Film Form / The Film Sense

Potemkin, a silent film that appeared in 1925, was the great Russian film director's first brilliant "mass epic," originally commissioned just after the 1917 Russian Revolution to commemorate the 1905 anti-Czarist uprising. In it Eisenstein broke new ground in the cinema with his anti-narrative technique of "shock-attraction," or dialectical, show more montage---a series of shots in which each pair being spliced gives rise to a collision of images, thereby creating a sharp impression, or synthesis, in the viewer's mind. Eisenstein (who had been an engineer before he became a film director) compared this technique to the series of explosions made by an internal combustion engine driving a vehicle forward---just so, the famous sequence of slaughter on the Odessa steps and the slow descent of a baby in its carriage through the carnage drives Potemkin forward. Dynamic cutting is again evident in Ten Days That Shook the World (1928), in which he uses slowly mounting sequences and fast cuts to depict the gathering storm of the Russian Revolution and its ultimate triumph. Despite his glorification of the Russian Revolution and the new Soviet state, Eisenstein often found himself at odds with the Soviet government. For a while he even attempted to work in Hollywood, but he returned to Russia to make Alexander Nevsky (1938), his most popular film, and Ivan the Terrible, which he envisioned as a three-part epic. Part I (1944) was completed and released, Part II was withheld at first by the Soviet Film Trust and then later released, and Eisenstein died of a heart attack while working on Part III. (Bowker Author Biography) show less