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The cinema of Eisenstein
ELSEVIER
Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 823-826
Book review David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. 316 pp. US$35. Reviewed by Timothy R. White, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119260. Apparently, David Bordwell is incapable of writing a bad, or even mediocre, book. His latest (in what seems a never-ending stream of scholarly work, coming at a pace that few of us could ever hope to match), The Cinema of Eisenstein, is simply further proof of this. It also is evidence that Bordwell is, without a doubt, the most important scholar of film working today. Not only has he written important works on such areas of film studies as the films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Bordwell, 1981), French impressionist cinema (Bordwell, 1980), the classical Hollywood film (Bordwell et al., 1985), and film narration (Bordwell, 1985), but this textbook, Film Art: An Introduction, written with Kristin Thompson (Bordwell and Thompson, 1993), is the standard text for 'Intro to film' courses, and his Film History: An Introduction, also written with Thompson (Bordwell and Thompson, 1994), is rapidly becoming the standard for film history courses. This most recent book, on the seminal Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, may come as a surprise to some. After all, much of Bordwell's recent work has been on Japanese cinema (see, for example, Bordwell, 1988). And, as Bordwell himself admits, there has been no lack of work on Eisenstein and his films. However, as the author points out, "students and general readers have lacked a straightforward introduction to [Eisenstein's] accomplishments" (p. xi). Most students learn of Eisenstein and his films through film history textbooks, which generally present him as one of a handful of filmmakers, along with Edison, the Lumi~re brothers, D.W. Griffith, and, maybe, a few German Expressionists, who shaped the silent cinema. Unfortunately, these texts often present the silent filmmakers and their films as museum pieces, antiques whose day is gone, whose chapters have been written and forgotten. On the other hand, more specialized works on Eisenstein, including the translated works of the director himself, tend to be too specialized, too narrow in their focus, or fail to place Eisenstein's films and writings in a historical context which would lead to a better understanding of his aims and accomplishments. And, these more specialized works tend to neglect some of Eisenstein's works, and especially the later films, in favour of the 'masterpieces', primarily Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky. Bordwell remedies this by offering a well-balanced account of all of Eisenstein's films, including such aborted works as Qu~ viva Mdxico and Bezhin Meadow, and
0378-2166/96/$15.00 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
824
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 823-826
placing them in a context of both Eisenstein's theoretical writings and the history of the Soviet Union under first Lenin, and then Stalin. And, of course, Bordwell does this in the clear, straightforward, jargon-free style that is the most welcome aspect of all of his work (Bordwell makes the convoluted prose of many of his contemporaries in film studies appear absolutely constipated). In the process, he brings some of the dynamism back to our readings of Eisenstein and his films. His analyses of the films themselves are clear and astute, reminding us of why these films were so exciting to us when we first saw them, while his explications of Eisentein's writings lead us to a new appreciation of both the director's far-reaching intellectual curiosity and his efforts to understand the art of film. This effort on the part of Eisenstein to understand film, to discover the ways in which it works in a very practical way, is at the heart of Bordwell's book. Not only does he clearly state his own project as being one of historical poetics, Bordwell also makes clear that he sees Eisenstein himself as a poetician of cinema: "[I] locate the films in relation to contemporary norms of Soviet cinema and seek antecedents and parallels to his ideas in wider intellectual traditions. In addition, we are now in a position to see Eisenstein's fusion of filmmaking practice with abstract theorizing as offering not so much an aesthetic as a poetics of cinema, an explicit creative and analytical method derived from a reflection on craft techniques" (p. xi). The poetics of cinema, and specifically historical poetics, has been the concern of several of Bordwell's recent books, and in fact constitutes his approach to the study of film. As Bordwell put it in an earlier work, "The poetics of any medium studies the finished work as the result of a process of construction - a process which includes a craft component (e.g., rules of thumb), the more general principles according to which the work is composed, and its functions, effects, and uses. Any inquiry into the fundamental principles by which a work in any representational medium is constructed can fall within the domain of poetics." (Bordwell, 1989a: 371) The poetics of cinema, with its roots in the works of Aristotle and the Russian Formalists (in the fields of both literature and linguistics), takes as its subject the very basic kinds of processes by which films are made; this is something that most approaches to film study simply take for granted. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that so much of what passes for film 'theory' these days falls apart upon close inspection; often film scholarship lacks a firm foundation in an understanding of just what film is, how it is made, and how it works. Film scholars are rarely concerned with whether or not what they theorize has any basis in the 'real world'; as a filmmaker as well as a scholar, Eisenstein lacked this luxury. His ideas had to work on film as well as on paper, and his burning passion was to figure out just which cinematic devices and techniques worked - that is to say, achieved desired effects - and which ones didn't. In order to explore this poetic mission, Bordwell divides his book into seven chapters. Instead of a strict chronological account of Eisenstein and his life and films, Bordwell first presents a short overview of the director's life in order to keep the analyses that follow in historical context. This is followed by three chapters covering
Book review / Journal of Pragmaties 26 (1996) 823-826
825
Eisenstein's work in the silent era; one chapter covers the silent films, one covers the theoretical writings o f the silent period, and the third, 'Practical Aesthetics: Pedag o g y ' , covers Eisenstein's teaching during these years. It is in this chapter that Bordwell really begins to make a case for seeing Eisenstein as a poetician of cinema: "These documents [the notes of his lectures] show us a somewhat different Eisenstein from the polemicist and thinker we encounter in the published writings. Although he did occasionally lecture on broad theoretical questions, most of the pedagogical material consists of detailed probings of specific problems. This work can be most fruitfully understood as a fresh attempt to build a poetics of film." (p. 139). It is this emphasis on Eisenstein as a poetician that truly distinguishes Bordwell's b o o k from earlier work on the filmmaker. And it is also the reason why this b o o k will likely be of interest to readers of the Journal of Pragmatics, as it is what ties the work with Bordwell's other recent work on historical poetics and cognitive approaches to film (see, for example, Bordwell, 1989a,b). The following passage from The Cinema of Eisenstein tells us as much about Bordwell and his approach to film as it does about Eisenstein himself: "Suppose we take poetics to be a kind of middle-level theorizing - an attempt to describe or explain particular craft practices while tying them to broader issues of form, response, and social function. Within this framework, Eisenstein's theoretical writings tend to argue 'from the top down.' Even though his filmmaking propelled him toward specific problems, his essays typically appeal to general doctrines of mental function and social structure in order to arrive at the principle informing film practice. By contrast, Eisenstein's teaching approaches poetics from the bottom up. He confronts us with a specific technical problem and demands that we justify making one concrete choice rather than another. To answer, we must move up to that middle level of principled craft knowledge that guides the artist's activity. Only then might Eisenstein invoke comparisons with other arts or broader philosophical doctrines. The result is "film theory" rather in the sense in which musicians speak of "music theory': a systemizing of the principles behind specific creative decisions." (pp. 139-140) Seen from this perspective, the shift in Eisenstein's later filmmaking and theoretical writings seems more than the simple response to Stalinism that it is often taken to be. After Chapter Four as a link between the early and late periods of Eisenstein's career, Bordwell looks at Eisenstein's writings in the sound era (1930-1948) in Chapter Five, and then his final films, Alexander Nevsky and the two completed parts of Ivan the Terrible, in Chapter Six. These two chapters are especially interesting for the light they shed on the pressures felt by Eisenstein during the Stalin years, and the ways in which he tried to keep himself in the g o o d graces o f the dictator (even as his colleagues were disappearing around him), at the same time remaining true to his art and continuing to explore the poetics of film. The final chapter of the book, "The making and remaking o f Sergei Eisenstein', traces the shifting critical and academic attitudes toward the great cinraste over the years, and end with B o r d w e l l ' s own assessment o f Eisenstein's importance to film, and to the study of film. The b o o k concludes with a chronology o f Eisenstein's career, a detailed filmography, an extremely helpful recommendation for further reading, and a bibliography, featuring a fairly extensive listing of the writings of Eisenstein himself.
826
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 823-826
A c c o r d i n g to a blurb by Yuri Tsivian on the back c o v e r o f the paperback, " E i s e n stein studies are b o u n d to fall into two parts - before and after B o r d w e l l ' s Cinema of Eisenstein". Before b e g i n n i n g the book, I r e g a r d e d this as typical p u b l i s h e r ' s hype; by the m i d d l e o f the book, I was c o n v i n c e d that it was accurate. U p o n finishing it, however, I c a m e to the conclusion that B o r d w e l l ' s latest book, like most o f his others, is p r o b a b l y too straightforward, too logical and jargon-free, and j u s t m a k e s too much d a m n sense to change the direction o f film studies, at least any time soon. F i l m scholars these d a y s are s i m p l y too c o m m i t t e d to their o w n narrow, unnecessarily complicated, ideological approaches. Perhaps the readers o f the Journal o f Pragmatics, m a n y o f w h o m I suspect w o r k outside o f the discipline o f film, will be m o r e willing to accept B o r d w e l l ' s practical a p p r o a c h to film and film studies.
References Bordwell, David, 1980. French impressionist cinema; Film culture, film theory, and film style. New York: Arno. Bordwell, David, 1981. The films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bordwell, David, 1985. Narration in the fiction film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, David, 1988. Ozu and the poetics of cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bordwell, David, 1989a. Historical poetics of cinema. In: R. Barton Palmer, ed., The cinematic text: Methods and approaches, 369-398. New York: AMS Press. Bordwell, David, 1989b. Making meaning: Inference and rhetoric in the interpretation of cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, 1985. The classical Hollywood cinema: Film style & mode of production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson, 1993. Film art: An introduction (4th ed.). New York: McGrawHill. Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson, 1994. Film history: An introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 823-826
Book review David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. 316 pp. US$35. Reviewed by Timothy R. White, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119260. Apparently, David Bordwell is incapable of writing a bad, or even mediocre, book. His latest (in what seems a never-ending stream of scholarly work, coming at a pace that few of us could ever hope to match), The Cinema of Eisenstein, is simply further proof of this. It also is evidence that Bordwell is, without a doubt, the most important scholar of film working today. Not only has he written important works on such areas of film studies as the films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Bordwell, 1981), French impressionist cinema (Bordwell, 1980), the classical Hollywood film (Bordwell et al., 1985), and film narration (Bordwell, 1985), but this textbook, Film Art: An Introduction, written with Kristin Thompson (Bordwell and Thompson, 1993), is the standard text for 'Intro to film' courses, and his Film History: An Introduction, also written with Thompson (Bordwell and Thompson, 1994), is rapidly becoming the standard for film history courses. This most recent book, on the seminal Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, may come as a surprise to some. After all, much of Bordwell's recent work has been on Japanese cinema (see, for example, Bordwell, 1988). And, as Bordwell himself admits, there has been no lack of work on Eisenstein and his films. However, as the author points out, "students and general readers have lacked a straightforward introduction to [Eisenstein's] accomplishments" (p. xi). Most students learn of Eisenstein and his films through film history textbooks, which generally present him as one of a handful of filmmakers, along with Edison, the Lumi~re brothers, D.W. Griffith, and, maybe, a few German Expressionists, who shaped the silent cinema. Unfortunately, these texts often present the silent filmmakers and their films as museum pieces, antiques whose day is gone, whose chapters have been written and forgotten. On the other hand, more specialized works on Eisenstein, including the translated works of the director himself, tend to be too specialized, too narrow in their focus, or fail to place Eisenstein's films and writings in a historical context which would lead to a better understanding of his aims and accomplishments. And, these more specialized works tend to neglect some of Eisenstein's works, and especially the later films, in favour of the 'masterpieces', primarily Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky. Bordwell remedies this by offering a well-balanced account of all of Eisenstein's films, including such aborted works as Qu~ viva Mdxico and Bezhin Meadow, and
0378-2166/96/$15.00 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
824
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 823-826
placing them in a context of both Eisenstein's theoretical writings and the history of the Soviet Union under first Lenin, and then Stalin. And, of course, Bordwell does this in the clear, straightforward, jargon-free style that is the most welcome aspect of all of his work (Bordwell makes the convoluted prose of many of his contemporaries in film studies appear absolutely constipated). In the process, he brings some of the dynamism back to our readings of Eisenstein and his films. His analyses of the films themselves are clear and astute, reminding us of why these films were so exciting to us when we first saw them, while his explications of Eisentein's writings lead us to a new appreciation of both the director's far-reaching intellectual curiosity and his efforts to understand the art of film. This effort on the part of Eisenstein to understand film, to discover the ways in which it works in a very practical way, is at the heart of Bordwell's book. Not only does he clearly state his own project as being one of historical poetics, Bordwell also makes clear that he sees Eisenstein himself as a poetician of cinema: "[I] locate the films in relation to contemporary norms of Soviet cinema and seek antecedents and parallels to his ideas in wider intellectual traditions. In addition, we are now in a position to see Eisenstein's fusion of filmmaking practice with abstract theorizing as offering not so much an aesthetic as a poetics of cinema, an explicit creative and analytical method derived from a reflection on craft techniques" (p. xi). The poetics of cinema, and specifically historical poetics, has been the concern of several of Bordwell's recent books, and in fact constitutes his approach to the study of film. As Bordwell put it in an earlier work, "The poetics of any medium studies the finished work as the result of a process of construction - a process which includes a craft component (e.g., rules of thumb), the more general principles according to which the work is composed, and its functions, effects, and uses. Any inquiry into the fundamental principles by which a work in any representational medium is constructed can fall within the domain of poetics." (Bordwell, 1989a: 371) The poetics of cinema, with its roots in the works of Aristotle and the Russian Formalists (in the fields of both literature and linguistics), takes as its subject the very basic kinds of processes by which films are made; this is something that most approaches to film study simply take for granted. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that so much of what passes for film 'theory' these days falls apart upon close inspection; often film scholarship lacks a firm foundation in an understanding of just what film is, how it is made, and how it works. Film scholars are rarely concerned with whether or not what they theorize has any basis in the 'real world'; as a filmmaker as well as a scholar, Eisenstein lacked this luxury. His ideas had to work on film as well as on paper, and his burning passion was to figure out just which cinematic devices and techniques worked - that is to say, achieved desired effects - and which ones didn't. In order to explore this poetic mission, Bordwell divides his book into seven chapters. Instead of a strict chronological account of Eisenstein and his life and films, Bordwell first presents a short overview of the director's life in order to keep the analyses that follow in historical context. This is followed by three chapters covering
Book review / Journal of Pragmaties 26 (1996) 823-826
825
Eisenstein's work in the silent era; one chapter covers the silent films, one covers the theoretical writings o f the silent period, and the third, 'Practical Aesthetics: Pedag o g y ' , covers Eisenstein's teaching during these years. It is in this chapter that Bordwell really begins to make a case for seeing Eisenstein as a poetician of cinema: "These documents [the notes of his lectures] show us a somewhat different Eisenstein from the polemicist and thinker we encounter in the published writings. Although he did occasionally lecture on broad theoretical questions, most of the pedagogical material consists of detailed probings of specific problems. This work can be most fruitfully understood as a fresh attempt to build a poetics of film." (p. 139). It is this emphasis on Eisenstein as a poetician that truly distinguishes Bordwell's b o o k from earlier work on the filmmaker. And it is also the reason why this b o o k will likely be of interest to readers of the Journal of Pragmatics, as it is what ties the work with Bordwell's other recent work on historical poetics and cognitive approaches to film (see, for example, Bordwell, 1989a,b). The following passage from The Cinema of Eisenstein tells us as much about Bordwell and his approach to film as it does about Eisenstein himself: "Suppose we take poetics to be a kind of middle-level theorizing - an attempt to describe or explain particular craft practices while tying them to broader issues of form, response, and social function. Within this framework, Eisenstein's theoretical writings tend to argue 'from the top down.' Even though his filmmaking propelled him toward specific problems, his essays typically appeal to general doctrines of mental function and social structure in order to arrive at the principle informing film practice. By contrast, Eisenstein's teaching approaches poetics from the bottom up. He confronts us with a specific technical problem and demands that we justify making one concrete choice rather than another. To answer, we must move up to that middle level of principled craft knowledge that guides the artist's activity. Only then might Eisenstein invoke comparisons with other arts or broader philosophical doctrines. The result is "film theory" rather in the sense in which musicians speak of "music theory': a systemizing of the principles behind specific creative decisions." (pp. 139-140) Seen from this perspective, the shift in Eisenstein's later filmmaking and theoretical writings seems more than the simple response to Stalinism that it is often taken to be. After Chapter Four as a link between the early and late periods of Eisenstein's career, Bordwell looks at Eisenstein's writings in the sound era (1930-1948) in Chapter Five, and then his final films, Alexander Nevsky and the two completed parts of Ivan the Terrible, in Chapter Six. These two chapters are especially interesting for the light they shed on the pressures felt by Eisenstein during the Stalin years, and the ways in which he tried to keep himself in the g o o d graces o f the dictator (even as his colleagues were disappearing around him), at the same time remaining true to his art and continuing to explore the poetics of film. The final chapter of the book, "The making and remaking o f Sergei Eisenstein', traces the shifting critical and academic attitudes toward the great cinraste over the years, and end with B o r d w e l l ' s own assessment o f Eisenstein's importance to film, and to the study of film. The b o o k concludes with a chronology o f Eisenstein's career, a detailed filmography, an extremely helpful recommendation for further reading, and a bibliography, featuring a fairly extensive listing of the writings of Eisenstein himself.
826
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 823-826
A c c o r d i n g to a blurb by Yuri Tsivian on the back c o v e r o f the paperback, " E i s e n stein studies are b o u n d to fall into two parts - before and after B o r d w e l l ' s Cinema of Eisenstein". Before b e g i n n i n g the book, I r e g a r d e d this as typical p u b l i s h e r ' s hype; by the m i d d l e o f the book, I was c o n v i n c e d that it was accurate. U p o n finishing it, however, I c a m e to the conclusion that B o r d w e l l ' s latest book, like most o f his others, is p r o b a b l y too straightforward, too logical and jargon-free, and j u s t m a k e s too much d a m n sense to change the direction o f film studies, at least any time soon. F i l m scholars these d a y s are s i m p l y too c o m m i t t e d to their o w n narrow, unnecessarily complicated, ideological approaches. Perhaps the readers o f the Journal o f Pragmatics, m a n y o f w h o m I suspect w o r k outside o f the discipline o f film, will be m o r e willing to accept B o r d w e l l ' s practical a p p r o a c h to film and film studies.
References Bordwell, David, 1980. French impressionist cinema; Film culture, film theory, and film style. New York: Arno. Bordwell, David, 1981. The films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bordwell, David, 1985. Narration in the fiction film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, David, 1988. Ozu and the poetics of cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bordwell, David, 1989a. Historical poetics of cinema. In: R. Barton Palmer, ed., The cinematic text: Methods and approaches, 369-398. New York: AMS Press. Bordwell, David, 1989b. Making meaning: Inference and rhetoric in the interpretation of cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, 1985. The classical Hollywood cinema: Film style & mode of production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson, 1993. Film art: An introduction (4th ed.). New York: McGrawHill. Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson, 1994. Film history: An introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill.