Sergei Eisenstein

“Beyond the Shot” and “The Dramaturgy of Film Form” were very fascinating and I really enjoyed reading them. Throughout both of these articles, Eisenstein argued for the importance of montage in film language. The goal, in Eisenstein’s view, was to distinguish the films from the strict realism of other art forms such as painting, sculpture and theatre, recognizing the ability of a filmmaker to shape and change his art in a way a painter could not. Eisenstein took ideas further and argued that “Cinema is, first and foremost, montage” (Eisenstein 14).  In “Beyond the Shot,” Eisenstein writes about the cinema of Japan, a country that has no cinematography. He argues that although Japanese cinema has no montage, the idea of montage is in fact ingrained in the culture, such as in their writing, hieroglyph. I am very much intrigued by how Eisenstein gives a fascinating example of how the Japanese script is composed of different representations put together, which is really what happens in cinema. Overall, Einstein promoted the idea that not only was editing important, but the way the images were used and arranged were as well.