What he meant by this was the establishment of an awareness of the meaning of each shot prior to montage and the subsequent production of a third meaning stemming from its juxtaposition. This unifying principle elucidates the important role of the audience in creating the montage effect by sharing the journey that the author took when making the work: 'the spectator not only sees the represented elements of the finished work, but also experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and assembly of the image just as it was experienced by the author.'77 It is the active, cognitive abilities of the spectator which are paramount in Eisenstein's conception of montage. The crucial difference between representation as singular fact or recording of event and the effect of the 'montage principle' is that the latter 'achieves that great power of inner creative excitement in the spectator which distinguishes an emotionally exciting work from one that stops without going further.'78 The potential of montage to plough-up 'the psyche of the spectator'79 is an essential concept for Eisenstein where the continuity of film space and time is disrupted with exact precision 'to produce certain emotional shocks in a proper order within the totality- the only means by which it is possible to make the final ideological conclusion perceptible.'80 In the film 'Strike' (1924), the suppression scene is comprised of two separate and unrelated scenes rapidly inter-cut together: the put down of the workers and the singular death of an animal in the slaughter house. The extract reproduced below indicates this sequence as recorded by Alexander Belenson81 Abbreviations are Close-up (c.u), Medium Shot (m.s), and Long Shot (l.s).

1) The head of a bull jerks out of the shot, beyond the upper frame-line, avoiding the aimed butchers knife.

2) (c.u) The hand holding the knife strikes sharply-beyond the lower frame-line.

3) (l.s) 1,500 persons role down a slope in profile.

4) 40 persons raise themselves from the ground, arms outstretched.

5) Face of a soldier taking aim.

6) (m.s) A volley of gun-fire.

7) The shuddering body of the bull (head outside of frame) rolls over.

8) (c.u) Legs of the bull jerk convulsively. The hooves beat in a pool of blood.

9) (c.u) The bolts of a rifle.

10) The bulls head is fastened with a rope to a bench.

11) 1,000 persons rush past the camera.

12) From behind bushes, a chain of soldiers appears.

13) (c.u) The bull's head dies of unseen blows (the eyes glaze).

Originally intended to be purely an educational film, 'Strike' evolved to be a experimental vehicle for the dialectical ideas of Eisenstein. The unavoidable re-negotiation of meaning of both scenes, encouraging allegorical effect that draw acute conclusions from the montagist action, reveals what for Eisenstein is the reality of this pre-revolutionary conflict between representatives of capital and labour. This latent reality is effected by means of creating a dialogue with the audience, communicating an ideological message while simultaneously reproducing the (supposed) reality of post capital/labour conflict in revolutionary Russia.

The general principles of Eisenstein's montage can be seen in contrast to that of the western avant-grade where the potential of montage is seen as an oppositional force (Heartfield, Benjamin, Brecht) to the dominant bourgeois culture and therefore aimed at exposing the contradictions of class society. In post-revolutionary Russia these contradictions no longer (again supposedly) existed, therefore Eisenstein's montage was 'harnessed to the construction of the Soviet system that had claimed to eradicate all class structure.'82 Benjamin's own conception of realism is of interest here- for him it was not just a matter of simply replacing a bourgeois narrative with a Marxist one, but one of making aware the fabricated and constructed nature of reality itself. Benjamin's commitment to montage is 'a commitment to resisting the reifying constraints of linear system building. Montage enacts the heterogeneous as the critique of premature synthesis.'83 Inherent in Eisenstein's method of montage practice is its ability to represent realty as a multi-dimensional, changeable space which emphasises the active role of the audience in creative interpretation and thus stands as an testimonial opposition to the figurative closures and passive contemplation of full-blown socialist realism.

Any attempt at describing the realism of Eisenstein's work has not only to consider the way that the material is being organised to create its meaning but also, as I have already stressed, the context in which the work is being produced. Through the ideas which informed the production and the devices employed to interpret them, Eisenstein's work can be understood to be creating a sort of realist effect but awareness must also be made here to the problems of co-option. The consequences of the consolidation of Stalinism discussed earlier necessarily played a part in determining at least some of the parameters and ideological direction of the work- as early as 1927 the anniversary film 'October' was subject to delay and alteration to suit the current political climate.84

The 1905 anniversary film 'Battleship Potempkin' (1925) serves as an illustrative point in understanding that realism is a specifically temporal category, not a timeless adoption of a particular technique.

Eisenstein represents the Potempkin mutiny and the Oddessa steps massacre, both synecdochal for the 1905 revolution in general, by a process where 'the sensation of fear on the quarter deck, panic and machine like murder on the steps, tension on the waiting ship, could only have been communicated by this revolutionary cutting method.'85 Made from within a culture where class conflict had been resolved, Potempkin reworked history from a Marxian derived perspective using the most innovative montage strategies for effecting a sort of realism. As observed earlier, critical realism for this enquiry is about how a work serves to reveal 'underlying essences' of a particular moment which makes it temporally and context dependant. This is where the issue of co-option becomes pertinent. In claiming the ideological mantle of films such as Eisenstein's Potempkin, the state is able to legitimise itself as heir to socialism. Before Stalinism emerged as a serious counter-revolutionary force, the Soviet Union's ideological register with reality still largely originated from a dialectically materialist position. This put it in a diametrically opposing position to the ruling classes generally distant relation with, and view of, reality which for reasons which determine its own continued existence, it cannot fully acknowledge.86 As the Soviet state's political role changed so did its orientation with reality. Its ability to co-opt productions such as Potempkin in supporting its own (now inverted87) strategy of being heir to the legacy of the worker's revolution must be borne in mind when we consider such notions of realist effect. Of course, these post-production factors are far beyond the control of the individual producer and it cannot be used as a simplistic argument which neutralises all that is genuinely significant in Eisenstein's method, but we can see here that there are problems with attempting to discuss Eisenstein's work in terms of it having any critically realist effect. By saying this the aim is not to doubt the importance of the innovative strategies of Eisenstein's theory and practice in trying to 'reveal the real' by his exploration of his various montage techniques, but to outline the sheer complexities of trying to define a critical realist practice.

 Footnotes

69 Buchloh, B.H.D, 1991, p 61

70 Andel, J, 1981, p 186

71 It can also be observed that the avant-garde's re-orientation towards representational work can be seen as a defensive response to the accusations of irrelevance and elitism directed at them by the AKhRR.

72 Lodder, C, 1985, p 187

73 Roberts, J, 1997, p 30

74 Honnef, K, Pachnicke, P, 1991, p 50

75 Ibid. p 61

76 Eisenstein, S, 1969, p 19

77 Roberts, J, 1997, p 33

78 Eisenstein, S, 1969, p 37

79 Roberts, J, 1994, p 149

80 Eisenstein, S, 1969, p 181

81 Belenson, A, 1925, p 59

82 Roberts, J,1994, p 150

83 Roberts, J, 1997, p 51

84 Leyda, J, 1973, p 239

85 Leyda, J, ibid. p 196

86 A Marxist position would identify the inability of a ruling class to have a direct register with reality because it would reveal the inevitable contradictions of its own class position and suggest its inevitable downfall, thus its need to create a 'false-reality' or 'consciousness'

87 Although, as I pointed out, the Soviet Union's was now moving towards a state capitalist economy, it still had great stakes in maintaining the notion that it was indeed socialist, an illusion which survived right up until the revolutions of 1989.