PREFACE

The idea for a Formalist volume addressing central issues in the theory and
practice of cinematic art originated with Boris Ejxenbaumin 1926 and was
realized during the following year. Potika kino (.Poetics o f Cinema) was pub lished in the spring of 1927 with Ejxenbaum as editor and included articles
by Ejxenbaum, Tynjanov, Kazanskij, Piotrovskij, Sklovskij, and the cinema
tographers Mixajlov and Moskvin.1 The intention was to establish a compre
hensive and definitive foundation for future Formalist film theoryan inten
tion indicated by the anthologys title (Poetika was the title of the early
Formalist volumes on literary theory), by the polemical stance with respect
both to other works on film theory and to the deficiencies of film practice,
and by the systematic distribution of topics: Ejxenbaum on film stylistics,
Tynjanov on the semiotic nature of cinema and on film syntagmatics, Kazan
skij on the potentials of cinema as an art form in relation to the other arts,
Sklovskij on poetry and prose in cinema, Piotrovskij on emerging film genres,
and Mixajlov and Moskvin on the stylistic significance of cinematographic
means. The positions taken by the authors of Poetika kino were carefully
thought out and integrated with one anotherthe individual authors allude
to aspects which are taken up more fully in other articles.
The concepts advanced in Poetika kino would seem not only to relate to
but also to have influenced at least the formulation of the works on montage
published two years later by Lev Kuleov and Sergei Eisenstein. Of course,
Kuleov and Eisenstein began expressing their respective ideas about montage
much earlier, but Kulesovs Iskusstvo kino (The A rt o f Cinema) was not pub
lished until 1929 and Eisensteins famous polemical articles on montage began
appearing in that same yearZa kadrom (Beyond the Shot) as an after
word to Kaufmans Japonskoe kino (Japanese Cinema) and Kino cetyrex
izmerenij (The Filmic Fourth Dimension) in the journal Kino. The influ
ence of Poetika kino can be felt ever more strongly in the 1930s Prague
School writings on cinema by Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky, where
certain of the Formalist initiatives are alluded to and developed further.
Works on the theory of cinema by the Soviet semioticians Ju. Lotman and
V.V. Ivanov in the early 1970s also returned to the Formalist principles of
the 1920s, recasting those principles in terms of modem semiotics.
However, unlike the writings of the filmmaker-semioticians Kuleov,
Pudovkin, and Eisenstein, Poetika kino remained largely unknown in the

ix

"

Westits central positions attributed to those who later commented upon and
extended the Formalists initial perspectives. In fact, the original Russian
volume itself is relatively unavailable, not to be found even in some of the
better Slavic collections of university libraries.
In my introductory study I attempt to integrate, synthesize, and illustrate
(with greater systematicity) the ideas originally presented in Poetika kino,
and demonstrate their relationship to the later writings on cinema of Eisenstein,
Jakobson, Mukarovsky, Lotman, and Ivanov. A final section comments on the
viability of the Formalist film semiotics with respect to present-day theory.
There follow translations of all the articles appearing in the original Poetika
kino, with the exception of a brief three-page note by Sklovskij ( Poetry
and Prose in Cinematography) which has already appeared in English translation in Bann and Bowlts anthology Russian Formalism ,2 Roman Jakobsons
1933 article Is the Cinema in Decline? ^ with it projection of Formalist
film theory into the modem era of sound film, serves as a fitting epilogue to
the volume. In rendering Russian names, titles, and words, both in my study
and in the translations, I have adopted the standard transcription system, with
the exception of the name Sergei Eisenstein, where I have used the more
common spelling above.
I would like finally to express my appreciation to my collaborators on the
translation part of the project, Professors Anna M. Lawton and Zinaida Breschinsky of Purdue University, to Professor Kenneth Brostrom of Wayne State
University for his helpful editorial and stylistic suggestions, and to Professor
Ladislav Matejka of the University of Michigan, General Editor of Michigan
Slavic Publications, for the encouragement he gave to the project from the
very outset.
Herbert Eagle
Ann Arbor, May, 1981

52

FORMALIST FILM THEORY

12. Russian Formalism and Present-Day Theory

Russian Formalist film theory has continued to play a vital role in our increas
ing understanding of cinematic art,both as it is reflected in the semiotic approach
of Lotman and Ivanov, and directly. The consistency of the Formalist view
of film as language, and the commitment to a scientific investigation of that
language, have promoted careful and relatively rigorous theoretical development.
This can be seen quite clearly when Russian Formalist theory is compared
to that of the past decades most active and influential group-the French
semiotics of cinema as represented principally by Christian Metz, Raymond
Bellour, and Thierry Kuntzel.90 As it developed in the 1970s, the French
theory underwent fairly radical epistemological shifts (moving in the latter
half of the decade into a Lacanian phase) and , in spite of its many flashes
of insight, has not maintained the consistency and clarity of view which the
Russian Formalist tradition possesses. For example, in his earlier work Metz
stressed (in the tradition of the leading theorist of realist cinema Andr
Bazin 91 ) the continuity of the filmic image and its existential relationship
to reality (i.e.,its functioning as an integral index of reality). Metz questioned
the existence of discrete units of signification in cinema and claimed that
the film image was a unit of meaning like the sentence, but not decomposable
into smaller units. Therefore, Metz termed film not a language, but only une
sorte de languageSim was to be understood phenomenologically as a contin
uous flow of creation in which the signifier is coextensive with the whole
of the signified:
There is indeed language system, but neither the image discourse nor
filmic discourse are language systems. Whether language or art, the image
discourse is an open system, and it is not easily codified, with its nondis
crete basic units (the images), its intelligibility (which is too natural),
its lack of distance between the significate and the signifier. Whether
art or language, the composed film is an even more open system, with its
whole sections of meaning directly conveyed to the audience.92
Thus, Metz substantially ignored the many aspects of articulation of signs
described by the Formalistsfrom the isolation of objects as semantic signs,
to the formation of affectual signs through the structuring of modalities, to
the use of marked stylistic features to create conventional signs. The crucial
role of differentiation as a sign-forming mechanism within a film was not
investigated.
Metzs early contribution to the study of film syntax, the Grande Syntagmatique, although once again very influential, was also problematic because
of its daim to universality. Metz attempted a taxonomic categorization of all
of the film syntagms (akin to the Formalists filmic phrases) used in dassical
narrative dnema, implying that any narrative film could be analyzed as a

INTRODUCTION

53

chain made up of this limited number of types of syntagms. This method

enjoyed some popularity with subsequent investigators, many of whom found,
however, that the films they chose to analyze contained syntagms not accounted
for in Metzs typology. The Formalist attempt to identify the principles of
phrasal formation in cinema, rather than attempting to enumerate all possible
syntagms, is ultimately more useful and more theoretically valid.
Metzs second book on semiotics of cinema Langage et Qnema (1971)
moved doser to the Formalist position, perhaps influenced directly by For
malist ideas disseminated in France at that time through the works of Tzvetan
Todorov and Julia Kristeva. Metz now characterized film as a language system
possessing many codes (langues in Saussures sense) superimposable upon one
another, as well as subcodes (systems of genre and styleidiolects in the sense
of parole). The various codes and subcodes have different minimal units:
the shot, the photogram (still frame), the cineme (filmed object or iconeme).
In material extent, the units of one code overlap the units of another, and units
which are meaningful in one code may not even be distinctive in another.
Metz also approached the Formalist position on the importance of differential
features in structuring the language: Each film, consciously or not, selects
the differences on which it is going to be constructed; it fabricates with these
its syntagmatics to the extent that these are transitions, its paradigmatics to
the extent that they are differences (opposition, for example). 93 Although
he made reference also to the Formalist notion of the negation of codes as
an informationally rich process in art, Metzs analysis is ultimately based on
a simpler theory of the integration and hierarchical ordering of codes within
texts. In contrast, in Lotmans view, the filmic text not only integrates codes,
but creates new codes, teaching them as it proceeds and constantly deforming
existing codes to transmit new meaning. Finally, Metz still did not concern
himself to any significant degree with the operation of paradigms which exist
on the level of distinctive features of the signifier (camera movement, camera
angle, lighting, color, etc.), and these are precisely the types of paradigms
which, in many films, are involved in the creation and frustration of anticipa
tions, in code destruction and creation.
The most recent phase of the work of the Metz group concerns the psycho
logical aspects of the realtionship between the viewer and the film: the position
of the viewer vis-a-vis the text, and its semiotic implications. This work is
heavily dependent on the writings of Lacan and focuses on the interaction
between film language and the internal psychological construction of the
viewer-subject, treated also in semiotic terms. The individuals psychological
projections onto the imaginary signifier on the screen form basic messages
of the type first proposed by Freud in his analysis of dreams. According to
Metz, the conditions of film viewing throw the spectator back to a presymbolic
imaginary state (Lacans mirror phase) dominated by confusion of image

54

FORMALIST FILM THEORY

and reality (subject and object) and by desire (as opposed to the disciplined
structures of language). No doubt filmic codes possess this psychoanalytic
level as wellbut in the work spawned by the Metz groups position, the
psychoanalytic seems (inaccurately) to crowd out other aspects of meaning.
Another important theoretical trend which clearly relates to the Formalist
heritage is recent Marxist film theory deriving from Althusser and elaborated
by Stephen Heath and the Screen group in England.94 While the Metz group
has focused on the interaction between film language and the psychology of
the individual, the Screen group has placed both of these in the larger context
of ideological languages. (The interest of the Screen group in central concepts
of Russian Formalism was reflected quite dramatically by the number of
articles in Screen in the years 1972 1975 which dealt with the Formalists
and Eisenstein). Placing the cinema in the context of other ideological languages
(a theoretical process initated with respect to literature by the critique of
Russian Formalism by Baxtin, Medvedev, and Voloinov in the 1920s), the
Screen group treats the filmic text as governed by extracinematic as well as
cinematic codes. The result has been a stimulating, if at present still somewhat
problematic, combination of Formalist, Lacanian, and Marxist theory.
The most promising continuation of Russian Formalism lies, however,
in the work of English and American theoreticians who are committed to a
constant scientific evaluation of emerging semiotic theories by careful analysis
of applications to the filmic texts themselves. Such efforts reflect the attitude
and methodology of Formalism by returning to the nature of the cinemas
devices and the manner in which these devices create the manifold differing
levels of film language and allow for their simultaneous elaboration. It is here,
for example, in the work of Peter Wollen,95 David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson,96 and Charles Altman,97 that the links to Russian Formalism,
to the theories of Eisenstein, and to Soviet semiotic theory, are most evident.

INTRODUCTION

29

Such a coordinated effort entails a montage table which will indicate the
necessary characteristics of the set design and from which a filming and lighting
scenario can be devised. In the working scenario, both in the directors shoot
ing table and in the filming/lighting one, each montage piece should have its
own unified meaning and be defined in its relationship to the film as a whole
and to the neighboring montage pieces. In realizing the shot as conceived,
all the relevant factors of the set, lighting, camera position, etc., must be co
ordinated with precisionbut in actual working practice this ideal is rarely
achieved, for a variety of reasons. Often, lack of foresight and planning in
preparation of the mise-ert-scene makes it impossible for the cinematographer
to capture and convey the necessary stylistic visual qualities. Also, the cine
matographer, who must conceptualize the spatial forms as they will appear
on the planar surface of the screen, is sometimes not consulted sufficiently
by the director in the latters planning for the blocking of positions and
movements in the shot. Ultimately, all of the members of the production
team must be aware of the interlocking stylistic consequences of their many
small decisions.
Even with the closest coordination between a films creators, such unpre
dictable factors as the weather (in location shooting) or the quality of the
developing of the negative (laboratory processes were still very uneven at
that time) could result in unpredictable effects. For these reasons, Mixajlov
and Moskvin advocated dose contact between the cinematographer and the
lab workers who would eventually do the processing of the film, and the use
of artificial lighting (for greater stylistic control) wherever possible. In the
conditions of the studio, where the possibilities for shaping the set and pre
cisely controlling the lighting were greatest, the cinematographer could truly
paint with light.
More than a decade after delineating his position on the role of the cine matographer in the shaping of a films style, Moskvin, working with Eisen
stein on Ivan the Terrible, used the architechtonics of the set and lighting as
major transmitters of mood and emotions (the second major channel for
affectual meaning was Prokofievs famous soundtrack). That film, acknowledged
now as one of the masterpieces of world cinema, definitively affirms the
Formalists belief that coherent and consistent stylistic systems for cinematic
works would emerge in practice.

9. The Formalists and Eisenstein

The filmmaker whose work is most closely associated with the theoretical
foundations laid by the Formalists is Sergei Eisenstein. During the middle to
late twenties, the years of the major Formalist writing, Eisenstein was passion
ately immersed in the making of films: Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October

30

FORMALIST FILM THEORY

{Ten Days That Shook the World), and The Old and the New {The General
Line) were all shot during that five-year period. Eisenstein worked at a furious
pace, creating, on film, dynamic and innovative stylistic systems which markedly
influenced the future evolution of world cinema. He was at the same time in
personal contact with a number of the Formalists (in particular Sklovskij,
Ejxenbaum, and Tynjanov), as well as with Futurist poets who were their
mutual friends. There clearly was an interchange of ideas (the Formalists
influencing Eisenstein and vice-versa) on an informal basis, and questions of
who originated particular concepts would be difficult to resolve today. How
ever, when Eisenstein began lecturing and writing extensively in 1929 (theoret
ical activity that continued throughout the 1930sto some extent forced
by Eisensteins difficulties in making films under the increasingly heavy-handed
dictates of the socialist realist film bureaucracy), he proceeded along the
theoretical lines which had been marked out by the Formalists.
Like Tynjanov and Ejxenbaum, Eisenstein felt that a film was a complex
communication, which carried not only denotative and referential, but also
affectual meaning: a construction which . . . serves to embody the authors
relation to the content, at the same time compelling the spectator to relate
himself to the content in the same way. 49 Eisenstein also analyzed in great
detail the relationships between natural signs and conventional signs in cinema,
utilizing the theories of another contemporary, the psychologist Lev Vygotskij.
Although human speech is based on a conventional symbolic system, Vygotskij
pointed out that human mental pricesses, inner speech as he termed it, also
depends on apprehending in total images (which, in C.S. Pierces terminology,
might be considered complex iconic signs):
While in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech
words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent
thinking in pure meanings. It is a dynamic, shifting, unstable thing, flut
tering between word and thought. . . 50
Using Vygotskijs conception, Eisenstein drew a distinction between
thematic-logical thinking and image-sensual thinking. He saw the problem
of creating a language of cinema as one of developing a sign system capable
of communicating both the rational and the irrational, capable of interweaving
logical and emotional thought: The forward movement of our epoch in art
must blow up the Chinese Wall that stands between the primary antithesis
of the language of logic and the language of images. 51 The former Eisen
stein identified with verbal language and conventional sign systems in general,
the latter with representational images and with structures which create models
of the emotions.
Eisenstein drew close parallels between film language as he conceived of
it and various Japanese cultural forms. The Japanese system of writing, for

INTRODUCTION

31

example, employs both conventional and iconic signs. The latter developed
into ideographs (conventionalized iconic images) which could be superimposed
to create new signs in a metaphorical fashion (for example, the ideographs for
knife and heart combine to form the ideograph for sorrow). Eisenstein
attempted to mirror this principle in his associative (iIntellectual) montage
constructions. Eisenstein was also attracted by Kabuki theater, in which the
natural world is broken up into various visual and aural signs. For example,
a verbal text is read by an off-stage narrator while on-stage an actor mimes
related actions, simultaneously, elements of make-up represent character
traits and emotions. Eisensteins approach directly recalls Tynjanovs assertion
that in order to create film language the natural world must be decomposed
into signs and recombined within the art form (The visible person, the visible
thing, is only an element of film language when it is given the quality of a
semantic sign).
Eisenstein also extended and applied Kazanskijs ideas about the ability
of modalities to represent and convey emotions directly, as affectual signs of
an iconic type (patterned on their physical resemblance to emotional processes).
In such signs, the variations in time of modal features are directly homologous
to the perturbations of the emotions. Thus, Eisenstein strove to create imagesensual signs by patterning graphic shapes, movements, lightingand later
color and musicinto icons of emotions, to create a compositional structure
identical with human behavior in the grip of pathos. Pathetic (emotional)
intensity and communicative intensity coincide: an emotional leap coincides
with a leap into a new understanding.
The key to Eisensteins development of affectual (image-sensual) signs was
human gesturewhich is linked both to verbal language and, directly, to the
emotions. Man and the relations between his gestures and the intonations of
his voice, which arise from the same emotions, are our models in determining
audio-visual structures. .. 52 Eisenstein not only patterned human gestures
(the exhortative arm motions of revolutionaries in Potemkin, or the bowing
and falling gestures of mourning), but extended this principle into graphic
qualities of visual composition and mise-en-scene (the subdued sadness of
the perturbations of light in the fog sequence, the unremitting coldness and
inevitability of the parallel Cossacks descending the parallel Odessa steps).
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, in connection with his work with Prokofiev
on the musical scores for Alexander Nevskij and Ivan the Terrible, Eisenstein
extended his theories on the use of image-sensual structures to musicfor like
visual images, music has its approachings, receding, ripples, and reflections.
In analyzing the way in which the emotion of tense anxiety is conveyed in
the sequence which precedes the attack of the Teutonic knights in Alexander
Nevskij, Eisenstein wrote:
We will try to discover here that secret of those sequential vertical

32

FORMALIST FILM THEORY

correspondences which, step by step, relate the music to the shots through
an identical motion that Ues at the base of the musical as well as the
pictorial movement.

After carefully comparing the path of the music with the path which the eye
is forced to take by the graphic compositions in the sequential montage of
shots, Eisenstein concludes:
If we try to read this graph emotionally in conjunction with the thematic
matter of the sequence, checking one against the other, we can find a
seismographical curve of a certain process and rhythm of uneasy ex
pectation. 53
Eisenstein related this movement gesturally and psychologically to holding
ones breathand then allowing oneself a deep sigh.
Not only did Eisenstein achieve in his films the creation of affectual
signs as advocated by Ejxenbaum and Kazanskij, but he also (simultaneously)
broke down the real world into abstract semantic signs of the kind emphasized
by Tynjanov in his analysis. In comparing his own use of the close-up with
that of D.W. Griffith, Eisenstein asserted that Griffith used petty details as
metonymies, i.e., for representing the characters of which they were a part,
whereas he (Eisenstein) used the close-up as an independent connotative sign:
We say an object or face is photographed in large scale (krupnyj plan) . . .
We are speaking of the qualitative side of the phenomenon, linked with
its meaning . . . not only and not so much to show or to present, as to
signify, to give meaning . . . to create a new quality of the whole from a
juxtaposition of the separate parts. 54
In his films, Eisenstein juxtaposed close-ups in order to create paradigms,
classes of objects linked by association and ultimately leading to the abstrac
tion of an idea. For example, in the celebrated sequence of the gods in
October Eisenstein follows a close-up of a Baroque statue of Christ with an
entire series of idols, from Buddha to Hindu gods to carved idols, thus associ
ating sophisticated Christianity with the primitive and superstitious origins
of religion. Such explicit filmic metaphors, which Eisenstein termed intellec
tual montage, frequently involved ready-made cultural sign material (icons,
masks, statues, clothing, architecture) already rich in connotative possibilities.
The film phrases which Eisenstein constructed with such signs are precisely
the narrations in the nominative envisioned by Ejxenbaum and Tynjanov
narrations which proceed through differential variations in images of the same
dass. Eisensteins rhetorical question and his answer clearly echo Tynjanov:
Why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather
than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts
to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete

INTRODUCTION

33

objects? . . . Could not the same thing be accomplished more productively

by not following the plot so slavishly, but by materializing the idea, the
impression .. . through a free accumulation of associative matter? . . . We
have taken the first embryonic step towards a totally new form of film
expression. Towards a purely intellectual film, freed from the traditional
limitations, achieving direct forms for ideas, systems, and concepts, without
any need for transitions and paraphrases.55
Eisensteins attitude toward the use of human beings as signs (i.e., his
theory of acting) closely reflected Kazanskijs view of the actor as model.
The actors poses, facial expressions, and parts of the body isolated in close-up,
are signs whose potential meanings can be brought out through montage.
Eisensteins typage and the painstaking process of selecting for major roles
non-actors with the desired physical attributes are entirely consistent with
this view. The shape of body and face were more important sign considerations
for Eisenstein than was professional acting experiencesince in any case the
human figure was to be fragmented in montage, turned into a chain of signs.
Even the Stanislavskij concept of acting, argued Eisenstein, is dependent on
such a fragmentation into signs:
The actor is confronted with exactly the same task: to express, in
two, three, or four features of a character or of a mode of behavior, these
basic elements which in juxtaposition create the integral image that was
worked out by the author, director and the actor him self.. . . This rests
primarily in the fact that the desired image is not fixed or ready -made,
but arises-is b o m . The image planned by author, director and actor is
concretized by them in separate representational elements, and is assem
bledagain and finallyin the spectators perception.56
Furthermore, the actor, to create in himself these elements, must bring forth
for himself a series of representations. Feeling and experience, like the actions
that flow from them, arise of themselves, called to life by the pictures his
imagination paints. The living feeling will be evoked by the pictures themselves,
by their aggregation andjuxtaposition. Thus, the very same sort of complicated
montage with which the filmmaker creates his text also takes place within
the actor creating his role and within the spectator recreating the concept.
Although the development of sound films led Eisenstein to the use of profes
sional actors, he never abandoned the essential principles of typage. In Ivan
the Terrible, for example, human gestures play a dominant role as signs. Not
only did Eisenstein carefully sketch body postures and facial expressions,
but faces are disembodied as paintings and icons on the walls of the film set.
The architectonics of the mise-en-scene (architecture, paintings, shadows,
costumes) also depend explicitly on sign function; these elements anticipate
and reinforce psychology of characters as well as events in the plot. Thus,
Eisensteins use of elements of mise-en-scene as signs confirmed the Formalist
position with regard to the abstract nature of film language.

34

FORMALIST FILM THEORY

The montage_ofhuman beings, objects^m/se - en -scene and actions within

the frame of a single shot was regarded by Eisenstein as the first step in the
combination of individual signs into larger units, so-called internal montage.
Thus, as in Tynjanovs insistence on the shot as the primary unit of film lan
guage, Eisenstein wrote of the montage cell. which could be any element
within the shot oi^of tbs^shat which entered into the syntagmatics of the film.
It is important to note here that the montage cell could consist not only of
objects disposed relative to one another, but also of modalities (e.g., a group
of frames in which a certain motion or lighting or color could be perceived and
opposed to another motion, lighting, or color). Such-montage with respect to
modalities could clearly take place within the shot as well-as- among shots
and this fact was a major structural device for Eisensteins compositions within
the frame. Composition in depth within the frame ultimately became for
Eisenstein a syntagmatic equivalent of montage among shots. In the finale of
Ivan the Terrible, Part / , for example, the sharp pointed lines of the Tsars
physiognomy and beard (in the right foreground of the shot) contrast with
the sweeping 5 -shaped curve of the procession of the people, on a snowcovered plain, coming to entreat him to return (in the left background of
the shot).
The most celebrated and the most influential aspect of Formalist theory
to be developed by Eisenstein was, however, the theory of montage. In parti
cular, Tynjanovs view of montage as differential replacement and the conten
tion that subsequent shots are deformed due to the expectations, both formal
and semantic, set up in previous shots, became, in Eisensteins more dramatic
phrasing, the theory of montage as collision. For Eisenstein the montage
process is based on conflict, opposition, deautomatization in Sklovskijs terms.
The classical structure of musical works, of dramas, of films or paintings is
almost invariably derived from a struggle of opposites, linked by the unity of
conflict. Eisenstein realized that the various sign functions of the film image
could be made manifest only in juxtaposition. Because the still frame as
photograph contains potentially infinite properties, it is only in collision with
other frames that signs can emerge as distinct by opposition. This holds not
only for object-signs, but for oppositions established through collision of
modalities (e.g., conflict of shapes, conflict of scales, conflict of volumes,
conflicts in lighting). Montage as collision was a conception which differed
radically from Pudovkins montage as linkage (the latter can be seen as the
fundamental principle of classical narrative cinema). In Eisensteins view,
the filmic image is not to be used only or primarily to represent reality; rather,
it is abundle rich in material which can be made to signify through the structur
ation of meaning-forming oppositions. As in the Formalist view, the essence
of cinema is not to show reality, but to create meaning through a new language.
Eisensteins montage as collision is also making strange in the Russian

INTRODUCTION

35

Formalist sense. In his early theater work, Eisenstein termed such collisions
tfte"'montage of attractions, and it was based on the radical disruption of one
code of aesthetic expectations by another, totally different, code. Thus,
Eisenstein had an actor suddenly express his anger through a somersault, or
his exaltation through a salto-mortale. The automatized norms of the natural
ist theater were disrupted by means of expression which came from the language
of the circus. Leaps from one type of expression to another, as well as unex
pected intertwinings of the two expressions, create a new synthesis of real
doing and pictorial imagination. 57 Strong semantic effects are produced
through this process in Eisensteins first film Strike : sequences which resemble
the later Italian neo-realism alternate with devices from th qcommediadellarte
and the circus. As Eisenstein later wrote: I . .. regard the inception of new
concepts and viewpoints in the conflict between customary conception and
particular representation as dynamicas a dynamization of the inertia of
perception, 58
The particular genius of Eisensteins films lies in the existence of colli
sions (or differentiations with ultimate semantic consequences) on various
levels of'ST'film simultaneouslywith respect to objects, actions, and modal
ities. In his later writings, Eisenstein gave to this process of conflict, concaten
ation, and superimposition on various levels the term vertical montage, using
an analogy drawn from music:
Through the progression of the vertical line, pervading the entire
orchestra, and interwoven horizontally, the intricate harmonic musical
movement of the whole orchestra moves forward.
When we turn from this image of the orchestral score to that of the
audio-visual score, we find it necessary to add a new part to the instru
mental parts: this new part is a staff of visuals .. . where shot is linked
to shot not merely through one indicationmovement, or light values,. . .
or the likebut through the simultaneous advance of a mutiple series of
lines, each maintaining an independent compositional course and each
contributing to the total compositional course of the sequence.59
In his later years, Eisenstein turned increasingly to the orchestration of
multiple lines in vertical montage. He envisioned one line as dominating the
syntagmatic development of a sequence, whereas other secondary stimuli
complicated or amplified the dominant. Thus, the modulations of grey lighting
which convey gloominess in the famous fog sequence of Battleship Potemkin
constitute the sequences dominantbut the rippling motion of the waves,
barely perceptible changing movements, form a parallel to the optical light
vibrations within the fog. In general, the relationship between various lines
in a montage sequence may be based on dissonance as well as on harmony
and the nature of the dominant line may change from one sequence to the
next. In fact, Eisenstein described his montage sequences as follows:

36

FORMALIST FILM THEORY

Like thought, they would sometimes proceed with visual images.

With sound. Synchronized or non-synchronized. Then as sounds. Formless.
Or with sound-images: with objectively representational sounds . . .
Then interpolated into the outer course of action, then interpolating
elements of the outer action into the inner monologue. 60
Eisensteins notes for his work on Ivan the Terrible reflect such a process,
albeit not so hyperbolically: drawings of sets, gestures, and facial expressions
alternate with Eisensteins writing of the verbal portion of the scenario. The
dominant continually shifts from the verbal-logical to the visual-emotional,
attempting to recreate the filmmakers process of inner speech within the
viewer, integrating the lines into a whole, namely, into that generalized image,
wherein the creator, followed by the spectator, experiences the theme. 61
As was pointed out in Section 7, Eisensteins films consistently embodied
those features which the Formalists assigned to poetic genres of film. The
narrative of actions was always accompanied by, and was frequently dominated
by, narratives based on stylistic elements and structural paradigmssets of
variants related by similarity and dissimilarity in terms of the distinctions
possible in music, color, graphic shape, gesture, lighting, etc. Such organization
of an art work, no less than in actual poetry, was the essence of that emphasis
on the means o f expression itself which the Prague Structuralists came to
call aesthetic function.

10. Czech Structuralist Contributions: Jakobson and Mukarovsky

The applications of the principles of Formalism to other arts, which began
in the 1920s (in part with the Formalist writings on cinema), continued and
intensified during the creative period of Prague School Structuralism (the
1930s and early 1940s).62 As the leading voices in the newly emerging area
of semiotics of art, both Jakobson and Mukarovsky asserted that Formalist
views on the structure of literary art were indeed applicable to aesthetic works
in general. In the article Art as Semiotic Fact (1936)63 Mukarovsky drew
together a number of Formalist-concepts and reformulated them in semiotic
terms. He defined a sign as a reality perceivable by sense perception that has
a relationship with another reality which the first reality is meant to evoke.
Thus, a work of art (composed of signs) does have an informational function,
which is quite evident in the representational arts and is manifest less distinctly
in dance, music, and architecture (the informational function is reflected in
the common idea of the subject of a work). However, the work of art as a
whole functions not only as an informational sign, but as an autonomous
sign, its autonomous function being in dialectical antinomy with its informa
tional function. Even in works of art with pronounced informational function

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37

(e.g., portrait painting, documentary film, or the historical novel), the work
is a unity of meaning and not a passive copy of reality . . . Such works of
art can never be existential equivalents of their subjects in reality. Further
more, they always refer more broadly to the total context of social pheno
mena, science, philosophy, religion, politics, economics, and so on, of any
given milieu. 64
The sharp distinction between an object in reality and an art form which
transforms objects as material into signs in an aesthetic language was a major
issue addressed by Jakobson and Mukarovsky in the early 1930s. The coming
pf sound to the cinema, giving it the ability to reproduce human conversation
synchronously with the corresponding images, increased a films verisimilitude
considerably. This once again gave impetus to theories of film as reality, film
as a direct, unmediated, existential index of fife as it i t a continuous flow in
which the signifier (the film) was identical to the signified (reality). If indeed
the cinema was to become merely a mirror of reality, its existence as language
and as art would be negated. It was for this reason that the Formalists (Tynja
nov, in particular) and Eisenstein had opposed talkies, insisting that reproduc
tion of synchronous conversation would be irrelevant and harmful to the
development of cinema as an abstract visual art form.
By 1933 the talkies were a reality. In an article entitled Is the Cinema
in Decline? 65 Jakobson set out to reaffirm and revise the Formalist position
with respect to two essential points(1) the presence of sound in cinema in no
way altered the fact that reality was only material for film artreality was
still being transformed into signs; (2) the use of sound in cinema, with its
primary components of on-screen conversation, background music, and silence,
had evolved into a rather consistent and highly conventionalized systemin
fact not at all the same as the nature of sound in reality.
In reaffirming the Formalist position that objects transformed into
signs. . . are the specific material of cinematic art, Jakobson distinguished
between objects and signs as follows:
We can say about the same person: hunchback, big-nose, or bignosed hunchback. In all three cases the object of our talk is identical,
whereas the signs are different. Likewise, in a film we can shoot such a
person from behind-his hump will be seen, then en facehis nose will be
shown, or in profile, so that both will be seen. In these three shots we have
three things functioning as signs of the same object. Now let us demon
strate the synecdochic nature of language by referring to our ugly fellow
simply as the hump, or the nose. The analogous method in cinema:
the camera sees only the hump, or only the nose. .. . Film works with
manifold fragments of objects which differ in magnitude, and also with
fragments of time and space likewise varied. It changes their proportions
and juxtaposes them in terms of contiguity, or similarity and contrast;
that is, it takes the path of m etonymy or metaphor (two fundamental
kinds of cinematic structure) . . . . A dog does not recognize a painted