Page 200 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 181
The following section of the ‘Statement’ has received less attention, although it
amounts to an admission that montage has reached an impasse. Sound used
contrapuntally is seen as ‘an organic escape for cinema’s cultural avant-garde from
a whole series of blind alleys which have appeared inescapable’. Two specific
examples are given: the intractable problem of integrating intertitles into montage
structures and the disruptive need for explanatory sequences, such as long shots, 28
in montage sequences consisting for the most part of rapidly edited close-ups. The
latter problem was perhaps more Pudovkin’s than Eisenstein’s. Noël Burch has
drawn attention to the ultimate paradox in Pudovkin’s method of analysis into the
simplest and most expressive montage elements, i.e. by close-ups:

Wishing to carry to its extreme consequences the logic of linearisation
through editing, Pudovkin comes up against the same obstacle encountered
by the pioneers when they were casting about for methods capable of
overcoming the unfortunate ‘dissociative’ effect which the first interpolated
close-ups had upon the unity of films that still depended almost exclusively
on the lay-out of the primitive tableau. In both cases this disintegration, as it
were, was the price that had to be paid for an increase in ‘expressiveness’….
Striving to remain within the bounds of fundamental linearity and to
strengthen that linearity, Pudovkin fails to see that the enunciation
characteristic of the system is not simply a succession of signs, as
decomposed as possible, but that it is founded on a dialectic between such
‘stripped down’ images and a more complex spatiality offering
complementary guarantees. 29

Burch’s general argument is that early Soviet cinema owed its pluralism and
originality to the ‘unfinished’ representational system which it inherited. The
‘Statement’ suggests that this phase had run its course, at least for the director who
had just finished October and returned to work on The General Line:

Every day the problems of theme and plot grow more complex; attempts to
solve them by methods of purely ‘visual’ montage either lead to insoluble
problems or involve the director in the field of fantastic montage
constructions, provoking a fear of abstruseness and reactionary
decadence. 30

It is well known that Eisenstein was already looking forward to sound as a ‘new
montage element’ while working on The General Line, which he also considered
31
turning into a sound film with music by Meisel, but the ‘Statement’ here suggests
a crisis in confidence in the ‘intellectual cinema’ towards which October pointed.
The ‘Statement’ ends with a further, prophetic, argument against the talkies.
Only contrapuntal sound films will escape the inevitable restriction of naturalistic
sound films to their own language communities. The authors of the ‘Statement’
foresaw what was soon to happen as the ‘internationalism’ of silent cinema–which