Five Feuilletons on Sergei Eisenstein

By Viktor Shklovsky
Context N°21
From: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/five-feuilletons-on-sergei-eisenstein/

First Feuilleton
Artists have certain freedoms when they draw from real life: they have the freedom to choose, they
have the freedom to change, and they have the freedom to offend. The makers of the film The Ninth
of January (Devjatoe Janvarja) used none of these. They say the picture cost several hundred
thousand rubles. What a waste. Aside from two crowd scenes, the film lacks merit. The fault lies
with the film-makers who did not take advantage of their freedoms. They shot everything they saw,
achieving the impossible: a boring revolution. Eisenstein, a master, has used his freedoms. His first
coup was to narrow the focus of the film, to select his facts carefully—to show the Potemkin, not all
of 1905; to show the steps, not all of Odessa. A wise decision. A well-executed panorama of the
revolution.
The “Potemkin” mutiny was a failure. Neither ship nor shore could aid the other. The mutiny
collapsed in Constanţa. Eisentein knew how to fix moments of heroism during the mutiny; he knew
how to depict the pathos of the galleys of the destroyer hurtling toward its doom.
Between Eisenstein’s work and history lies a real divide. And Eisenstein, like the “Potemkin,” has
made history, flying the flag of revolution. The picture’s success is total. The picture draws in the
audience. The picture is interesting. The picture is filled with things of great moment.
Second Feuilleton
The great themes have not yet reached Rus’.
Whether it is Eisenstein or Russian cinema that is the genius is still open for discussion. Eisenstein’s
genius is not the issue. The issue is what is needed to advance Russian cinema. Whenever we try to
create a commercial cinema, whenever we show women nude in The Minaret of Death, whenever
we convince ourselves that a film like this is travelogue rather than pornography, we put our
freedoms at risk.
Properly spearheading a Soviet cinema requires both a faith in the genius of our era and an
acknowledgment that Eisenstein did not just appear out of the air or rise out of the water. His films
are the logical culmination of the Left Front. For there to be an Eisenstein first there had to be a
Kulešov to establish a conscious relationship with his cinematic material. First there had to be a
Dziga Vertov, first there had to be Constructivists. First the concept of a cinema beyond the sujet
had to emerge.
To acknowledge Eisenstein’s genius is easy—one man’s genius is never so shameful. Give a genius
film stock and Tisse for a cameraman—greatness! The genius of the age is harder to recognize.
Soviet cinema does not flow in the current—it invents itself.
Third Feuilleton
What can Eisenstein do? What can’t he do?
Eisenstein knows how to show things.
His things work marvelously. His battleship is the real protagonist of the work. Its guns, its
movements, its masts, its steps—all are actors. The doctor’s pince-nez is a better actor than the
doctor himself.
Actors, or models, as they’re called, don’t work for Eisenstein. He doesn’t like working with them.
This weakens the first part of the film. Every so often an actor makes an impression on Eisenstein—
whenever Eisenstein can use him as a reference, as an object he can render as a type. The good
Captain Barskij of Potemkin is good, like a cannon, the people on the steps are even better, but the
steps themselves are the best of all.
The steps are the sujet. The role of the landings is to prolong individual moments; the steps are
arranged according to the rules of Aristotle’s poetics: the peripateia of the drama is born from such
new forms.
Tisse is a man of great talent. His dawn is artfully done, but it belongs in a different film: a splendid
example of how little the material actually matters, and how much the director’s transformation of it
does. One need only compare Eisenstein’s Odessa steps with Granovskij’s. Identical cameraman,
identical steps, utterly different results.
Fourth Feuilleton
Pushkin’s lexicon. There are very few neologisms in Pushkin’s work—he stands at the summit of
his age. His lexicon and his prosody, anticipated by formal innovations he proceded to refine,
emerged semiconsciously, the product of a well-lit field of sensitive readers coupled with the genius
of the poet.
Eisenstein’s shooting script for 1905: edits, camera angles, dissolves, diagrams, all less elaborate
than in The Strike (StaČka). There are only two dissolves in the entire film, and each stresses the
key image: the steps filling with people, and the deck of the battleship emptying.
Dissolves economize scene exposition without feeling like its focus. The film is good because the
things in it are uncluttered. I think that economy as a device is consciously utilized here—it serves
as a unifier of action.
A handful of scenes are all that remains of the old Eisenstein. The commander shrouded in the
tarpaulin is taken from The Strike. The tarpaulin works better when it is moved only by the wind.
Nothing else is needed. The gratuitous killing of ValinČuk is just as unnecessary. Had his killing
occurred at the sailors’ moment of victory, after the deaths of the officers, no one could see it as
summary execution.
Fifth Feuilleton
What about the color red of the flag hoisted up the mast of the Potemkin. Is it necessary? I think it
is. No need to rebuke the artist because it is the revolution the audience applauds and not him.
The red flag flies continuously illuminated above the Kremlin. No one applauds it.
When he tinted that flag Eisenstein took a risk. He earned the right to that color.
An aversion to risk, a fear of effects simply achieved, this is vulgarity. A lone tinted flag in a film is
the act of a man of courage, a man of the moment.
Translated from the Russian by Adam Siegel