THE SHAPE AND THE DARKNESS
145
movement of cutting from scene to scene.) Such active preoccu–
pation with a single shot as a completed whole, however, tends to
destroy the temporal flow of the
sequence
of scenes, and is there–
fore eschewed in most cinema, for instance in any ordinary story–
telling film. Here the screen-shape is looked
thru
rather than
looked
at;
it offers the means for looking out, so to speak, at the
world behind
i
that is, it acts purely as a window. But now suppos–
:ng no illusion of the total world is desired at all: then the sereen–
shape may simply be disregarded as a part of the spectacle, and
the compostion may be formed of objects succeeding each other as
if
in an indeterminate space or even in no space. This effect, most
obvious in the light-play films, sometimes moves so far from the
conditions of ordinary vision as to be analogous to music,
cf.
the
efforts of Scriabin or such imbecilities as
Anitra's Dance.
But if
the presentation is not to be mere play of lights, but objects deter–
mined by an horizon, then the Square shape might be just the most
suitable space, for, as Eisenstein insists, it allows the greatest quan–
tity
of expansion in the relevant directions; as a rectangle, it sup–
ports the design of each shot of objects; as
not
an ellipse or flat
oblong, it neutralizes the sense of an actual visible space. Now any
one who has admired the marvelous synthetic montage of this
director, which is not the turning of a scene before the camera
(illusion of the actual total field), nor yet the posing of a static
composition (picture-frame), but a unity of cutting and synthesiz–
ing a sequence of images of objects by means of their psychological
and philosophical associations, will easily understand why Eisen–
stein asks for the Square.
The square is the convenient screen for
synthetic montage.
The square neutralizes not only the illusion of the actual
visible world, but also the sense .of visible spectacle altogether,
for it does not play to the visual potentialities of the spectator,
hut retracts from the largest area that he could conveniently rest
his eyes in. This leaves the way open to the
non-visual
play of
attention, unconscious, visceral, and theoretic, that Eisenstein so
uch delights in exploiting. He does not speak to the sight. It is
en in this double sense, first as getting away from the limitations
f physical visible reality and secondly from the sentiment of
ectacle altogether, that Eisenstein says the cinema must not copy
e stage. But expressionist staging tries at the same freedom-
