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THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE AND THE IDEOGRAM

IT IS a weird and wonderful feat to have written a pamphlet on som.ething that in reality does not exist. There is, for ex­ ample, no such thing as a cin�ma without cinematography. And yet the author of the pamphlet preceding this essay • has contrived to write a book about the cinema of a country that has no cinematog;rapby. About the cinema of a country that has, in its culture, an infinite number of cinematographic traits, strewn everywhere with the sole exception of-its cin­ ema.

This essay is on the cinematographic traits of Japanese cul­ ture that lie outside the Japanese cinema, and is itself as apart from the preceding pamphlet as these traits are apart from the Japanese cinema.

Onema is: so many corporations, such and such tun10vers of capital, so and so many stars, such and such dramas.

Cinematography is, first and foremost, montage. The Japanese cinema is excellently equipped with corpora­

tions, actors, and stories. But the Japanese cinema is completely unaware of montage. Nevertheless the principle of montage can be identified as the basic element of japanese representa­ tional culture.

Writing-for their writing is primarily representational. The hieroglyph. The naturalistic image of an object, as portrayed by the skil­

ful Chinese hand of Ts’ang Chieh 2650 years before our era,

• Eisenstein’s essay was originally published as an “afterword” to N. Kaufman’s pamphlet, Japanese Cinema (Moscow, 1929).

28

THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE AND mE IDEOORAM %9

becomes slightly formalized and, with its 5 39 fellows, forms the first “contingent” of hieroglyphs. Scratched out with a stylus on a slip of bamboo, the portrait of an object maintained a resemblance to its original in every respect.

But then, by the end of the third century, tlle brush is in­ vented. In the first century after the “joyous event” (A.D.)­ paper. And, lastly, in the year :no-India ink.

A complete upheaval. A revolution in draughtsmanship. And, after having undergone in the course of history no fewer than fourteen different styles of handwriting, the hieroglyph crystallized in its present form. The means of production (brush and India ink) determined the form.

The fourteen reforms had their way. As a result:

In the fierily cavorting hieroglyph ma (a horse) it is already impossible to recognize the features of the dear little horse sagging pathetically in its hindquarters, in the writing style of Ts’ang Chieh, so well-known from ancient Chinese bronzes.

But let it rest in the Lord, this dear little horse, together with the other 6o7 remaining hsilmg cbeng symbols-the earli­ est extant category of hieroglyphs.

The real interest begins with the second category of hiero­ glyphs-the huei-i, i.e., “copulative.”

The point is that the copulation (perhaps we had better say, the combination) of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is

30 FILM FORM

to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as a value of another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination cor­ responds to a concept. From separate hieroglyphs has been fused-the ideogram. By the combination of two “depictables” is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable.

For example: the picture for water and the picture of an eye signifies “to weep”; the picture of an ear near the drawing of a door = “to listen”;

a dog + a mouth = “to bark”; a mouth + a child = “to scream”; a mouth + a bird = “to sing”; a knife + a heart = “sorrow,” and so on.1 But this is-montage! Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots

that are depictive, single in meaning, neutral in content-into intellectual contexts and series.

This is a means and method inevit2ble in any cinemato­ graphic exposition. And, in a condensed and purified form, the starting point for the “intellectual cinema.”

For a cinema seeking a maximum laconism for the visual representation of abstract concepts.

And we hail the method of the long-lamented Ts’ang Chieh as a first step along these paths.

We have mentioned laconism. Laconism furnishes us a tran­ sition to another point. Japan possesses the most laconic form of poetry: the haikai (appearing at·. the beginning of the thirteenth century and known today as “haiku” or “hokku”) and the even earlier tanka (mythologically assumed to have been created along with heaven and earth).

Both are little more than hieroglyphs transposed into phrases. So much so that half their quality is appraised by their cal-

THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC �RINCIPLE AND THE IDEOGRAM 31

ligraphy. The method of their resolution is completely analo­ gous to the structure of the ideogram.

As the ideogram provides a means for the laconic imprint­ ing of an abstract concept, the same method, when transposed into literary exposition, gives rise to an identical laconism of pointed imagery.

Applied to the collision of an austere combination of sym­ bols this method results in a dry definition of abstract concepts. The same method, expanded into the luxury of a group of already formed verbal combinations, swells into a splendor of imagist effect.

The concept is a bare formula; its adornment (an expansion by additional material) transforms the formula into an image­ a finished form.

Exacdy, though in reverse, as a primitive thought process­ imagist thinking, displaced to a definite degree, becomes trans­ formed to conceptual thinking.

But let us turn to examples. The haiku is a concentrated impressionist sketch:

A lonely crow On leafless bough,

One autumn eve.

What a resplendent moon! It casts the shadow of pine boughs

Upon the mats. K.IKAKU

An evening breeze blows. The water ripples

Against the blue heron’s legs. BUSON

It is early dawn. The castle is surrounded

By the cries of wild ducks. K.YOROK.U2

32 FILM FORM

The earlier tanka is slightly longer (by two lines):

0 mountain pheasant long are the feathers trail’st thou

on the wooded hill-side- as long the nights seem to me on lonely couch sleep seeking.

HITOMARO[?] 8

From our point of view, these are montage phrases. Shot lists. The simple combination of two or three details of a material kind yields a perfectly finished representation of an­ other kind-psychological.

And if the finely ground edges of the intellectually .defined concepts formed by the combined ideograms are blurred in these poems, yet, in emoti01Ull quality, the concepts have blos­ somed forth immeasurably. We should observe that the emo­ tion is directed towards the reader, for, as Y one Noguchi has said, “it is the readers who make the haiku’s imperfection a perfection of art.” •

It is uncertain in Japanese writing whether its predominating aspect is as a system of characters (denotative), or as an inde­ pendent creation of graphics ( depictive). In any case, born of the dual mating of the depictive by method, and the deno­ tative by purpose, the ideogram continued both these lines (not consecutive historically but consecutive in principle in the minds of those developing the method).

Not only did the denotative line continue into literature, in the tanka, as we have shown, but exactly the same method (in its depictive aspect) operates also in the most perfect ex­ amples of Japanese pictorial art.

Sharaku-creator of the finest prints of the eighteenth cen­ tury, and especially of an immortal gallery of actors’ portraits. The Japanese Daumier. Despite this, almost unknown to us. The characteristic traits of his work have been analyzed only in our century. One of these critics, Julius Kurth, in discussing

THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE AND THE IDEOGRAM 3 3

the question of the influence on Sharaku of sculpture, draws a parallel between his wood-cut portrait of the actor Nakayama Tomisaburo and an antique mask of the semi-religious No theater, the mask of a Rozo.

The faces of both the print and the mask wear an identical ex­ pression . . . • Features and masses are similarly arranged although the mask represents an old priest, and the print a young woman. This relationship is striking, yet these two works are otherwise totally dissimilar; this in itself is a demonstration of Sharaku’s originality. While the carved mask was constructed according to fairly accurate anatomical proportions, the proportions of the por­ trait print are simply impossible. The space between the eyes comprises a width that makes mock of all good sense. The nose is almost twice as long in relation to the eyes as any normal nose would dare to be, and the chin stands in no sort of relation to the mouth; the brows, the mouth, and every feature-is hopelessly misrelated. This observation may be made in all the large beads by Sharaku. That the artist was unaware that all these proportions are false is, of course, out of the question. It was with a full awareness that he repudiated normalcy, and, while the drawing of the separate features depends on severely concentrated naturalism, their proportions have been subordinated to purely intellectual considerations. He set up the essence of the psychic expression as the norm for the proportions of the single features.5

Is not this process that of the ideogram, combining the inde­ pendent “mouth” and the dissociated symbol of “child” to form the significance of “scream”?

34 FILM FORM

Is this not exacdy what we of the cinema do temporally, just as Sharaku in simultaneity, when we cause a monstrous disproportion of the parts of a normally .flowing event, and suddenly dismember the event into “close-up of clutching hands,” “medium shots of the struggle,” and “extreme close-up of bulging eyes,” in making a montage disintegration of the event in various planes? In making an eye twice as large as a man’s full figure?! By combining these monstrous incongruities we newly collect the disintegrated event into one whole, but in our aspect. According to the treatment of our relation to the event.

The disproportionate depiction of an event is organically natural to us from the beginning. Professor Luriya, of the Psychological Institute in Moscow, has shown me a drawing by a child of “lighting a stove.” Everything is represented in passably accurate relationship and with great care. Firewood. Stove. Chimney. But what are those zigzags in that huge cen­ tral rectangle? They turn out to be-matches. Taking into account the crucial importance of these matches for the de­ picted process, the child provides a proper scale for them. •

The representation of objects in the actual (absolute) pro­ portions proper to them is, of course, merely a tribute to

• It is possible to trace this panicular tendency from its ancient, almost pre-historical source (” • • . in all ideational art, objects are given size according to their importance, the king being twice as large as his subjects, or a tree half the size of a man when it merely informs us that the scene is out-of-doors. Something of this principle of size ac­ cording to significance persisted in the Chinese tradition. The favorite disciple of Confucius looked like a little boy beside him and the most important figure in any group was usually the largest.” 6) through the highest development of Chinese art, parent of Japanese graphic arts: ” . . • natural scale always had to bow to rictorial scale . . • size accord­ ing to distance never followed the laws o geometric perspective but the needs of the design. Foreground features might be diminished to avoid obstruction and overemphasis, and far distant objects, which were too minute to count pictorially, might be enlarged to act as a counterpoint to the middle distance or foreground.” 7

mE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE AND THE IDEOGRAM 35

orthodox formal logic. A subordination to an inviolable order of things.

Both in painting and sculpture there is a periodic and invari­ able return to periods of the establishment of absolutism. Dis­ placing the expressiveness of archaic disproportion for regu­ lated “stone tables” of officially decreed harmony.

Absolute realism is by no means the correct form of percep­ tion. It is simply the function of a certain form of social struc­ ture. Following a state monarchy, a state uniformity of thought is implanted. Ideological uniformity of a sort that can be developed pictorially in the ranks of colors and designs of the Guards regiments • • •

Thus we have seen how the principle of the hieroglyph­ “denotation by depiction”-split in two: along the line of its purpose (the principle of “denotation”), into the principles of creating literary imagery; along the line of its method of realizing this purpose (the principle of “depiction”), into the striking methods of expressiveness used by Sharaku. •

And, just as the two outspreading wings of a hyperbola meet, as we say, at infinity (though no one has visited so dis­ tant a region!), so the principle of hieroglyphics, infinitely splitting into two parts (in accordance with the function of symbols), unexpectedly unites again from this dual estrange­ ment, in yet a fourth sphere-in the theater.

Estranged for so long, they are once again-in the cradle period of the drama-present in a parallel form, in a curious dualism.

The significance (denotation) of the action is effected by the reciting of the ] oruri by a voice behind the stage-the representation (depiction) of the action is effected by silent marionettes on the stage. Along with a specific manner of movement this archaism migrated into the early Kabuki the-

• It has been left to James Joyce to develop in literature the depictive line of the Japanese hieroglyph. Every word of Kurth’s analysis of Sharaku may be applied, neatly and easily, to Joyce.

FILM FORM

ater, as well. To this day it is preserved, as a partial method, in the classical repertory (where certain parts of the action are narrated from behind the stage while the actor mimes).

But this is not the point. The most important fact is that into the technique of acting itself the ideographic (montage) method has been wedged in the most interesting ways.

However, before discussing this, let us be allowed the luxury of a digression-on the matter of the shot, to settle the debated question of its nature, once and for all.

A shot. A single piece of celluloid. A tiny rectangular frame in which there is, organized in some way, a piece of an event.

“Cemented together, these shots form montage. When this is done in an appropriate rhythm, of course!”

This, roughly, is what is taught by the old, old school of film-making, that sang:

“Screw by screw, Brick by brick • • .”

Kuleshov, for example, even writes with a brick:

If you have an idea-phrase, a particle of the story, a link in the whole dramatic chain, then that idea is to be expressed and accu­ mulated from shot-ciphers, just like bricks. 8

“The shot is an element of montage. Montage is an assembly of these elements.” This is a most pernicious make-shift an­ alysis.

Here the understanding of the process as a whole ( connec­ tion, shot-montage) derives only from the external indications of its flow (a piece cemented to another piece). Thus it would be possible, for instance, to arrive at the well-known conclu­ sion that street-cars exist in order to be laid across streets. An entirely logical deduction, if one limits oneself to the external indications of the functions they performed during the street­ fighting of February, 1917, here in Russia. But the materialist conception of history interprets it otherwise.

The worst of it is that an approach of this kind does actu­ ally lie, like an insurmountable street-car, across the potenti-

THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE AND THE IDEOGRAM 3 7

alities of formal development. Such an approach overrules dialectical development, and dooms one to mere evolutionary “perfecting,” in so far as it gives no bite into the dialectical substance of events.

In the long run, such evolutionizing leads either through refinement to decadence or, on the other hand, to a simple withering away due to stagnation of the blood.

Strange as it may seem, a melodious witness to both these distressing eventualities, simultaneously, is Kuleshov’s latest film, The Gay Cmary [1929].

The shot is by no means an element of montage. T}:le shot is a montage cell. Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of another

order, the organism or embryo, so, on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage.

By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell-the shot?

By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision.

In front of me lies a crumpled yellowed sheet of paper. On it is a mysterious note:

“Linkage-P” and “Collision-E.”

This is a substantial trace of a heated bout on the subject of montage between P (Pudovkin) and E (myself).

This has become a habit. At regular intervals he visits me late at night and behind closed doors we wrangle over matters of principle. A graduate of the Kuleshov school, he loudly defends an understanding of montage as a linkage of pieces. Into a chain. Again, “bricks.” Bricks, arranged in series to expound an idea.

I confronted him with my viewpoint on montage as a col­ lision. A view that from the collision of two given factors arises a concept.

FILM FORM

From my point of view, linkage is merely a possible special case.

Recall what an infinite number of combinations is known in physics to be capable of arising from the impact (collision) of spheres. Depending on whether the spheres be resilient, non-resilient, or mingled. Amongst all these combinations there is one in which the impact is so weak that the collision is degraded to an even movement of both in the same direc­ tion.

This is the one combination which would correspond with Pudovkin’s view.

Not long ago we had another talk. Today he agrees with my point of view. True, during the interval he took the op­ portunity to acquaint himself with the series of lectures I gave during that period at the State Cinema Institute. • . .

So, montage is conflict. As the basis of every art is conflict (an “imagist” transfor­

mation of the dialectical principle). The shot appears as the cell of montage. Therefore it also must be considered from the viewpoint of conflict.

O>nflict within the shot is potential montage, in the devel­ opment of its intensity shattering the quadrilateral cage of the shot and exploding its conflict into montage impulses between the montage pieces. As, in a zigzag of mimicry, the mise-en­ scene splashes out into a spatial zigzag with the same shat­ tering. As the slogan, “All obstacles are vain before Russians,” bursts out in the multitude of incident of War tmd Peace.

If montage is to be compared with something, then a pha­ lanx of montage pieces, of shots, should be compared to the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its automobile or tractor: for, similarly, the dynamics of montage serve as impulses driving forward the total film.

O>nflict within the frame. This can be very varied in char­ acter: it even can be a conflict in-the story. As in that “pre­ historic” period in .films (although there are plenty of instances

THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE AND THE IDEOGRAM 39

in the present, as well), when entire scenes would be photo­ graphed in a single, uncut shot. This, however, is outside the strict jurisdiction of the film-form.

These are the “cinematographic” conflicts within the frame: Conflict of graphic directions.

Conflict of scales. Conflict of volumes. Conflict of mtJSses.

(Lines-either static or dynamic)

(Volumes filled with various intensities of light) Conflict of depths. And the following conflicts, requiring only one further im­

pulse of intensification before flying into antagonistic pairs of pieces:

Close shots and long shots. Pieces of graphically vtrried directions. Pieces resolved in

volume, with pieces resolved in area. Pieces of darkness and pieces of lightness. And, lastly, there are such unexpected conflicts as: Conflicts between an object and its dimension-and con­

flicts between an event and its duration. These may sound strange, but both are familiar to us. The

first is accomplished by an optically distorted lens, and the second by stop-motion or slow-motion.

The compression of all cinematographic factors and prop­ erties within a single dialectical formula of conflict is no empty rhetorical diversion.

We are now seeking a unified system for methods of cine­ matographic expressiveness that shall hold good for all its elements. The assembly of these into series of common indica­ tions will solve the task as a whole.

Experience in the separate elements of the cinema cannot be absolutely measured.

Whereas we know a good deal about montage, in the theory of the shot we are still floundering about amidst the most aca­ demic attitudes, some vague tentatives, and the sort of harsh radicalism that sets one’s teeth on edge.

FILM FORM

To regard the frame as a particular, as it were, molecular case of montage makes possible the direct application of mon­ tage practice to the theory of the shot.

And similarly with the theory of lighting. To sense this as a collision between a stream of light and an obstacle, like the impact of a stream from a fire-hose striking a concrete object, or of the wind. buffeting a human figure, must result in a usage of light entirely different in comprehension from that em­ ployed in playing with various combinations of “gauzes” and “spots.”

Thus far we have one such significant principle of conflict: the principle of optical counterpoint.

And let us not now forget that soon we shall face another and less simple problem in counterpoint: the conflict in the sound film of acoustics and optics.

Let us return to one of the most fascinating of optical con­ flicts: the conflict between the frame of the shot and the ob­ ject!

The camera position, as a materialization of the conflict be­ tween organizing logic of the director and the inert logic of the object, in collision, reflects the dialectic of the camera­ angle.

In this matter we are still impressionistic and lacking in prin­ ciple to a sickening degree. Nevertheless, a sharpness of prin­ ciple can be had in the technique of this, too. The dry quadri­ lateral, plunging into the hazards of nature’s diffuseness . . .

And once again we are in Japan! For the cinematographic method is used in teaching drawing in Japanese schools.

What is our method of teaching drawing? Take any piece of white paper with four comers to it. Then cram onto it, usually even without using the edges (mostly greasy from the long drudgery!), some bored caryatid, some conceited Co­ rinthian capital, or a plaster Dante (not the magician perform­ ing at the Moscow Hermitage, but the other one-Alighieri, the comedy writer).

The· Japanese approach this from a quite different direction:

THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE AND THE IDEOGRAM 41

Here’s the branch of a cherry-tree.9 And the pupil cuts out from this whole, with a square, and a circle, and a rectangle­ compositional units:

He frames a shot!

;a ::t i ft It C7) • 11

These two ways of teaching drawing can characterize the two basic tendencies struggling within the cinema of today. One-the expiring method of artificial spatial organization of an event in front of the lens. From the “direction” of a se­ quence, to the erection of a Tower of Babel in front of the lens. The other-a “picking-out” by the camera: organization by means of the camera. Hewing out a piece of actuality with the ax of the lens.

However, at the present moment, when the center of atten­ tion is finally beginning, in the intellectual cinema, to be trans­ ferred from the materials of cinema, as such, to “deductions and conclusions,” to “slogans” based on the material, both schools of thought are losing distinction in their differences and can quietly blend into a synthesis.

Several pages back we lost, like an overshoe in a street-car, the question of the theater. Let us tum back to the question of

FILM FORM

methods of montage in the Japanese theater, particularly in acting.

The first and most striking example, of course, is the purely cinematographic method of “acting without transitions.” Along with mimic transitions carried to a limit of refinement, the Japanese actor uses an exactly contrary method as well. At a certain moment of his performance he halts; the black­ shrouded kurogo obligingly conceals him from the spectators. And lo! -he is resurrected in a new make-up. And in a new wig. Now characterizing another stage (degree) of his emo­ tional state.

Thus, for example, in the Kabuki play N arukami, the actor Sadanji must change from drunkenness to madness. This tran­ sition is solved by a mechanical cut. And a change in the arsenal of grease-paint colors on his face, emphasizing those streaks whose duty it is to fulfill the expression of a higher in­ tensity than those used in his previous make-up.

This method is organic to the film. The forced introduction into the film, by European acting traditions, of pieces of “emo­ tional transitions” is yet another influence forcing the cinema to mark time. Whereas the method of “cut” acting makes pos­ sible the construction of entirely new methods. Replacing one changing face with a whole scale of facial types of varying moods affords a far more acutely expressive result than does the changing surface, too receptive and devoid of organic re­ sistance, of any single professional actor’s face.

In our new film [Old and New] I have eliminated the in­ tervals between the sharply contrasting polar stages of a face’s expression. Thus is achieved a greater sharpness in the “play of doubts” around the new cream separator. Will the milk thicken or no? Trickery? Wealth? Here the psychological process of mingled faith and doubt is broken up into its two extreme states of joy (confidence) and gloom (disillusion­ ment). Furthermore, this is sharply emphasized by light-illu­ mination in no wise conforming to actual light conditions. This brings a distinct strengthening of the tension.

Another remarkable characteristic of the Kabuki theater is

THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE AND THE IDEOGRAM 43

the principle of “disintegrated” acting. Shocho, who played the leading female roles in the Kabuki theater that visited Moscow, in depicting the dying daughter in Yashao (The Mask-Maker), performed his role in pieces of acting completely detached from each other: Acting with only the right ann. Acting with one leg. Acting with the neck and head only. (The whole process of the death agony was disintegrated into solo per­ formances of each member playing its own role: the role of the leg, the role of the arms, the role of the head.) A break­ ing-up into shots. With a gradual shortening of these separate, successive pieces of acting as the tragic end approached.

Freed from the yoke of primitive naturalism, the actor is enabled by this method to fully grip the spectator by “rhythms,” making not only acceptable, but definitely attrac­ tive, a stage built on the most consecutive and detailed flesh and blood of naturalism.

Since we no longer distinguish in principle between ques­ tions of shot-content and montage, we may here cite a third example:

The Japanese theater makes use of a slow tempo to a degree unknown to our stage. The famous scene of hara-kiri in Cbu­ sbingzera is based on an unprecedented slowing down of all movement-beyond any point we have ever seen. Whereas, in the previous example, we observed a disintegration of the tran­ sitions between movements, here we see disintegration of the process of movement, viz., slow-motion. I have heard of only one example of a thorough application of this method, using the technical possibility of the film with a compositionally reasoned plan. It is usually employed with some purely pic­ torial aim, such as the “submarine kingdom” in The Thief of Bagdad, or to represent a dream, as in Zvenigora. Or, more often, it is used simply for formalist jackstraws and unmoti­ vated camera mischief as in V ertov’s Mm with the Movie­ Camera. The more commendable example appears to be in Jean Epstein’s La chute de la Maison Usher-at least according to the press reports. In this film, normally acted emotions filmed with a speeded-up camera are said to give unusual emo-

44 FILM FORM

tiona! pressure by their unrealistic slowness on the screen. If it be borne in mind that the effect of an actor’s performance on the audience is based on its identification by each spectator, it will be easy to relate both examples (the Kabuki play and the Epstein film) to an identical causal explanation. The in­ tensity of perception increases as the didactic process of iden­ tification proceeds more easily along a disintegrated action.

Even instruction in handling a rifle can be hammered into the tightest motor-mentality among a group of raw recruits if the instructor uses a “break -down” method.

The most interesting link of the Japanese theater is, of course, its link with the sound film, which can and must learn its fundamentals from the Japanese-the reduction of visual and aural sensations to a common physiological denom­ inator.•

So, it has been possible to establish (cursorily) the permea­ tion of the most varied branches of Japanese culture by a pure cinematographic element-its basic nerve, montage.

And it is only the Japanese cinema that falls into the same error as the “leftward drifting” Kabuki. Instead of learning how to extract the principles and technique of their remarkable acting from the traditional feudal forms of their materials, the most progressive leaders of the Japanese theater throw their energies into an adaptation of the spongy shapelessness of our own “inner” naturalism. The results are tearful and saddening. In its cinema Japan similarly pursues imitations of the most revolting examples of American and European entries in the international commercial film race.

To understand and apply her cultural peculiarities to the cinema, this is the task of Japan! Colleagues of Japan, are you really going to leave this for us to do?