Posts
taken from
written by Mohammed Noureddine Afaya
1- Cinema and intellectual montage
Sergey Eisenstein failed to "produce" the book of capital for Marx and turn it into a movie, because he faced a triple problem that could be intensified in the following questions: How is it possible to make a film whose form is based on philosophical text ? How can a strange speech about the film be translated and transferred to a cinematic language? What are the ways worth building a cinematic rhetorical style that takes into account the requirements of cinematography as a form?
"Eisenstein" was exposed to major difficulties as he strives to produce a "dialectical cinema" with the necessary effectiveness and influence to achieve the principles of the Soviet revolution, a cinema that fuses between "content" and "form". To this end, Eisenstein recruited all his capabilities and talents in drawing, directing, and theorizing. Even if he did not succeed in his “Marxist” project, he left for the history of ideas about cinema very important texts and writings, and even laid the foundations for the so-called “intellectual montage”. Try it in “Armored Pottery” (1926), and apply it to the rest of his films that followed: “October” (1927), and “General Line” (1929); and between “Armored Potkin” and “General Line”, a crystallization depicting him for editing, theory and direction. He considered that "intellectual cinema" alone has the power to limit the conflict of "the language of logic" and "the language of images" depending on the language of dialectical cinema; it is an intellectual cinema that forms unprecedented forms and performs a declared social function, a cinema that seeks to acquire extreme knowledge in order to move emotions is more sensitive, and she owns an arsenal of methods that she helps in her work to produce visual and auditory stimuli 1.
Eisenstein's intellectual montage is not a bias towards ideas and contents at the expense of the aesthetic value of cinematography, because the central concern that dominated his mind, in addition to his ideological commitment, was to search for the "more complete film format that could carry a speech." As far as achieving a high degree of sensory influence at the level of representativity, it is also necessary, and from a more deductive rather than epistemological perspective, to ensure maximum ideological effectiveness.
Sergey Eisenstein
That is why Eisenstein considered in his lecture in the Sorbonne (February 17, 1930) that it should not be forgotten that cinema is the only tangible art that is dynamic and that it can simultaneously unleash thought processes. The process of thought cannot be revitalized in the same way as other arts ”[1].
The Marxist influence may seem evident in this cinematic perception of the relationship of theory and practice by virtue of the fact that the aim of the practice is to change conditions, but the problem of "Eisenstein" for a number of researchers is that he was a cinematic not too valuable for the value of his films compared to the level of "cinematic kit" that was Available in his time, but it was, in contrast, an unconvincing view 3, according to some researchers.
However, dialectics and theoretical jurisprudence that he proposed through the montage brought the cinematic contribution of this cinema closer to the field of thought and philosophy, despite the institutional and political commitment imposed by the Soviet regime on it; there are those who see that this commitment was not entirely negative because it stimulated Eisenstein to innovation and theorizing. And on formulating elements of his ministry to convince that the film practice must also be “revolutionary” and provide a logical understanding of the requirements of technical production and the corresponding technical process. This is what led Herbert Marcuse in his book The Aesthetic Dimension to say that research must be sought within art itself, and within the aesthetic form as it is also about "the political possibilities of art." Therefore, "Eisenstein" was convinced that "the ideological form is always this way", and the form must be used as an ideological dimension.
It is difficult to separate Eisenstein's openings proposed to the process of thinking about the cinematic phenomenon from the general ideological and political context with which he was associated, even if in some of his writings he expressed a relative affection from the official Marxist saying, and declared very clearly, a tendency to the importance of the idea as crystallized by Hegelian dialectics away from the theory of reflection, which turned into a "doctrinal" choice that disrupted the thinking of all those involved in art.
From the movie "Armored Potkin"
Eisenstein revolted a little about this choice, and in his rebellion he expressed a double rupture in his relationship with the words of the official institution which he did not hide his commitment to without being completely convinced of their slogans on the one hand, and in the suffering that he experienced in translating his theoretical premises into the completion of my film as much on the other hand, he had to respond to the imperatives of change, and he had to respect the requirements of creativity and aesthetic considerations.
Eisenstein's writings on the cinematic phenomenon and his filmical achievements remain evidence of the intellectual concerns that were driving this cinematic; and if we leave his ideological and institutional commitment to the emerging trends of the Soviet state aside, he left all those involved in the interlocking relations of idea and reality, theory, achievement, content and aesthetic dimension, difficult texts excluding them, but found many critics who did not hesitate to criticize "Stalinism" from the inspiration of his ideas, translation and definition of them.
[4].
.
2- Jean Epstein and the cinematography intelligence
The founder of the “intellectual montage” of cinematic images distributed between theory and achievement on the basis of Marxist tendencies, even if he concluded a bit of the “mechanics” of his approach and found himself closer to the Hegelian idea. If this is the case with “Eisenstein”, another cinematographer is the French “Jean Epstein” (1897-1953) who has not hidden his desire, since the beginning of his meditation in cinema and his practice of it, to establish a “philosophy of cinema”; and since the beginning of the twenties he is haunted with the idea of taking cinema to the philosophical level. This was what he meant by editing a philosophy of cinema, and highlighting the ability of this mediation to produce philosophical visions, by working to define the special way in which the cinematography is held to suggest a view of the world.
Jean Epstein
As far as Epstein is concerned , it is not a matter of cinema being able to think only based on its language and its specific number in relation to other artistic practices, but rather the employment of a “cinematic genius” [2] and its contribution to the knowledge of the world and to the renewal of its manifestations and expressions; cinema is not just a spectacle, It is “special knowledge because it represents the world in its unstoppable movement, and a general knowledge that, when we address all senses, we predict that it will help transcend its physiological limits. It provides us with the possibility of carrying out a “new spiritual sport”, which forces us to correct our defects thanks to an authentic representation of the world, our involvement in psychological states that are free from the pressures of logical and scientific thought, and it opens up opportunities for us to communicate with dream and poetic thought »[3].
Dominique Chateau notes that Epstein introduces utopian language in his talk of establishing a “philosophy of cinema”; here it appears again the difference between the desire to establish and the conditions for its realization. However, this “cinematographer”, despite some of its contradictions, provided, along with “Eisenstein,” the possibility of taking cinema as a subject of thought. Cinema, like its "microscope" and "telescope," allows to reveal aspects of reality that remain unknown, and thanks to the principle of movement this machine is able to create its place and time. Perhaps the cinematic image teaches us to what extent there is a difference between film representation and reality or its transcription; here lies its originality and strength, as well as its control over the physical scales in which it produces its language between movement and stability, estrangement and continuity, slowdown and acceleration. It is a machine that is able to achieve an unprecedented synthesis between the elements and the spatial and temporal dimensions and the normal functioning of the brain, but it reaches a high degree of complexity, but rather expresses a “special subjective as long as things are represented, not as they are perceived by the looks of people, but as you see them according to their structure Special that gives it a distinct personality
And if the cinema was initially discovered as a recording machine, then it gradually turned into a machine for thinking and a kind of "partial mechanical brain that receives visual and auditory influences, coordinated between them in its own way in time and space, and expressed and prepared and organized in a form that is often surprising." 5]. Thus, cinema is not thought because it conveys human thought or because it translates its own essence, but rather because it is this very essence that establishes special thought and philosophy.
In Epstein's eyes, cinema advances, as if it is a machine that transcends what is human, and transcends its physical and mental limits, and it is also a tool to compensate for a lack of a sense of senses; that is, what a person cannot accomplish or do in life, as he captures its manifestations in a way intermittently, the cinema is able to do it as well as the ability to do creative installation, so that it can achieve continuity and flexibility in space and time, the normal physiological forces of man are unable to do the same. For this reason, "Jean Epstein" considers that cinema is a surhumain art, as it possesses exceptional possibilities for excitement and excitement, and for generating special emotional states. This machine, says "Epstein", which "attracts and intensifies permanence, and demonstrates the transforming nature of time, and calls for the relativity of all measurements, which - i.e. this machine - seems to be a kind of psychological construction" [6]; Rather, cinema rises to a spiritual level . It is a magical art and its “secret is extremely simple, as its magic is concentrated in its ability to diversify and change dimensions and temporal trends” [7]. It is a “revival art” that reveals the life of things, sometimes rising to the level of will, freedom and spirit.
From the movie "The Fall of Usher's House" by Jean Epstein (1928)
It is indisputable that Epstein's enthusiastic engagement with the cinematic phenomenon brought him down in various intellectual contradictions. It confuses the scientific understanding of reality with the various "spiritual" interpretations or understandings of it, and claims to establish a philosophy of cinema and cinema at the time when we find it formulating "non-philosophical" texts or far from them. His talk about the psychological life of cinema remains obscure, as Dominique Chateau notes, does the referral on the psychological dimension refer to the cinematographic machine or the spectator?
In front of this question, Epstein remains hesitant and even confused, as he accepts that the motion picture cinema requires, when presented, a mental and spiritual activity for the recipient, and it gives the cinematography a mysterious character as it stores “a psychological life”; but it is completely incapable of interpretation of the existence of this life in a manner that has the necessary conditions of clarity and persuasion. It is not enough to emphasize the importance of movement in the cinema and to prioritize it compared to the forms, which is a weak justification for the simple reason that the cinematographic machine lives moments of stopping, for example, through the "fixed shot". Also, "Epstein" did not pay attention to the necessary correlation between the formative intensity of the film image and the semiological dimension of the film discourse, and the game of marks, including the concept of the snapshot, and the different patterns of its intertwining with the elements that make up the cinema narration. Dominique Château explains the absence of this connection in Epstein's writing about cinema to his anti-rational tendency, and to his firm belief that the picture is fundamentally different from logical abstraction.
It is a sign that directs directly to the spectator, which does not require him to make a great effort to dismantle its meaning or meanings.
Whatever the many observations that can be recorded on the writings of "Eisenstein" and "Epstein" on cinema as a subject of philosophy, they represent, however, an exciting moment in the history of philosophical interest in cinema, or rather cinematic preoccupation with questions of philosophy. In their view, cinema possesses a special ability to think based on its own set, because it cannot be reduced to being a mere sight, by virtue of having special means to represent the world without necessarily being subject to the constraints of the rules of logical reasoning. Whether we treat them with utopianism, or formulate logically weak ideas, these “filmmakers” theorists offer thought to openness to deepen the philosophical view of the cinematic phenomenon.
1- Cinema and intellectual montage
Sergey Eisenstein failed to "produce" the book of capital for Marx and turn it into a movie, because he faced a triple problem that could be intensified in the following questions: How is it possible to make a film whose form is based on philosophical text ? How can a strange speech about the film be translated and transferred to a cinematic language? What are the ways worth building a cinematic rhetorical style that takes into account the requirements of cinematography as a form?
"Eisenstein" was exposed to major difficulties as he strives to produce a "dialectical cinema" with the necessary effectiveness and influence to achieve the principles of the Soviet revolution, a cinema that fuses between "content" and "form". To this end, Eisenstein recruited all his capabilities and talents in drawing, directing, and theorizing. Even if he did not succeed in his “Marxist” project, he left for the history of ideas about cinema very important texts and writings, and even laid the foundations for the so-called “intellectual montage”. Try it in “Armored Pottery” (1926), and apply it to the rest of his films that followed: “October” (1927), and “General Line” (1929); and between “Armored Potkin” and “General Line”, a crystallization depicting him for editing, theory and direction. He considered that "intellectual cinema" alone has the power to limit the conflict of "the language of logic" and "the language of images" depending on the language of dialectical cinema; it is an intellectual cinema that forms unprecedented forms and performs a declared social function, a cinema that seeks to acquire extreme knowledge in order to move emotions is more sensitive, and she owns an arsenal of methods that she helps in her work to produce visual and auditory stimuli 1.
Eisenstein's intellectual montage is not a bias towards ideas and contents at the expense of the aesthetic value of cinematography, because the central concern that dominated his mind, in addition to his ideological commitment, was to search for the "more complete film format that could carry a speech." As far as achieving a high degree of sensory influence at the level of representativity, it is also necessary, and from a more deductive rather than epistemological perspective, to ensure maximum ideological effectiveness.
Sergey Eisenstein
That is why Eisenstein considered in his lecture in the Sorbonne (February 17, 1930) that it should not be forgotten that cinema is the only tangible art that is dynamic and that it can simultaneously unleash thought processes. The process of thought cannot be revitalized in the same way as other arts ”[1].
The Marxist influence may seem evident in this cinematic perception of the relationship of theory and practice by virtue of the fact that the aim of the practice is to change conditions, but the problem of "Eisenstein" for a number of researchers is that he was a cinematic not too valuable for the value of his films compared to the level of "cinematic kit" that was Available in his time, but it was, in contrast, an unconvincing view 3, according to some researchers.
However, dialectics and theoretical jurisprudence that he proposed through the montage brought the cinematic contribution of this cinema closer to the field of thought and philosophy, despite the institutional and political commitment imposed by the Soviet regime on it; there are those who see that this commitment was not entirely negative because it stimulated Eisenstein to innovation and theorizing. And on formulating elements of his ministry to convince that the film practice must also be “revolutionary” and provide a logical understanding of the requirements of technical production and the corresponding technical process. This is what led Herbert Marcuse in his book The Aesthetic Dimension to say that research must be sought within art itself, and within the aesthetic form as it is also about "the political possibilities of art." Therefore, "Eisenstein" was convinced that "the ideological form is always this way", and the form must be used as an ideological dimension.
It is difficult to separate Eisenstein's openings proposed to the process of thinking about the cinematic phenomenon from the general ideological and political context with which he was associated, even if in some of his writings he expressed a relative affection from the official Marxist saying, and declared very clearly, a tendency to the importance of the idea as crystallized by Hegelian dialectics away from the theory of reflection, which turned into a "doctrinal" choice that disrupted the thinking of all those involved in art.
From the movie "Armored Potkin"
Eisenstein revolted a little about this choice, and in his rebellion he expressed a double rupture in his relationship with the words of the official institution which he did not hide his commitment to without being completely convinced of their slogans on the one hand, and in the suffering that he experienced in translating his theoretical premises into the completion of my film as much on the other hand, he had to respond to the imperatives of change, and he had to respect the requirements of creativity and aesthetic considerations.
Eisenstein's writings on the cinematic phenomenon and his filmical achievements remain evidence of the intellectual concerns that were driving this cinematic; and if we leave his ideological and institutional commitment to the emerging trends of the Soviet state aside, he left all those involved in the interlocking relations of idea and reality, theory, achievement, content and aesthetic dimension, difficult texts excluding them, but found many critics who did not hesitate to criticize "Stalinism" from the inspiration of his ideas, translation and definition of them.
[4].
.
2- Jean Epstein and the cinematography intelligence
The founder of the “intellectual montage” of cinematic images distributed between theory and achievement on the basis of Marxist tendencies, even if he concluded a bit of the “mechanics” of his approach and found himself closer to the Hegelian idea. If this is the case with “Eisenstein”, another cinematographer is the French “Jean Epstein” (1897-1953) who has not hidden his desire, since the beginning of his meditation in cinema and his practice of it, to establish a “philosophy of cinema”; and since the beginning of the twenties he is haunted with the idea of taking cinema to the philosophical level. This was what he meant by editing a philosophy of cinema, and highlighting the ability of this mediation to produce philosophical visions, by working to define the special way in which the cinematography is held to suggest a view of the world.
Jean Epstein
As far as Epstein is concerned , it is not a matter of cinema being able to think only based on its language and its specific number in relation to other artistic practices, but rather the employment of a “cinematic genius” [2] and its contribution to the knowledge of the world and to the renewal of its manifestations and expressions; cinema is not just a spectacle, It is “special knowledge because it represents the world in its unstoppable movement, and a general knowledge that, when we address all senses, we predict that it will help transcend its physiological limits. It provides us with the possibility of carrying out a “new spiritual sport”, which forces us to correct our defects thanks to an authentic representation of the world, our involvement in psychological states that are free from the pressures of logical and scientific thought, and it opens up opportunities for us to communicate with dream and poetic thought »[3].
Dominique Chateau notes that Epstein introduces utopian language in his talk of establishing a “philosophy of cinema”; here it appears again the difference between the desire to establish and the conditions for its realization. However, this “cinematographer”, despite some of its contradictions, provided, along with “Eisenstein,” the possibility of taking cinema as a subject of thought. Cinema, like its "microscope" and "telescope," allows to reveal aspects of reality that remain unknown, and thanks to the principle of movement this machine is able to create its place and time. Perhaps the cinematic image teaches us to what extent there is a difference between film representation and reality or its transcription; here lies its originality and strength, as well as its control over the physical scales in which it produces its language between movement and stability, estrangement and continuity, slowdown and acceleration. It is a machine that is able to achieve an unprecedented synthesis between the elements and the spatial and temporal dimensions and the normal functioning of the brain, but it reaches a high degree of complexity, but rather expresses a “special subjective as long as things are represented, not as they are perceived by the looks of people, but as you see them according to their structure Special that gives it a distinct personality
And if the cinema was initially discovered as a recording machine, then it gradually turned into a machine for thinking and a kind of "partial mechanical brain that receives visual and auditory influences, coordinated between them in its own way in time and space, and expressed and prepared and organized in a form that is often surprising." 5]. Thus, cinema is not thought because it conveys human thought or because it translates its own essence, but rather because it is this very essence that establishes special thought and philosophy.
In Epstein's eyes, cinema advances, as if it is a machine that transcends what is human, and transcends its physical and mental limits, and it is also a tool to compensate for a lack of a sense of senses; that is, what a person cannot accomplish or do in life, as he captures its manifestations in a way intermittently, the cinema is able to do it as well as the ability to do creative installation, so that it can achieve continuity and flexibility in space and time, the normal physiological forces of man are unable to do the same. For this reason, "Jean Epstein" considers that cinema is a surhumain art, as it possesses exceptional possibilities for excitement and excitement, and for generating special emotional states. This machine, says "Epstein", which "attracts and intensifies permanence, and demonstrates the transforming nature of time, and calls for the relativity of all measurements, which - i.e. this machine - seems to be a kind of psychological construction" [6]; Rather, cinema rises to a spiritual level . It is a magical art and its “secret is extremely simple, as its magic is concentrated in its ability to diversify and change dimensions and temporal trends” [7]. It is a “revival art” that reveals the life of things, sometimes rising to the level of will, freedom and spirit.
From the movie "The Fall of Usher's House" by Jean Epstein (1928)
It is indisputable that Epstein's enthusiastic engagement with the cinematic phenomenon brought him down in various intellectual contradictions. It confuses the scientific understanding of reality with the various "spiritual" interpretations or understandings of it, and claims to establish a philosophy of cinema and cinema at the time when we find it formulating "non-philosophical" texts or far from them. His talk about the psychological life of cinema remains obscure, as Dominique Chateau notes, does the referral on the psychological dimension refer to the cinematographic machine or the spectator?
In front of this question, Epstein remains hesitant and even confused, as he accepts that the motion picture cinema requires, when presented, a mental and spiritual activity for the recipient, and it gives the cinematography a mysterious character as it stores “a psychological life”; but it is completely incapable of interpretation of the existence of this life in a manner that has the necessary conditions of clarity and persuasion. It is not enough to emphasize the importance of movement in the cinema and to prioritize it compared to the forms, which is a weak justification for the simple reason that the cinematographic machine lives moments of stopping, for example, through the "fixed shot". Also, "Epstein" did not pay attention to the necessary correlation between the formative intensity of the film image and the semiological dimension of the film discourse, and the game of marks, including the concept of the snapshot, and the different patterns of its intertwining with the elements that make up the cinema narration. Dominique Château explains the absence of this connection in Epstein's writing about cinema to his anti-rational tendency, and to his firm belief that the picture is fundamentally different from logical abstraction.
It is a sign that directs directly to the spectator, which does not require him to make a great effort to dismantle its meaning or meanings.
Whatever the many observations that can be recorded on the writings of "Eisenstein" and "Epstein" on cinema as a subject of philosophy, they represent, however, an exciting moment in the history of philosophical interest in cinema, or rather cinematic preoccupation with questions of philosophy. In their view, cinema possesses a special ability to think based on its own set, because it cannot be reduced to being a mere sight, by virtue of having special means to represent the world without necessarily being subject to the constraints of the rules of logical reasoning. Whether we treat them with utopianism, or formulate logically weak ideas, these “filmmakers” theorists offer thought to openness to deepen the philosophical view of the cinematic phenomenon.
1-S.Eisenstein. Perspectives ; in Cahier du cinéma : N° 209, 1969.
2-Dominique Château, Cinéma et philosophie, Ed, Nathan, Paris
2003, P12.
3-Eisenstein ; cité in Dominique Château, PP 63-64.
4-Dominique Château ; P64.
5-Dominique Château ; op.cit, P 75.
6-Jean Epstein ; Écrits sur le cinéma , tome 1 ;
Ed. Seghers ; Paris, 1974, P224.
7-Dominique Château, op. cit ; P75.
8-Jean Epstein, op. cit, P263.
9-Ibid, P 282.
