Eisensteins Essay

Eisenstein’s essay was challenging to get through and understand but brings up some key points. Eisenstein starts by discussing Japanese cinema, how they have no cinematography, and therefore no montage. He then contradicts himself, saying that early hieroglyphs form montage, and that the Japanese poetry known as haiku is made up of shots, which also form montage. The article then describes Japanese theater at length. The Japanese method of “acting without transitions” describes the transitions between scenes being done by the actor simply halting his performance, concealing himself, and then reappearing as a different character. The Japanese make use of a super slow tempo in theater that is not used anywhere else in the world. He then concludes by saying that despite their originalities of their culture, the Japanese are behind the times in cinema and simply imitate American and European cinema. My feeling reading this is that it was a very long way to go about discussing Japanese cinema and their use or non-use of montage. The next section was easier to get through regarding the dialectic approach to film form. Eisenstein says that montage has been established as “the nerve of cinema” and that understanding the nature of montage is needed to understand cinema. What I get from this is that the editing of the shots is the key to the power of a film. In The Big Sleep we saw the scene with 12 shots and after reading about it, I can see how powerful each shot is in creating the montage.