Eisenstein's Two Concepts of Montage and the Evolution of the Soviet Avant-Garde in the 1920s-1930s

Abstract

In the 1920s, montage became one of the most characteristic strategies of avant-garde art, which was based on the understanding of the art work as a complex whole. It suggested the possibility of a recombination of relatively autonomous elements which was based on a rethinking of the general concept of artistic creativity and, in particular, the rejection of the traditional opposition of artistic labour to industrial, “alienated” labour. Sergei Eisenstein’s theory and practice of film editing were vivid manifestations of this approach. Thus, the scene “Kerensky in the Winter Palace” from the film October (1927) can be regarded as a thematization of his concept of montage and its ideological implications: dispersing the single image of the emperor and God, Eisenstein put the heterogeneity and discreteness of signifiers in place of totality. Such a model of montage can be called inductive: the movement proceeds from a particular representation to a general meaning by comparing this representation with others, particular and "non-correlative". At the turn of the 1930s, the concept was criticised within the anti-formalist campaign . However, in 1938, Eisenstein undertook a revision of his theory based on a deductive approach rather than inductive one. Now montage was carried out in the perspective of the initially given signifier: it appeared as a choice of a limited number of signifiers from a potentially infinite set for the best disclosure of the topic - to create its comprehensive representation". Eisenstein found examples of the use of this strategy in all forms of art, including painting and literature: everywhere, the image formation means the selection and comparison of a small number of components and the achievement of the effect of the identity of the particular and the general. At the same time, Eisenstein used the concept of the image (obraz), which played a key role in the aesthetic discussions of the 1930s; he understood the image as montage and extended the montage principle to all types of art, both temporal and spatial. His article “Montage 1938” contains one of the most convincing and articulate theories of the image in the history of aesthetic thought. By undertaking to rehabilitate montage, Eisenstein exceeded the level of the task at hand and defined this strategy as the universal basis of any artistic practice, rooted in the functioning of human consciousness itself.