montage

The Virtual Life of Film by D.N. Rodowick

by

The Wachowski’s The Matrix

Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007.

Rodowick’s philosophical musings on the curious circumstances at the beginning of the 21st century which saw the physical nature of the cinematographic medium changing from real film to digital capture, processing, and projection. Full of asides that feel just as valuable as his main ideas, which follow Stanley Cavell’s notions of the automatisms of media as their defining features, the book is dense and a little difficult to navigate. Luckily, in his preface he provides a succinct overview of his argument and its progress.

In his first section, he argues that even though the physical film is changing, the concepts and ways of understanding visual media propagated by film throughout the 20th century still retain a tight grasp on the current technology such that we can still use many of the ways of understanding images derived from film theory and our narrative practices still largely spring from classical Hollywood narrative structures.

In his second section, he spends a lot of pages working through understanding what the film medium provided artists and audiences in its automatism, or those elements that were central to the operation of the medium itself. Largely agreeing with and expanding upon Cavell’s ideas, Rodowick suggests that film (and photography before it), are isomorphic in their capturing of reality. That is, a photograph captures the shape and time of the physical world as it existed in the moment of capture. A film does the same thing but over the course of time itself, an additional automatism Rodowick names as “succession.” Rodowick argues that the automatisms of automatic isomorphic capture has been largely understood via its spatial representative powers, the idea that the photograph contains evidence of a place, while Rodowick argues that the temporal element is more important, it contains evidence of a place from the past. The photograph (and film) therefore brings evidence of the past to us in the present and creates an uneasy mixture of the two, a mixture that never fully coalesces into one thing but remains separate via the screen. Up there is the past, here in the present. Because of these automatisms, the physical nature of the cinematographic medium is crucial to understanding the way film effects us as audience members. When it disappears, Rodowick argues, something of great value is lost.

Part three is focused on that loss, and its digital replacement. Rodowick essentially argues that because digital capture is non-isomorphic because the light inputs are separated from the numerical outputs (that can be infinitely manipulated), it loses that sense of pastness that film once had and brought to the culture. In its place, Rodowick argues, the digital image creates a kind of ever-presentness (and interactive past) through its automatisms of constantly-refreshing, pixel-based “montage.” Basically, if every pixel is the smallest discrete unit of a digital image, Rodowick sees the digital image as already composed of the juxtaposition of those pixels in a way that creates a montage effect even in the still image. The fact that motion (or the simulation of it) is created by changing each of those pixels individually extremely quickly rather than the succession of images means that there is no longer such a thing as a shot, at least not without some modification. Rodowick proposes this drastic reconsideration of what the digital image is and how it works to reassert the value of film theory and terms to understand what’s happening, at least right now.

He astutely argues that the conventions of film and film theory still hold sway over the digital, even if the digital is fundamentally different from the filmic. Since artists, technology developers and engineers, and audiences still crave the sense of “perceptual realism” defined by the century of filmic history which says that what we see is a real record of the past as it was, modern digital images must still follow the rules of that perceptual realism, which asserts the physical reality of the image through the single-point perspective and laws of physics. It’s no wonder that digital images recreate these elements to claim a grounding in reality when their automatisms do not assert it themselves.

It’s a fascinating book, full of dialogue with film theorists like Metz and Bazin and Barthes and, of course, Cavell. On the digital side, Lev Manovich and Bolter and Grusin get their due as well. Film philosophy isn’t strictly my thing, and it usually takes me much longer to get through, but I also find it intensely fascinating. I noticed I was watching a movie after reading Rodowick’s breakdown of the digital image and I felt like I could see the pixels shifting, fundamentally changing the way I looked at digital images. That’s powerful stuff.

Film, A Sound Art by Michel Chion

by

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Chion, Michel. 2009. Film, A Sound Art. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In this giant text, Michel Chion attempts to revise the way we think of film’s relation to sound, specifically to move towards a way of thinking about images and sounds in an inextricably entwined way such that any analysis which takes the two realms as separate (or even ignores one) would be seen as fundamentally deficient. In an attempt to make his argument as forcefully as possible, Chion splits his text into two parts, with the first tracing the technical and aesthetic history of sound’s relation to image in cinema before a longer section that sees him more thoroughly investigating some of the claims, theoretical nooks and crannies, and expansions of the ideas first presented in the history section.

The history section contains Chion’s most thoroughly organized thoughts on how ideas about sound’s integration with image developed via a complex interrelation between technological advancements, artistic experimentation, and cultural factors (the prevalence of disembodied sound via the radio, for example). Here he calls what is traditionally termed “silent” cinema “deaf cinema” instead (a play on the French term “mute cinema”) because it was never silent in the first place, it just couldn’t fully respond to the sounds that were being played alongside the images. He also claims, convincingly, that sound film is a palimpsestic art form where the silence of the first type of cinema remains underneath the integrated sound film, waiting for the soundtrack to die down to return. In this section he also writes about the way that the technology advancements of the 70s (problematically but still effectively collected under the branded Dolby designation), which featured not just the splitting of audio tracks into locationally distinct speaker locations (aka surround sound) but also a broader dynamic range of possible sounds, allowed for the (re)development of impressionistic creation of space via sound. The introduction of digital recording and playback is the last technological advancement that Chion writes of in this section, and he claims that it allows for true silence in a way that optically recorded and played sound couldn’t, as well as the further development of microediting sounds that makes sound effects a more powerful and varied tool for filmmakers.

The second part of Chion’s text takes a different tack, abandoning a linear progression of events and developments for a topic-by-topic trip through the various ways that sound and image relate to each other on film. One big theme that runs through this section is that the relationship between those two realms is not nearly as neat or easy to understand as it seems. He calls the audiovisual relationship a continuous “vertical” Kuleshov effect because at every moment the image is influencing how we perceive the sounds while the sounds influence how we perceive the images (231). Sounds come from different realms, ranging from simple on-screen representation to complicated interplays of off-screen sounds and music and dialogue that can greatly effect how an image is understood.

Chion also writes about how sound creates a sense of time and place within (alongside? throughout?) a film. Because sounds have a definite duration (even if that duration is endless) they are the elements of film that create time more profoundly than the shot, the image, which might be as short or as long as the director wants. A ticking clock creates a sense of time much more than the image of a clock does. Similarly, the filmmaker can use sound to create a sense of an expansive vista with wind sounds and the recorded (or recreated) sounds of bugs chirping in such a way that gives more life to the image of such a scene. Sound can expand beyond the screen, and so can be used to manipulate the way an audience feels about the images they are seeing on that screen.

Chion writes also of the critical role voice plays in film, noting that even films that decenter intelligible speech (the works of Tati, to call out Chion’s favorite exemplar) still rely upon the vocal to structure the film and specifically the sounds of the film. Even sounds of speech that cannot be distinguished from each other and given their full meaning are being used to specifically deny the vocal’s power. He also writes that the voice might be considered another kind of special effect as actors manipulate their voices for volume, intelligibility, and timbre, to say nothing of post-processing that further changes that vocal performance. Of course, voices can sing as well, and join in with the musical element of filmmaking, and we all know examples of dialogue that have been called melodic. Again, things are not easily categorizable.

Finally, Chion writes convincingly about the way that music structures film experiences, as most films do not feature a full-length score. The music then becomes an important signifier of crucial moments, either as a type of drumroll that sets up an important action, scene, or bit of dialogue, or instead plays underneath such an event to color that event differently (either increasing or decreasing the intensity of the event or instead providing some other way of thinking about it entirely). Music with words, Chion argues, is largely useful for turning the specifics of a scene into a more universally applicable situation. A love scene with a song featuring lyrics about “she and he” or “you and I” turns that love scene into a scene about all romantic pairings, including ones featuring the “I” of an audience member.

Chion concludes the book by writing about how sound is used to “equalize” film, to smooth off the edges of the film viewing experience to create something immediately understandable and graspable in the way that, he says, great art does. It returns us, he claims, to the state of the child experiencing things anew and marveling at the way they work rather than categorizing them into hierarchies in the way that our society would expect of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG-HRiBWrlM

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

The scholar most frequently cited in this text is Rick Altman, the other major theorist who wrote primarily about the use of sound in film. Even then, he is most frequently cited to say that another scholar has indeed already touched upon the idea at hand. Chion doesn’t overly reference other scholars, instead taking a pretty (although not entirely) wide base of films up for discussion as his method for ensuring a breadth of ideas. It is clear, from the title through the text itself, that Chion’s project is an intervention into the discussion of aesthetics, poetics, and the history of film arguing that those areas of film scholarship have ignored or downplayed the importance of sound to film. Even though the introduction of sound is indeed a large part of film history, Chion still thinks that scholars have not yet fully understood or dealt with the implications of its introduction on cinema or lasting effects.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

As I wrote about above, the book is split into two parts. In the first half the ideas are presented chronologically, following the development of sound technologies, strategies, and effects as they were introduced to film. In this section the technology becomes the dominant element, and the theory and examples come out of it. In the second section, which is arranged thematically around big ideas or kinds of film sounds, Chion will often start with one big idea or term before outlining several different ways that cinema has operationalized those ideas or terms via copious examples. This might also happen several times in a chapter as Chion touches upon a few different but related ideas or bits of theory.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The biggest rhetorical move that Chion engages in is to first call forth a (bad or incomplete) understanding of how something related to sound in film works before explaining why it is wrong and then explaining his way of conceiving it. This works pretty well for his project to assert the importance of sound in the analysis of film.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Probably the biggest complaint one might make in regards to Chion’s text (aside from its length!) is the somewhat limited scope of his filmic examples. He brags at one point about how he’s not afraid to look at the non-auteurist works that his fellow French theorist apparently ignore. But that largely amounts to an obsession with (the admittedly great) Blade Runner and everybody’s favorite, Hitchcock. The rest of his examples come from American and European Art House movies with brief stays in Japan ever few chapters. This aligns him pretty strongly with the stuffy movies that people think film theorists usually write about. Plenty of Tarkovsky and Bresson here, for example. He claims to be working on a book that would complement this one focused on world cinema, and I hope he does eventually publish it if only to broaden his scope beyond the staid grounds he’s mostly treading here.

Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

He’s got a whole glossary and invents a new term or two every chapter, so he’s got a heck of a lot of key terms. The ones that stick out for me are: sound, image, synchresis, time, space, music, voice, Dolby, silence, montage, onscreen, offscreen, the “fundamental noise of cinema,” realism

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

The “whirring of the machine” is, of course, the first noise of the cinema. This noise that would persist, concretely or symbolically, into the sound film is what I call the fundamental noise, in other words the sound that refers ultimately to the projection mechanism itself. (8)

This is what the so-called sound cinema made possible, even when films were not taking advantage of its ability to make dialogue audible. The new cinema standardized film projection speeds once and for all (at twenty-four frames per second, imposed by the demands of sound reproduction), whereas previously both cameras and projectors could run at variable speeds, generally anywhere between twelve and twenty frames per second. Henceforth the cinema could literally count on constancy in the reproduction of actors movements and gestures. Moreover, it allowed the auteur director, the era’s king (think of Stroheim before his problems with the studios or of Murnau, Gance, Eisenstein, and Clair), to control the music – and the silence – down to the second and to know that all audiences would hear exactly what he desired. (35)

But even before Dolby, in the history of the sound film, sound slowly expanded farther into the low and high frequency ranges; It became denser and more refined. This often went unnoticed. No one said at a particular moment that the sound was different. But things on the screen were perceived to have more physical presence, and the film’s time became more urgent. […] On the screen everything looks right, but in the découpage, the construction of screen space, everything has changed. The image no longer establishes the scenic space – sound does that – now the image only presents points of view on it. (119)

There is no pure silent cinema on one side and sound (or talking) cinema on the other; they mutually implicate each other. (184)

The absence of a clear rhetoric for sound is also linked to the absence of any symbolic mediator of our hearing, something that would function as the “symbolic microphone” allowing us to participate in the effects and at the same time keep our distance from them, a double position readily occupied by the “symbolic camera.” (212)

Indeed, as I see it, the audiovisual relation is 90% a generalized Kuleshov effect, but it is a Kuleshov effect that is “vertical” (through the projection of one element onto another simultaneously) instead of “horizontal” (projection of the meaning or the effect of one element onto another that precedes or follows it), such that it is much more immediate and perennially produces an illusion of redundancy. (231)

Synchresis can thus override the perception of realism. Cinema has created codes of “truth” – in fact what feels true – that have nothing to do with what is true. Cinema prefers the symbol, the emblematic sound, over the sound of reality. The proof is the alarm or siren sound in city scenes. (241)

Can’t we say that the voice is the mother of all special effects – one that requires the least technology and expense? A good actor or comic imitator, and practically anyone who has had some training and practice, is capable of altering his or her voice and giving it all kinds of inflections, using only the natural bodily resources that nature has provided. Moreover, an individual’s voice changes through life much more than his or her face changes (this is particularly so for males, whose vocal timbre changes significantly at puberty). Though it is common to see facial features in childhood photos that survive in the grown adults, there is unlikely to be any relation between an individual’s voice as a child and his or her voice in middle age. (337)

A song would seem, a priori, to be the opposite of a talking film: the first is set to music while films are mostly spoken; a song is often composed of verse, with rhyme and rhythm, while movie dialogue is in prose. A song posits an I, you, he, and she that are indeterminate, often symbolic or generalized, while sound films present specific characters. A song takes place over a short, highly structured length of time with predictable symmetries and repetitions, while a film is expected to advance without repeating itself. Finally, a song can have extremely varied modes of existence – played with instruments only, hummed, whistled, shouted, la-la-la’d, recited – while dialogue most often comes in only one form. It is precisely because the song is so different that above and beyond its centrality to musicals, in many films it takes the role of a pivot or turntable, a point of contact. The song opens a horizon, a perspective, and escape route for characters mired in their individual story. The song is what often creates a link between individual characters’ destinies and the human collectivity to which they belong. When we hear a film referring to “you and me,” in a scene where two characters are getting together or breaking apart, we think of a “she” and a “he” that transcend the woman and man we see on the screen. We leave behind any individual psychologism that often circumscribes the sound film. (428)

These fundamental noises are like reminders of the sound of the movie projector, the mechanical place from which the film unwinds to begin and then returns at its end. The fundamental noise – always a complex sound mass – is the emergence of the background noise of the film’s apparatus; it represents the sound out of which everything emerges and into which everything melts back and is reabsorbed. (454)

Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein

by

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin

Eisenstein, Sergei. 1949. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Translated by Jay Leyda. New York City: Harcourt Inc.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Sergei Eisenstein writes (though several of these were transcripts of speeches, too) as a filmmaker and theorist who is deeply invested in the ideological implications of the film form that he writes about. Primarily, Eisenstein affirms the value of montage (as a way of presenting inner thought via the collision of images) in opening the possibilities inherent in cinema (as opposed to other artistic media) for promoting the collectivity and solidarity of socialism. Occasionally Eisenstein dips into uncomfortable territory, especially as he writes about the Japanese cinema and, in a somewhat strange digression, Alexandre Dumas, with an unfortunate tendency to dip into cultural and racial stereotypes. He also has a clear bias towards the Soviet cinema for its ideological and formal superiority. As the book is more a collection of essays, I’ll hit the highlights of those instead of trying to pull them all together here, likely missing something in the process.

“Through Theater to the Cinema” – your standard early film theory trope of distinguishing the form from other related forms. Here Eisenstein claims that the shot is the “minimum ‘distortable’ fragment of nature” and that the cinema derives its power from its “natural” ability to capture reality and re-present it differently via montage.

“The Unexpected” – the first of two essays looking at Japanese forms for their relation to the cinema. This first looks at kabuki theater for its “monistic ensemble,” or how each element (sound, costume, action, etc.) is interrelated. This is the start of his later ideas about the evolutions of montage into an organic mechanism.

“The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram” – the second of the Japanese-related essays looks at how the “hieroglyphs” of Japanese writing does what montage does by combining two image-based expressions to create a wholly new expression. It is this which allows for the creator’s imposition upon the events of a film, and it is that process which he refers to as a collision which is like the explosions that drive an internal combustion engine. This is in direct opposition to Kuleshov, who likens montage to links in a chain or bricks arranged to make a building. There is conflict in Eisenstein’s conception that is absent in Kuleshov’s.

“A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” – Here Eisenstein builds upon the collision idea he developed in the previous essay to write about how montage comes from untangling the inherent conflict in a single image. He writes that one image invites the next because of its composition, and that when done correctly, the collision of those images can be used not only to direct emotion, as happens in many films, but also to direct thought processes (more on this later).

“The Filmic Fourth Dimension” – Eisenstein expands upon the previous essays by writing about the “orthodox” montage style, which uses a key image, usually early in the montage sequence, to guide the way audiences think about the other images present in the montage. He offers that his newest film, Old and New, was assembled differently such that each image was given equal weight, no one image was dominant, which created a “complex” “summary” effect similar to over and undertones in symphonic music (66). These overtones, which he says will inspire a new sensory response not of “I see” or “I hear” but “I feel,” will not be findable in a single image just the way a moment of music won’t reveal the complex relationships between the sounds that develop over time. Only projected film that unfolds over time will reveal the overtonal nature of the montage.

“Methods of Montage” – In this essay Eisenstein categorizes the ways of assembling montage, from “metric” (adhering to strict mathematical formulas), to rhythmic (an evolution of the prior which adjusts its speeds according to the feeling present), to tonal (montage with an emphasis on the “general tone” of the piece (75)), to overtonal (as discussed in the previous essay, which is tonal (dominant idea) plus overtones (shading according to creator’s desires). The idea is that each successive type of montage grows from complicating the prior one by adding new ideas to it such that the overtonal montage builds to a level where it can create phsysiological reactions in the audience. He concludes the essay by positing that a fifth type of montage might be possible, one which would take the overtonal ideas an apply them not to emotions but ways of thinking. Through such a kind of montage, the audience might be directed to think differently.

“A Course in Treatment” – Eisenstein goes a long way into literary theory to eventually arrive at the idea that the modernists like James Joyce were invested in presenting inner thought via written language, but that cinema can achieve that goal better because only cinema can juxtapose those images in such a way that it recreates the thought process of Free Indirect Discourse. Maybe he had never read a comic?

“Film Language” – a lot of Russian lit that I’m not familiar with enough to really get a full picture of his ideas in this one, unfortunately. He ends it by exhorting his fellow filmmakers to not only become great storytellers but great masters of their chosen form as well, for how a story is told as important as the story itself. That’s all I got.

“Film Form: New Problems” – In this essay Eisenstein recognizes that film montage is dependent upon synecdoche (paging Perez!), which is a way of representing inner thought (this thing is part of this other thing, or this other thing has this as its part) and that such a technique is able to create “emotional sensual” effects (133). He concludes by noting film’s dialectical drives, one upwards on a path towards intellectual enlightenment, and one downwards towards the basest emotional responses. The idea, he says, is to get as far up the intellectual climb as you can while using those emotional response to compel the viewer.

“The Structure of the Film” – Here Eisenstein is concerned with how film can not only show events happening but impart a sense of the artist’s ideas about those events. This is the point of art, he claims. He also develops in this essay his other big idea, the sense of organic completeness that a film might achieve. He claims that if art can achieve this organic completeness (akin to the ideas of kabuki theater from an earlier essay where every element is related to each other and working towards expressing one main idea through emotion), it can create an ecstatic feeling in the audience member that will result in changing them profoundly. This is all wrapped up in some questionable “natural” rhetoric, but the idea is solid on its own I think.

“Achievement” – A return to two themes that run through the book: 1. Cinema is the highest art because it is a combination of the others but not bound by their limitations, and 2. The Soviets are better at it than everybody else. He calls cinema the first truly synthetic medium because it allows each form of art to exist independently within it, simultaneously coalescing into an “organic essence” (193).

“Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today” – This essay finds Eisenstein primarily concerned with looking to the so called “masters” of the past for traces of what he’s talked about in the other essays in order to define a pre-history of cinematic thought. From Dickens he sees a desire to observe and juxtapose (or collide) characters, images, and ideas to create new combinations without destroying the singularity of the original images. He claims that Griffith, the American filmmaker he thinks is best at montage, can only create basic relational chains between images, while the Soviets are already adept at not only linking images but also unifying them in the same organic completeness he wrote about earlier. So take that, Griffith. And you’re a racist, too.

The two biggest takeaways are:

  1. Montage is about collisions of images which create entirely new ideas and feelings in the audience’s head.
  2. The highest ideal of montage is to create an entire film that marshals all of the elements (characters, plot, montage, shots, sound) to an “organically complete” whole which will change an audience member’s way of thinking about a particular thing.

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Eisenstein occasionally clashes with other Soviet theorists (Kuleshov, as mentioned above), but that’s about it on the debating front. So early in film theory’s history, his place was to stake out a position rather than to converse too much with others, because there weren’t that many others writing at this time. Of course, his career as a filmmaker influences his writing as well, and he thinks highly of himself in that regard. It is also important to consider that some of these were or started as speeches, which involve different kinds of rhetorical engagement than an essay does. And obviously his legacy lives on as somebody with whom many theorists today still converse with in their writing about film form.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Eisenstein seems to have set out in each essay to get one main idea across, he’ll usually introduce the main idea before delving into specifics and then concluding with a final statement (that often either points towards a new way of thinking or filmmaking) to solidify his thesis. Most of his essays take his own films as examples, though he occasionally looks elsewhere (Japan, Griffith) as well.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Eisenstein writes (or is transcribed) in a way that attempts to capture the passion he obviously has for the theory and ideas he’s presenting in these essays. Italics, short paragraphs, photo stills and graphics enhance his persuasive attempts. He’ll also build upon what he’s said before, often referencing the prior essay in the book explicitly. This creates a sense of a life’s work that is in constant development. He’ll readily denigrate ideas and styles of filmmaking (and montage specifically) that he thinks are out of touch or outmoded.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I probably won’t look to Eisenstein first for most of my own writing and idea formation, but it’s great to have a stronger sense of his ideas as I dive into later theorists who reference him a lot. I also bristle at the easy and un(der)developed appeal to nature that he pulls several times in this book, even if I am drawn to his explanation of an organically complete work that is entirely devoted to getting one idea across.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

nature, organic, complete, montage, overtonal, pathos, synecdoche, collision, dialectical, internal thought, film form

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

The shot, considered as material for the purpose of composition, is more resistant than granite. This resistance is specific to it. The shot’s tendency toward complete factual immutability is rooted in its nature. This resistance has largely determined the richness and variety of montage forms and styles – for montage becomes the mightiest means for a really important creative remolding of nature. Thus the cinema is able, more than any other art, to disclose the process that goes on microscopically in all other arts. The minimum “distortable” fragment of nature is the shot; ingenuity in its combinations is montage. (5)

By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, it’s cell – the shot? By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision. (37)

In distinction from orthodox montage according to particular dominance, Old and New was edited differently. In place of an “aristocracy” of individualistic dominance we brought a method of “democratic” equality of rights for all provocations, or stimuli, regarding them as a summary, as a complex. (66)

What takes place in acoustics, and particularly in the case of instrumental music, fully corresponds with this. There, along with the vibration of a basic dominant tone, comes a whole series of similar vibrations, which are called overtones and undertones. Their impacts against each other, their impacts with the basic tone, and so on, envelop the basic tone and a whole host of secondary vibrations. If in acoustics these collateral vibrations become merely “disturbing” elements, these same vibrations and music – in composition, become one of the most significant means for affect by the experimental composers of our century, such as Debussy and Scriabin. (66)

The dialectic of works of art is built upon a most curious “dual-unity.” The effectiveness of a work of art is built upon the fact that there takes place in it a dual process: an impetuous progressive rise along the lines of the highest explicit steps of consciousness and a simultaneous penetration by means of the structure of the form into the layers of our profoundest sensual thinking. The polar separation of these two lines of flow creates that remarkable tension of unity of form and content characteristic of true art-works. Apart from this there are no true art-works. (144-5)

Evidently, whatever may be the kind of organic-ness in it, the work has a completely individual affect on its perceivers, not only because it is raised to the level of natural phenomena, but also because the laws of its construction are simultaneously the laws governing those who perceive the work, inasmuch as this audience is also part of organic nature. Each spectator feels himself organically related, fused, united with a work of such a type, just as he senses himself united and fused with organic nature around him. (161)

Only when the work becomes organic, only when it can enter the conditions of a higher organic-ness – into the field of pathos as we understand it, when the theme and content and idea of the work become an organically continuous unity with the ideas, the feelings, with the very breath of the author. Only when organic-ness itself takes on the strictest forms of constructing a work, only when the artistry of a master’s perceptions reach the last gleam of formal perfection. Then and only then will occur a genuine organic-ness of a work, which enters the circle of natural and social phenomena as a fellow member with equal rights, as an independent phenomenon. (174)

Only in cinema can real events, preserving all the richness of material and sensual fullness, be simultaneously – epic, in the revelation of their content, dramatic, in the treatment of their subject, and lyrical to that degree of perfection from which is echoed the most delicate nuance of the author’s experience of the theme – possible only in such an exquisite model of form as the system of audiovisual images of the cinema. When a film-work, or any part of one achieves this triple dramatic synthesis, its impressive power is particularly great. (190)

For here – in cinema – for the first time we have achieved a genuinely synthetic art – an art of organic synthesis in its very essence, not a concert of co-existent, contiguous, “linked,” but actually independent arts. (193-4)

For us montage became a means of achieving a unity of higher order – a means through the montage image of achieving an organic embodiment of a single idea conception, embracing all elements, parts, details of the film work. And thus understood, it seems considerably broader than an understanding of narrowly cinematographic montage; thus understood, it carries much to fertilize and enrich our understanding of art methods in general. And in conformity with this principle of our montage, unity and diversity are both sounded as principles. Montage removes its last contradictions by abolishing dualist contradictions and mechanical parallelism between the realms of sound and sight and what we understand as audio-visual (“vertical”) montage. (254)