Sergei Eisenstein was strongly concerned with the evolution of the film form – the development and improvement of the techniques which lend film its power. He considered each (successful) film of his a step forward in this direction, and openly acknowledged the inferiority of his previous work in light of the new accomplishments he made with each effort. This philosophy, combined with the fact that he was a prolific writer, writing in conjunction with the creation of each new film (and its corresponding advancement of form), provides a strong linear history of the development of his theory. This fortunate structure, aside from being key to Eisenstein’s understanding of film as progressive and revolutionary, makes it possible for us to neatly track his opinion on a number of things, including fellow Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, an opinion that fluctuated in relation to Eisenstein’s successes, failures, refinements of his theories, and need to negotiate the outside political evaluation of his work.

A lot of the animosity between Eisenstein and Vertov had to do with the worsening political climate in Stalinist Russia. There was a time when “Eisenstein showed considerable respect and interest for Vertov’s work, attending both the screenings and the discussions surrounding the release of the Kinopravda series,”ⁱ Vertov’s political newsreels. Things changed after the implementation of the Leninist film ratio, which endorsed the predominance of newsreel production over fiction films (the mode Eisenstein had been working in). Understandably, Eisenstein was threatened by this policy – in the struggling Soviet film industry, there was a strictly limited amount of funding and political support to go around. Alliances were constantly shifting - censorship, censure, and purging were constant worries. Eisenstein’s virulent attacks and counterattacks were a fight for his professional and mortal life. Both he and Vertov were targets of political exclusion at different points, but in the early years it was Eisenstein’s fictive approach that was under threat. Post-revolutionary Russia was a desperate environment, a pressurizing set of circumstances which could easily turn differing opinions into life-or-death polemic battles. It was this atmosphere that necessitated the radicalization of Eisenstein’s opposition to Vertov concurrent with the development of his film theory.

An early mention of Vertov and the Cine-Eyes came in Eisenstein’s essay (written in conjunction with his first feature, The Strike, not published until after his death) “The Montage of Film Attractions” (1924). In the opening he stresses the importance of securing cinema a place in the rank of arts to “make widespread use of the experience and the latest achievements in the sphere of those arts that set themselves similar tasks;”ⁱⁱ a classification that the Cine-Eyes avowedly wanted to avoid at all costs. This is an important statement, and one of the biggest divisions between their schools of thought. Eisenstein, fresh from a theatre history, was willing to incorporate ideas from other established arts, although he conceded that “the future undoubtedly lies with the plot-less actorless form of exposition,”ⁱⁱⁱ he believed that that future was distant and had to be achieved gradually. Vertov despised this sort of “intermediate” filmmaking, which was still tainted with bourgeois art culture. He called instead for a total purge which would lend film its legitimizing specificity by the “liquidation of a heritage of literary and theatrical representation and the elimination of the psychologism that characterized their narration.”^iv Eisenstein argued that this removal of the psychological and thematic from cinema rendered it purposeless, “neutral,” and unable to agitate – thus a betrayal of the revolutionary objectives that it should rightfully further.

With the resounding success of The Strike, Eisenstein saw an opportunity to solidify his position and launch an attack on Vertov and his materialist approach that was backed by the full strength of his political and critical credibility. With “The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form,” he stepped the rhetoric up to a new level. The Strike, he said, was “an ideological victory in the film of form… the first instance of revolutionary art where the form has turned out to be more revolutionary than the content.” The reason that the form worked so well, according to Eisenstein, was because it was determined by the exposition of the content, it was the “formal realization of the material under consideration.”^v Eisenstein was careful to distinguish himself from Vertov here specifically on the basis of form – he was worried that his work would be attacked on the basis of “Formalism,” and the purpose of this essay was partially to establish the difference between Vertov’s arbitrary patterns of montage and his ideologically motivated (and thus politically sound) ones. He was interested in protecting himself from being accused of empty Formalism, and preempted the possibility by criticizing Vertov. He went on to make a couple of points that seem strikingly similar to the beliefs of the Cine-Eyes. He lauded the fact that:

The Strike took its renewing principle not from the ranks of ‘artistic phenomena’ but from those that are directly utilitarian: specifically… the exposition of the manufacturing processes in the film... ascertained… that sphere whose principles might alone define the ideology of the forms of revolutionary art just as they have defined revolutionary ideology in general: heavy industry, factory production and the forms of the manufacturing process.^vi

In this statement Eisenstein simultaneously denied a connection to established artistic phenomena and applauded his focus on machinery and the manufacturing process, especially as a parallel to film form (it is worth noting that in the previous essay, he made reference to “the absurd lengths the game of love for ‘machines’ has been taken^vii). This sounds exactly like Vertov, who denied inclusion of film within “art,” and was obsessed with the filming of machines, manufacturing, the mechanics of the camera/film, and the industrialization of the Russian proletariat in general:

“Our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man.

In revealing the machine’s soul, in causing the working to love his workbench, the peasant his tractor, the engineer his engine –

we introduce creative joy into all mechanical labor

we bring people into closer kinship with machines… Openly recognizing the rhythm of machines, the delight of mechanical labor…”^viii

Since his ideas were so apparently close to Vertov’s, Eisenstein was very eager to deny the similarities between The Strike and 1924 release Cine-Eye, an exposition of “life caught unawares.” He conceded that “in terms of the external form of the construction you can point to a certain similarity, in precisely the most essential part, the formal method of construction, ‘The Strike’ is the direct antithesis of ‘Cine-Eye’.”^ix He could not deny the similarity in content, so he argued that the “primitive Impressionism” of the Cine-Eyes form rendered it impotent and without ideological strength. He criticized Cine-Eye for merely recording objects and connecting them casually, rather than applying a “socio-organizational motive,” yielding to the “cosmic” arrangement of things. This type of apolitical, unemotional linking of events was unacceptable to Eisenstein, who accused Vertov of pantheism, a doctrine that subordinated his films to the forces and laws of the universe, and to an indifferent portrayal of them. Instead, Eisenstein said, film should “snatch fragments from our surroundings according to a conscious and predetermined plan to launch them at the audience in the appropriate combination, to subjugate it to the appropriate association with the obvious final ideological motivation.”

In the article the brunt of Eisenstein’s attack on Vertov came in the criticism of his form. He did, however, bother to note that Vertov was making attempts at an effective organization of material in a subsequent work of his, and allowed for the possibility of reconciliation between their schools of thought, that is, if Vertov came to his side of the fence. Although this essay is considered an attack on Vertov, it is striking how similar some of their ideas and content are. It seems that at this point in their careers, Eisenstein and Vertov were somewhat artificially opposed to each other – they could not both exist within the suffering Soviet film industry “which shared the difficulties of Soviet industry in general (lack of equipment, of film stock, of capital), was… disastrously underfunded”, poorly attended, and generally “in crisis”.^x This is the context in which they worked, and were forced to crystallize their theories on film, exaggerate the distinctions, and battle for supremacy. The violence of Eisenstein’s theory was well encapsulated in his memorable quote: “It is not a ‘Cine-Eye’ that we need but a ‘Cine-Fist’.”^xi

An important development that came with the 1926 release and international acclaim of his second feature film The Battleship Potemkin was “a further distancing from the Vertov school, and indeed, from what Eisenstein now called ‘the Cine-Eye qualities of The Strike’.”^xii So, it seems, our suspicion of Eisenstein’s exaggeration of the distinction between he and Vertov was confirmed in this case! The further separation that Eisenstein argued here was on the basis of his creation of “psychologised” objects, or objects that evoke measured psychological effects. Since Vertov vocally despised psychologism (“The ‘psychological’ prevents man from being as precise as a stopwatch; it interferes with his desire for kinship with the machine” ^xiii), Eisenstein’s claim of separation holds more water. With Potemkin, Eisenstein explicitly refined his technique, substituted “the full force of psychologism” for “plotlessness, the protocolism, and abstract naturalism, and, if you will, the Cine-Eye qualities of The Strike.”^xiv He began to accept sentimentalism as a necessary means of influencing the audience, and in doing so, amended his earlier suspicion of emotionalism (distinct from just directing emotion), distanced himself further from Vertov, and began down a path toward intellectual cinema. ^xv

To put things bluntly, after Potemkin, things went downhill for Eisenstein. His subsequent films, without exception, had to be heavily modified before they were considered politically acceptable. In 1928, as Stalin’s Five-Year Plans began, Soviet Cinema was under scrutiny for not successfully accomplishing its goals.^xvi At this point, Eisenstein began to advocate a cinema that operated “through the abstract word that leads to a concrete concept,” an idea that he would later term “intellectual cinema”. His article defending October, “Our October: Beyond the Played and Non-Played,” made a jab at the Cine-Eyes, with his “CONTEMPT FOR RAW MATERIAL.” Here he asserted that cinema must move beyond the obsession with capturing raw material, especially machines, and mature towards abstract social evaluation.

A curious similarity between Vertov and Eisenstein occurred in his evaluation of Japanese culture and its cinematic elements. He admired the way that the maskmaker Sharaku took details from separate “faces” and created composite masks of the features that he considered most psychologically expressive.^xvii Compare that to Vertov’s statement:

I am kino-eye, I create a man more perfect than Adam… from one person I take the hands, the strongest and most dexterous; from another I take the legs, the swiftest and most shapely; from a third, I the most beautiful and expressive head – and through montage I create a new, perfect man.^xviii

Although their positions are similar, it is important to note Eisenstein’s stress on the psychological expressiveness of the composite image as the objective. Vertov was merely positing an example of how the camera can be used to organize material. Despite that difference, Eisenstein’s echoing of Vertov reveals a certain similarity in their form that cannot be overlooked.

In the years surrounding this article, Eisenstein was subject to an increased amount of abuse and control by the Stalinist regime. His films were butchered, shut down, and he was shamed with a fourth-class award. Eventually, under pressure, Eisenstein began to accept the intrusion of plot and easier accessibility and intelligibility that the cultural authorities insisted on, for lack of any alternative, even accepting to some degree the convention of the heroic character. Vertov suffered similar pressure, which he wrote about extensively in his diary. Although Eisenstein incorporated these elements into his films, he was not truly complicit with Stalinism, as was made clear by his personal dislike for Stalin and attempt at subversion in Ivan the Terrible.^xix

In 1934 in “Eh! On the Purity of Film Language,” Eisenstein made the following statement:

We do not by any means stand for the “hegemony” of montage. The time has passed when, for pedagogical and educational purposes, it was necessary to perform a tactical and polemic manoeuvre to ensure the broad mastery of montage as one of cinema’s expression.

These are the words of a man who is weary of years of waging polemical warfare against other filmmakers for the purpose of political survival. They are the words of a man whose professional and personal lives came under an incredible amount of coercive political pressure that he was unable to sidestep completely. This quote serves as a sort of conciliatory gesture towards Dziga Vertov, who under less tense, cutthroat circumstances may not have exchanged so many blows with Eisenstein. In the nearly unnavigable post-revolutionary Russia, under the pressure to be “Soviet filmmakers,” the theories of Eisenstein and Vertov were necessarily denatured, and for better or worse, pitted against each other antithetically.

 

Notes