Film Chronicle:
·•
The Eisenstein Tragedy
~
<T
ONLY
a do'en
yean
ago th", with piou' exdtoment, we went
to "little" movie houses-the very term has disappeared-to see the new
films from Russia? Is it so short a time since many of us were writing
on the cinema as
the
great modern art form, the machine art whose
technique was most in harmony with the dynamism of the machine age,
the art that most powerfully affected such peculiarly modern areas as
Freud's subconscious and Pavlov's reflexes, the only art that could some·
times bridge the gap between serious creation and mass taste, so that
Birth
of a
Nal-ion,
Chaplin's comedies,
Potemkin
and a few other films might
be said to have been the only works of our time that have been both
popular and great? Our enthusiasm was not misplaced, our theories
were not unfounded. And yet the wonderful possibilities that lay before
the cinema ten years ago have withered into the slick banality of Holly·
wood and the crude banality of the post-1930 Soviet cinema. The poten·
tialities, which really existed, which, for that matter, still exist and in
even richer profusion, simply were not realized, and the cinema gave up
its own idiom and technique to become once more what it was before
Griffith: a mechanical device for recording stage plays. Like so much
else in the last decade, it crept back into the womb, into unconsciousness.
It has been many years now since, anywhere in the world, a film has been
made which, esthetically speaking, is cinema at all.
These depressing reflections are suggested by Eisenstein's new book.*
Dull and platitudinous, it reads more like a conscientious and not too
inspired Ph.D. thesis than like the work of the creator of
October
and
Potemlcin.
The only valuable part of the book is the Appendices, which
reprint some Eisenstein scenarios and articles and give a bibliography
of his writings, films, and unrealized projects.
I think
The Film Sense
may best be understood as an attempt by its
author to adopt the protective coloration of official Stalinist culture.
This explains the platitudes: the distinguishing mark of "an emotionally
exciting. work" is that it causes "inner creative excitement in the spec·
tator" (p. 35 ) ; "the technique of creation recreates a life process, con·
ditioned only by those special circumstances required by art" (p. 43 ) ;
repetition "may well perform two functions"-( !) "to facilitate the
creation of an organic whole,"
(2)
to develop "mounting intensity"
(p. 95) ; etc. It also accounts for the citations from Walt Whitman, Sir
Joshua Reynolds, Lewis Carroll, Pliny the Elder and practically everybody
*"The Film Sense." Harcourt, Brace. $3.
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