Eisenstein's Essay

Eisenstein's essay addresses cinema and cinematography over time, but most importantly, montage. For Eisenstein, cinematography is montage and he traces this back to Japanese representational culture and even to hieroglyphs. The signifier and the signified have no relation, according to Eisenstein, and this is what the cinema does. The cinema takes depictive shots that have a single meaning and have a neutral context, and gives them intellectual contexts and series. Eisenstein's essay also addresses other devices and concepts like laconism and ideograms. The historical context of this essay is also particularly interesting, considering that this era in Soviet history didn't have a film school of it's own, and the film school that did exist was largely theoretical. Eisenstein's focus on Japanese cinema is one way that different cinematic schools can learn from one another and move the art form forward.