From Sergei Eisenstein, a legendary pioneer in filmmaking and director of Battleship Potemkin, Film Form collects twelve essays written between 1928 and 1945 that demonstrate key points in the development of his film theory and in particular his analysis of the sound-film medium. "By turns savagely polemical and whimsically humorous...Eisenstein's last book, like all his writings, is on fire with imagination...Jay Leyda, well-known authority on Eisenstein's work, has done an excellently thorough job of editing and translating."— Saturday Review After D.W. Griffith, the most important figure in the history of the international cinema is Sergei Eisenstein. Both men died in 1948, but Eisenstein left a double legacy: not only was he one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, but he was also a magnificent film theorist, perhaps the most important one ever. This book of his essays, superbly translated and edited by Jay Leyda, reprints some of his most vital writings on the art of the cinema, including articles on the language and structure of the movies, the differences between theater and film, and the author's efforts to adapt Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy for the screen. In "The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram," Eisenstein analyzes the written symbols of the Japanese language as a model for film editing. "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," one of the author's most famous pieces, speaks of Griffith as a Dickensian director and then argues for a kind of filmmaking that transcends Griffith's literal style in order to touch its audience on an ideological and metaphorical level. This volume also includes the notorious "statement" on sound movies, which argues against the use of synchronous sound and in favor of jarring, contrapuntal audio that Eisenstein believed would add new dimensions to the talking picture. Idiosyncratic, engrossing, and brilliant, Eisenstein's essays will inspire you to reevaluate everything you thought you knew about the movies. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, who was born in Riga in 1898, first achieved world fame with his silent film Potemkin in 1925. Although he completed only six films before his death in 1948, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers and film theoreticians of our time. Film Form Essays in Film Theory By Sergei Eisenstein, Jay Leyda Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Copyright © 1977 Jay Leyda All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-15-630920-2 Contents Title Page, Table of Contents, Copyright, Introduction, Through Theater To Cinema, The Unexpected, The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram, A Dialectic Approach To Film Form, Photos, The Filmic Fourth Dimension, Methods of Montage, A Course In Treatment, Film Language, Film Form: New Problems, The Structure of The Film, Achievement, Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today, Appendix A, Appendix B, Notes on Texts and Translations, Sources, Index, About the Author, Footnotes, CHAPTER 1 Through Theater To Cinema IT IS interesting to retrace the different paths of today's cinema workers to their creative beginnings, which together compose the multi-colored background of the Soviet cinema. In the early 1920s we all came to the Soviet cinema as something not yet existent. We came upon no ready- built city; there were no squares, no streets laid out; not even little crooked lanes and blind alleys, such as we may find in the cinemetropolis of our day. We came like bedouins or gold-seekers to a place with unimaginably great possibilities, only a small section of which has even now been developed. We pitched our tents and dragged into camp our experiences in varied fields. Private activities, accidental past professions, unguessed crafts, unsuspected eruditions — all were pooled and went into the building of something that had, as yet, no written traditions, no exact stylistic requirements, nor even formulated demands. Without going too far into the theoretical debris of the specifics of cinema, I want here to discuss two of its features. These are features of other arts as well, but the film is particularly accountable to them. Primo: photo-fragments of nature are recorded; secundo: these fragments are combined in various ways. Thus, the shot (or frame), and thus, montage. Photography is a system of reproduction to fix real events and elements of actuality. These reproductions, or photoreflections, may be combined in various ways. Both as reflections and in the manner of their combination, they permit any degree of distortion — either technically unavoidable or deliberately calculated. The results fluctuate from exact naturalistic combinations of visual, interrelated experiences to complete alterations, arrangements unforeseen by nature, and even to abstract formalism, with remnants of reality. The apparent arbitrariness of matter, in its relation to the status quo of nature, is much less arbitrary than it seems. The fina