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Montage October : Dialectic of the Shot*

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Montage October : Dialectic of the Shot* Montage October : Dialectic of the Shot* ROSALIND E. KRAUSS While the conventional film directs the emotions, this suggests an opportunity to encourage and direct the whole thought process, as well. —Eisenstein Ten years after the event, Grigory Alexandrov, Sergei Eisenstein’s colleague and codirector, wrote about their one audience with Joseph Stalin in the tones of childlike reverence and obedience that reveal the loss of innocence rather than its opposite. “The idea,” his account began, “that we, young Soviet filmmakers, were to see the great leader of the people, to talk with him personally, filled us with excitement and joy.” And it ended with, “We were sincerely sorry that the talk with Cde Stalin had not taken place before we made our film. It would have been a very different film. .” 1 The interview had been held in the spring of 1929, in the interval between the completion and the official release of The General Line , Eisenstein’s fourth film. Stalin had expressed displeasure about the ending of the film, which purported to express the official position on the collectivization of agriculture. And his criticism had resonated through the Communist Party ranks to deprive the film of its origi - nal release title, substituting instead Old and New , a title that would no longer sig - nal the work as an embodiment of official Soviet directive. During that same meet - ing, Stalin had said something else. The “great friend of Soviet cinema” had spo - ken of the weakness of his comrade filmmakers’ grasp of Marxism. “Cde Stalin spoke heatedly,” reports Alexandrov, “about the slight acquaintance that masters of Soviet film art had with the works of Marx. .” Alexandrov does not describe Eisenstein’s reaction to that remark, and Eisenstein himself did not write about the interview or discuss it with others. So we can only guess at his despair. Eisenstein’s “acquaintance” with the works of Marx was neither “slight” nor superficial. That same spring, he had written an essay in * This essay was first published in Artforum 11, no. 5 (January 1973), pp. 61–65. 1. Grigory Alexandrov, “Great Friend of Soviet Cinema,” Iskusstvo kino (December 1939), as quoted by Jay Leyda in Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: Allen and Unwinn, 1960) , pp. 266–69. OCTOBER 162, Fall 2017, pp. 133 –144. © Artforum, January 1973. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00313 by guest on 26 September 2021 134 OCTOBER which he had optimistically connected his passion for film theory with Theory of Historical Materialism , and he had prefaced his own discourse, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” with the following statement: According to Marx and Engels the dialectic system is only the conscious reproduction of the dialectic course (substance) of the external events of the world. 2 In that essay, Eisenstein had attempted to tie film—from its most rudimenta - ry physical basis, namely the creation of an impression of movement, to its capacity for the most subtle kind of historical analysis—back into the revolution of con - sciousness that was dialectical materialism. The most basic of cinematic facts, Eisenstein reasoned, addressed itself to the dialectic. The action of two sequential film frames projected upon the retina was to superimpose a discordance of detail. And out of that discord arose the synthetic concept that was motion. Film was thus a proof of the materialist basis of thought, and if that were true, film could mature into the appropriate testing ground of the materialist view of history. In his text, Eisenstein then turns to the film he had made as the great laboratory of that test, the film that was to have been both drama and explanation, the film that was simultaneously to project the triumph of Marxist history and to act as an exegesis of Marxist thought: October . Eisenstein turns to October as the workshop of his insight into the dialectical foundations of film. It was undoubtedly on the basis of October that Eisenstein announced in 1928 his ambition to film Marx’s Capital .3 He had had one year to make October . It was to be completed by November 7, 1927, for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. It had not been finished on time, and was only released several months later, in March of 1928. 4 In Russia the film was received with coolness and the disappointment of incomprehension. In the United States it was accused of massive subjectivism, 5 a posture of recoil that was to harden by 1931 within the Soviet Union into an offi - cial criticism of Eisenstein as a formalist. Eisenstein, it was said, had not been able to understand the internal basis of the Revolution. “No attempt is made to present the Revolution as a link in an historic process.” Eisenstein, thrown back upon his own subjectivism, had remained outside of the events so that “the film, which was 2. Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949), p. 45. The quote Eisenstein uses is from Razumovsky, Theory of Historical Materialism (1928). 3. See Leyda, Kino , p. 246. 4. The lateness of October was in part due to the need, after Trotsky’s expulsion late in 1927, to recut certain scenes in the film to play down Trotsky’s role in the Revolution. See Kino , pp. 237–39; and Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein (London: Bodley Head, 1952), p. 101. Outside of the Soviet Union the film was released as Ten Days That Shook the World . 5. Alexander Bakshy, “The Language of Images,” The Nation (December 26, 1928), as quoted in Seton, Eisenstein , p. 103. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00313 by guest on 26 September 2021 Montage October 135 to have been a history of the October Revolution, becomes a horde of dead objects covered with the dust of museums.” 6 Ten years after October was shot, the outcry had become so insistent that it had to be answered. The form of the answer was a self-denunciation, a bewildered examination by Eisenstein of his own “mistake.” The mistake is rooted in one deep-seated intellectual and individualist illusion . It is an illusion which Lenin consistently decried, an illusion which Stalin tirelessly exposes—the illusion that one may accomplish truly revolutionary work “on one’s own,” outside the fold of the collec - tive . This intellectual illusion was the main cause of mistakes and quixotic digressions from the right way of presenting questions and answering them. These individual digressions result in the political dis - tortion of the events portrayed and a wrong political interpretation of the subject. Unripened revolutionary feelings, which should have been replaced long ago by disciplined Bolshevik consciousness, are the source of errors that, subjectively mistaken, become objectively harmful, despite affirmative intentions and purposes . By turn of mind I am much given to generalization. But is it that gener - alization which the Marxist doctrine of realism teaches us to under - stand? No. For in my work generalization destroys the individual. Instead of being derived through the concrete and the particular, gen - eralization trails off into detached abstraction. 7 But the anger and distrust of Eisenstein’s pretensions to being a revolution - ary filmmaker never really abated—neither in the Soviet Union nor among the Left in the West. In 1955 the critic Robert Warshow poured out his anger against Eisenstein’s “glassy and inhuman . brilliance,” calling his work “vulgar” and “a falsehood,” and accusing him of “playing with corpses.” 8 Disapproving of montage as a weapon to sever into pieces the uninterrupted wholeness of reality, to excise separate details out of the body of an objectively real space and to force them into conjunction within the flow of the film in order to produce concepts or signifi - cances, Warshow inveighs against montage and its “meanings.” 9 “If they had got 6. Ivan Anisimov, “The Films of Eisenstein,” International Literature 3 (1931), reprinted in Seton, Eisenstein , pp. 494–503. The above quote is from page 500. 7. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Mistakes of Bezhin Lug ,” International Literature 8 (1937), reprinted in Seton, Eisenstein , pp. 372–77. 8. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 281. 9. In her article “Screen/Surface: The Politics of Illusionism,” Artforum 11, no. 1 (September 1972), Annette Michelson, drawing a parallel between Warshow’s repugnance with the montage of Russian film of the 1920s and the more closely argued but similar rejection of it by André Bazin, devel - ops the view of the aesthetic and intellectual presuppositions operative for both. Bazin’s reasons appear Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00313 by guest on 26 September 2021 136 OCTOBER the chance,” Warshow says of Eisenstein and Pudovkin and Dovzhenko, “they would have made a handsome montage of my corpse too, and given it a mean - ing—their meaning,” he hisses, “and not mine.” * It is hard to know what it means to be accused of “meaning”—especially when October was to be about the sudden access to meaning. In showing the events that led up to and culminated in the October Revolution’s storming of the Winter Palace, Eisenstein had no intention to passively reflect a chain of circumstance. As I hope to show, he wanted to project that moment when access to the meaning of History in turn gave access to the meaning of real space, a meaning that was unmis - takably couched in the meaning of political power. The space that his critics loved so much, the great space of documentary, the space unmanipulated by camera or editor, was a space that Eisenstein also respect - ed and understood.
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