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DAVID THORBURN: This
afternoon, by welcoming
our virtual audience,
the audience that's
looking at this lecture on MIT'S
OpenCourseWare, some of you
attentive viewers may notice
what the students here
would not notice-- that
seven years have elapsed.
There's no podium-- some of
you may have gotten that--
and a much older professor.
I hope that our completion
of these lectures seven years
later will not result in a
reduced or less energetic
performance.
I'll do my best.
We come now to the end
of our first segment
in the course on silent film.
And I thought it would
be helpful to use
today's lecture in part to
create some perspectives
on both the silent film, the
idea of the silent film--
not just the
particular films we've
looked at, but more generally
the phenomenon of silent film,
the whole phenomenon-- and some
perspectives that will also
help us look forward
to what will follow,
to the sound films that
will follow this week.
I'd like in a certain
way to do this
by complicating an
idea I've already
suggested to you
about the notion
of the film as a cultural form.
What does it
actually mean to say
that a film is a cultural form?
What, in a concrete sense,
does this phrase signify?
Well, one answer I think
I can offer by drawing
on your own experience.
My guess is that all of you
have watched older films, films
from 20 or 30 or 40 years
ago, and immediately
been struck as soon
as you began to watch
the film by certain
kinds of differences
that the original filmmakers
would have been oblivious to.
And I'm talking about things
like the hairdos of people,
the clothing that they wear, the
way automobiles look, or even
a world in which there
are no automobiles,
the physical environment
that is shown.
One of the things that
this reminds us of
is that always, even
the most surreal
and imaginative and
science-fictiony
films, always inevitably
in some deep way,
in some essential ways,
reflect the society
from which they come.
They may reflect more
than that, and they
may be influenced by
other factors as well,
but they are expressions
of the culture that
gave rise to them in certain
really essential ways.
And one of the
things this means,
among other significance, one
of the most interesting aspects
of this recognition
is the fact that films
get richer over time.
They become artifacts of immense
anthropological interest,
even if they're terrible
films, because they show us
what the world of 50 or 25 or 30
years ago actually looked like
and how people walked and
how people combed their hair
and what kind of
makeup they wore,
all of the things, many
of the things, which
in many respects, the people
making the original film
would simply have taken for
granted as part of the reality
they were trying to dramatize.
So one way of thinking about
film as a cultural form
is to recognize that
as films grow older,
they create meaning.
They become more interesting.
They become richer, and
a corollary implication
of this idea that
films become richer
is that the meaning of
any individual artifact,
cultural artifact, especially
cultural artifacts as complex
as films, is always in process.
But the meaning is never
fully fixed or finished,
that new significance
and new meanings emerge
from these texts with
the passage of time,
as if the texts
themselves undergo
a kind of transformation.
One final point about
this, just to sort of tweak
your broader understanding
of these kinds of questions--
one of the kinds
of transitions that
occurs with particular artifacts
is they sometimes move or make
a kind of transition
from being recognized
as merely ordinary and
uninteresting parts
of the society from which they
grow, from which they emerge,
simply ordinary routine aspects
of the experience of society.
Later ages may value
these routine objects
as profoundly
valuable works of art.
And in a certain
sense, one could
say that the film
in the United States
underwent a transition
of that kind,
that at a certain point in the
history of our understanding
of movies, American culture
began to recognize that movies
were actually works of art,
that they deserved comparison
with novels and plays and
poems and so forth, probably
an idea that all of you
folks take for granted.
Many of members
of your generation
admire movie directors more than
they do novelists and poets--
a radical mistake
it seems to me,
but that's my literary
bias showing through.
I certainly admire great
directors certainly as much
as I do good novelists.
But the fact is that this
is really not the case.
This recognition of the
film as an artistic object,
as I've suggested
earlier in the course,
is not some fixed
or stable identity
that the film has had
from the beginning.
It's an identity that
the film has garnered,
that has been laid
on the film later
as cultural changes
have occurred
and as other forms of
expression have emerged
that have put the film in a
kind of different position
hierarchically from other kinds
of imaginative expressions.
And as I've already suggested
many times in this course,
we'll come back to this
principle, because it's
such a central historical fact
about the nature, the content
of American movies especially.
It's the advent
of television that
is partly responsible
for the transformation,
although it takes some
time for the transformation
in American attitudes
toward what movies are,
because television became
the throwaway item,
the routine item,
the thing Americans
experienced every day.
And the consequence of that
was to change our understanding
of what the film was.
Now of course, the Europeans
had an insight like this long
before the Americans
did, and that's
something I'll talk
about a bit later today
and also at other
times in our course.
So that's one way of thinking
about what it means to say
that a film is a cultural form.
It means that it's
unstable in the sense
that its meanings are
not fixed, and the way
in which a culture
categorizes and understands
a particular artifact is also
something that's unstable,
that undergoes change over time.
But there are
other ways to think
about this problem of film
as a cultural formation,
as an expression
of society, and I
want to tease out some of
those meanings for you as well.
One way to come
at this problem is
to think of a kind of
tension or even contention
between our recognition that
film is a global form-- that
is to say that because
the movies are watched
across national boundaries,
movies that are made
in the United States can
influence movies that are made
in Europe and vice versa.
So in one sense,
the film, especially
after film got going within
the first 10 years of its life,
it had become an
international phenomenon,
and American films
were watched in Europe,
and European films influenced
American directors, even
at very early stages
so that we begin
to get certain kinds of
films that certainly appealed
across national boundaries.
And so there is a kind
of global dimension
to what film might be.
And there's another
way of thinking
about what it means
to talk about film
as a global phenomenon, not as
a merely national expression.
And that has to do specifically
with the way in which
particular directors and
films in particular societies
can influence world cinema.
And from the very earliest
days of cinema, as I suggested,
this has been a reality.
As David Cook's History of
Narrative Film informs you,
and I hope you'll read
the assigned chapters
on Russian film closely,
because I can only skim
these topics in my lecture.
What you'll discover
among other things
is that the great American
director, DW Griffith,
had a profound impact
on Russian films
and that, in fact,
at a certain point
in the history of
Russian films, there
was a workshop run by
a man named Kuleshov,
who actually took
DW Griffith's movies
and disassembled
them shot by shot
and studied the editing
rhythms in his workshop.
This had a profound impact
not only on Russian cinema,
but Griffith's practices
had a profound impact
on virtually all filmmakers.
And there's a kind
of reverse influence,
because certain Russian
directors, Eisenstein
especially, but
also Dziga Vertov,
their work had a profound
impact on the films
from Western Europe and
from the United States.
So it's a two-way process.
It's too simple to say that
particular films are only
an expression of French
culture or only an expression
of Russian culture or only an
expression of American culture.
They are also global
phenomena, and they
were global phenomena from
almost the earliest stages.
So it's important to recognize
this tension or this balance.
There are dimensions
of film that reach
across national boundaries.
And as we've already
suggested, one
of the explanations for the
success of American movies
in the United States
was in part a function
of the fact that they
did not require language
in nearly the same degree.
They were visual experiences,
and an immigrant population
coming into the large
cities of the United States
at the turn of the century was
one of the primary factors that
helps to explain the phenomenal
quick growth of the movies
from a novelty into a profound
embedded cultural experience.
So it is a global
phenomenon in a certain way
and reaches across
national boundaries.
But there's also-- and
we need to acknowledge
this side of the equation
too-- there's also a profound,
a really deep fundamental
sense in which
films, at least
until very recently,
are an expression of the
individual national cultures
from which they come.
I say until very recently,
because some of you
must be aware of the fact
that a new kind of film
is being made now by
which I mean a film that
seems to appeal across all
national boundaries, that
doesn't seem to have a
decisive national identity.
At least some films like that.
I think the Bollywood people
are making films like this.
Americans are certainly
making films like this now.
And sometimes if you think
of some of the action
adventure films that
will have a cast that
is drawn from different
cultures, a sort
of multiethnic and multilingual
cast, all of them dubbed
into whatever language the
film is being exhibited in,
you'll see an example.
What's begun to emerge now
in our 21st century world
is a kind of movie that
already conceives of itself
as belonging to a kind
of global culture.
So far I'm not sure these movies
have as much artistic interest
as one would like, but
it's a new phenomenon,
and the globalizing tendencies
of digital technology
are certainly
encouraging new ways
to think about the origins or
the central sources of movies.
But until very recently,
it is still the case
that virtually every
film made in any society
reflected in deep
and fundamental ways
aspects of that society.
And one of the reasons that
this is such an important thing
to recognize is it
means that, especially
in cultures like the
European societies
and those in the United States,
the movies are profoundly
illuminating source of
cultural and social history.
Even if they had no
artistic interest,
they would be worth
teaching and studying.
And the fact that some of
them are luminous works of art
makes teaching them a particular
pleasure, a particular joy,
a real vocation.
So if we talk about films as a
national expression, what we're
talking about here is
the extent to which
the assumptions about
personal relationships
and the assumptions about
the way society operates
are going to be grounded
in culturally, socially
specific phenomena,
socially specific practices.
And we're also talking not just
about the content of movies,
but also about the structure
of the industries which end up
providing movies to the public.
And part of what I
want to at least allude
to today in the
lectures and materials
that we're looking at today is
to crystallize or concretize
this idea that the
variations that
are possible within the broad
universe of the cinema so
that, for example, the
individual and atomistic system
that developed in
the United States
for the production of movies,
the capitalist arrangements
that developed in
the United States
for the development of
movies, are in many ways
radically different
from the systems that
were developed in some
European societies
or in the Soviet Union.
And there's a
particular contrast
with the Soviet Union,
which developed movies
in a quite different way and
had a quite different notion
about them.
The emergence of
the movies coincides
in some degree with the
turmoil in the Soviet Union.
The Russian Revolution is 1917.
Movies become a central source
of information and propaganda
for the emerging
of Soviet culture.
Lenin called movies
our greatest art form,
because he understood
how important they
were in promulgating
certain ideals
and embedding those
ideals in the society.
And in fact, there
were not in Russia
a series of independent
companies that produced films.
There was a top-down arrangement
in which the government
controlled filmmaking.
It doesn't mean that
they didn't make
remarkable and
interesting films,
but it was a different system.
It was a top-down system.
We had central
government financing
in which the genres
in Soviet films
could be said to
have had what we
might call rhetorical sources.
For example, a revolution story
is one genre of Russian film,
celebrating the heroic
struggle of the people.
There were even sort
of genres that we
might call building
genres or creating genres,
and they were about creating a
farm or building a skyscraper.
And the film was put in the
service by the Soviet state,
was put in the service
of this emerging society.
It was understood
as a system that
would mobilize
mass social forces
for the betterment of society.
And these differences in
attitudes and in the ways films
are financed and who makes the
decisions about what films will
go forward, of course,
has a profound impact
on the nature of those movies.
Our demonstration
instance today will
be one of the most famous
passages from Eisenstein's
Potemkin to demonstrate
some of the,
in a much more
concrete way, some
of the implications
of this difference
between American and Russian
film that I'm suggesting.
There also profound differences,
and I'll develop this argument
a little more fully to this
evening when we shift over
to the great German
silent film that we're
going to look at tonight.
There are profound differences
between the American and German
systems of moviemaking
and attitudes
toward the making of movies.
And I'll elaborate on some
of those notions later today
in the evening lecture.
But for the moment
then, suffice it
to say that virtually all
movies are going to reveal
or are going to
embody the values
and assumptions of the
culture from which they come,
that that makes them
anthropological artifacts
of profound significance and
distinguishes French film
from British film
from American film
in ways that continue to be
illuminating and significant.
But there's certain other
contrasts or potential tensions
in this notion of film
as a cultural form
that I'd also like
to develop or spend
a little bit more time on.
One of them is the notion
that there's a profound, even
a fundamental
difference, more broadly,
not just between French
and American cinema,
but between all forms
of European cinema
and the American version.
And this is a principle we'll
talk about more this evening,
but I want to allude to it now.
One of the ways to
crystallize this
is to remind you of
something we've already
talked about briefly
in the course, which
is the migration of
filmmaking from the east coast
to the west coast in the
early days of filmmaking
in the United States, the flight
of filmmakers to California.
And we've talked a
little bit about why
that's a significant
transformation
and a significant move.
But perhaps, the most important
aspect of this historical fact,
the migration of the
movies to the west coast,
is that what this meant is that
the movies in the United States
were able to develop in a
culture whose intellectual
and artistic and
cultural authorities
were on the east coast, as far
away as possible from where
movies were developing.
In other words,
the American movie
is much more fundamentally in
its emergence a popular form,
a form that has no consciousness
of itself as a work of art.
It knows that what
it's trying to do
is make money and
entertain people,
and the earliest--
very early, there
were some directors
like DW Griffith who
recognized the artistic
importance of movies.
I don't mean there weren't
directors who recognized it.
Chaplin surely thought of
himself as making works of art,
especially later in his career.
But the fact is
the American movies
begin on the farthest
Western verge of the society.
Nothing developed there.
New York is the cultural center.
Boston is a cultural center.
Maybe we could even say some
of the great Midwestern cities
have some kind of
cultural authority,
but there's nothing
on the west coast.
And what that means is
that all the writers, all
the dramatists, all the
actors, all the theater actors,
all the poets, all
the musicians--
they were in the East.
They lived in New York, and
there was a kind of freedom
that this imparted
to American movies.
And this is a very
sharp contrast
with the development of almost
all forms of European cinema,
partly because the cultures are
literally geographically more
limited, unlike the vast
expanse of the United States.
But also because of the
much stronger traditions
in these European societies of
high culture, the much stronger
respect in these societies
for theater and for poetry
and for prose narrative.
In the European societies,
and this was especially true
in Germany, but it was
true in some degree
in every European society,
including the Soviet Union,
there was a sense
that the movies
were emerging in the shadow of
older art forms whose greatness
and grandeur shadowed,
menaced this emerging form.
And in a way, the
distinction I'm mentioning,
the difference I'm
mentioning, accounts
both for the limitations
and for the glories
of both kinds of film,
because if the European film
was more static-- and
we'll talk much more.
I'll give you some
examples of this tonight.
If the European film
was more static,
it was less cinematic in
a way in its early years,
because it thought of itself
as emerging from literature,
from theater, from poetry.
And in fact, some of the
important early German
filmmakers especially were
people who came from theater,
and they had theatrical
notions of what art was.
We'll talk more about
this this evening.
So because that
was true, the glory
of the early European
cinema was its recognition
that it could be
artistically powerful,
its sense that it was talking
about important subjects.
But of course, the
limitations were
that it was often very boring
visually, that it was serious,
but not a movie, that
it didn't exploit
the properties of the
medium nearly as quickly.
It didn't try to explore the
unique properties of the medium
nearly as quickly, in part
because it was so in thrall
to inherited ideas of artistic
value and artistic expression.
This isn't entirely a
disadvantage, as I said,
because it also imparted
to European filmmakers
a sense of dignity and the
importance of their enterprise
that served them
well in certain ways
and made them pick
ambitious subjects.
And you'll see the
outcome, the final outcome,
once the European film was
liberated into a greater
cinematic freedom.
And I'll show you an example
or two tonight of that.
It became something
immensely rich
in part because it had
this legacy of high art
behind it and high
artistic ambitions.
The United States' story
is almost the opposite.
In the United States,
there was a kind
of glorious sense of having no
responsibility toward older art
forms.
There was something exuberant,
experimental, joyous,
unembarrassed about
early American films.
They didn't think of
themselves as artwork,
so it gave them a
kind of freedom.
They were also vulgar as hell.
They were often
trivial and silly.
They often had limited
artistic ambitions,
but they explored the
nature of the medium
in a way that became the
legacy of movies and a legacy
that was communicated to
other societies as well.
Well, this distinction then
between American and European
cinema is something I'll
develop a little bit more
fully with examples
this evening.
But it's a crucial distinction.
It's a crucial difference,
and it tells us a lot
about both forms of filmmaking.
There's one final tension
that I want to mention here.
We'll return to it
again when we come
to look at Singing
in the Rain later
in the course, which dramatizes
this subject among others.
There's another kind of tension
implicit in what I've already
said, which is the tension
between what we might call
popular culture, notions
of culture that are enjoyed
by the masses, by everyone as
against high culture like opera
and poetry and theater, which
only the educated people go to.
And this tension is
especially important-- it's
important in many
films-- but it's
an especially important
tension in American movies.
And one of things that we will
come back to in different ways
as we think about these American
films is the way in which
very often, American
films position themselves
as the antagonist
of high culture.
And there are many
films that actually
do that, and some
of the Marx Brothers
films systematically dismantle
the objects of high culture.
There's one Marx Brothers
film called A Night
at the Opera, which
takes place in an opera,
and the whole set
comes crashing down.
The whole place falls apart
in the course of the film,
acting out a kind of aggression
against the older art form.
And this is a tension also
that we will see played out
in some of the films we're
going to be looking at a bit
later in the course.
So this notion of
Hollywood as the embodiment
of a certain kind of demotic
vigor and populist energy
is a helpful way
of thinking about
how, especially in
the early years,
American film was somewhat
different from European film,
and how it also very
aggressively was
happy to distinguish itself
from established art forms.
I want to take a quick, what
will appear to be a digression,
but actually isn't.
I want to talk a bit now
about two crucial terms that
will be useful in our
discussions of the matters I've
already raised and
some other matters that
will come up later
in the course,
and then return after clarifying
these terms to an example
from Battleship Potemkin,
Eisenstein's most famous film,
to demonstrate
something of what I mean
by the principles of top-down
organization and film
as propaganda that I was
talking about earlier,
as well as calling
your attention to some
of the artistic
innovations that we still
attribute to Sergei Eisenstein.
The two terms I want to discuss
are the terms montage and mise
en scene.
They're contrasting elements
of what is in all movies.
In a certain way, the term
montage and the term mise
en scene describe the
most essential features
of what movies are.
Mise en scene, a term drawn
from the theater, which
literally, it's a French word.
It literally means
what is put or placed
in the scene, what
is in the scene.
Mise en scene refers
to the single shot,
to what goes on within the
single continuous unedited shot
of film, the frame of film,
however long it lasts.
And the mise en
scene of that shot
is virtually everything
inside that frame.
In other words, even how
the actors move in the frame
is part of the mise en scene,
but especially, the mise
en scene emphasizes what
is the environment like,
what's the furniture
like, what's
the relation between the
foreground, the middle ground,
and the background.
And in mise en
scene, the emphasis
is on the composition
within the frame,
and sometimes very
great directors
will compose their
frames with such subtlety
that if you freeze them,
they look like paintings.
They're balanced or
unbalanced if that's
the artist's intention
in particularly
artistic and complex ways.
So we can think of
this in some sense
almost as having a kind
of painterly equivalent.
What goes on in
the scene within?
The other great term, montage,
which is also a French term,
comes from the verb the French
verb monter, which means
to assemble or to put together.
And a montage means what is
put together, what is edited,
what is linked together.
So a montage means the
editing of continuous shots
in a sequence.
So the montage of a film is
the rhythm of its editing.
So all films have
both elements in them,
and in fact, we need to
be aware of both of them.
When we look at a film,
it's often very helpful
to ask yourself questions about
the rhythm of the editing,
to pay attention to how
long the shots are held,
to the way the film is edited.
Again, the Eisenstein
example we're
going to look at in a
minute will give you
some dramatic instances
of why manipulating
the editing and
the montage can be
so dramatic and so signifying.
So there's a kind of
convention that has developed,
and though ti radically
simplifies in some ways,
it's a simplification that's
immensely instructive.
One way you can
talk about directors
is to categorize them
as montage directors
or mise en scene directors.
Mise en scene directors--
I'm oversimplifying,
remember, because there's
montage in every film.
So a mise en scene
director can be
a master of editing
too, and a director
that we identify as a
montage director certainly
has to know how to
manipulate his mise en scene.
So it's not as if
one kind of director
doesn't do the other thing, but
what it does try to signify,
what it does try to
indicate is that directors
we call montage directors are
directors whose effects come
in a central way from the
way they edit the film,
from the quickness
of their editing,
from the way their editing
manipulates or controls
meaning in some sense.
And we therefore would think of
montage directors-- Eisenstein
is a classic example.
Hitchcock is probably
the contemporary example,
near contemporary example, that
most of you might have in mind,
in which the editing of the
film, the quickness with which
the shots develop,
the way the music
is superimposed on
the editing rhythm,
to increase your emotional
response to the film.
What we would say
is that that's what
a montage director embodies.
So if we say that Hitchcock is
a montage director, what we mean
is that most of his
most profound meanings
come from the way in
which he edits his film.
And a contrast would be,
let's say, with a director
like the director we're going
to see in a few weeks later
in the term, Jean Renoir,
a realistic director
who might be called much more
fully a mise en scene director,
because he does edit.
His editing rhythms
are subtle, but he's
interested in long takes.
Montage directors
like short takes,
shots that last
only a short time.
In the most dramatic
segments of the segment
from Battleship
Potemkin that I'm
going to show you this
afternoon in a few minutes,
sometimes the edits are so
brief that they don't even
last a second and a half.
The average number of shots
in the film as a whole,
in Battleship
Potemkin as a whole,
the shots last four seconds.
That's not very long.
In a Renoir film, they might
last 10, 15 seconds, sometimes
much longer than that.
That's a very long time
for a shot to be held,
and if a shot is held that long,
it means the camera will move,
action will occur in it, but
it'll still be a single shot.
And can you see that if you
hold the shot for that time,
and the camera moves like
this, what is it encouraging?
It's encouraging you to
think about the relation
between characters
and the environment.
It's encouraging a kind
of realistic response
to what the film is showing
you, whereas if you're
looking at a film in which the
cuts occur every two seconds,
you don't have time
to sort of take
in what's the relation between
the actor and the furniture.
You're disoriented, and
in fact, Hitchcock often
brought his editing to a
point just below the threshold
of disorientation.
When Eisenstein was theorizing
about the power of editing--
he was one of the first
great film theorists--
he talked about the way in which
you could control an audience
physiologically by
manipulating montage.
And it's true.
You can, as you will
know, and something
that fascist societies are
fully aware of and make use of.
So this distinction between
montage and mise en scene
is immensely useful,
and in some degree,
if you apply the
terms generously
and tactfully, you can learn
something about every film
you look at by thinking
about how these elements work
in the film.
I want to turn now to
arguably, certainly
one of the most famous films
in the history of cinema
and to a particular
fragment from the film
or an extended
one, which I think
embodies and will help clarify
many of the abstract ideas I've
just been suggesting to you.
Let me say a word
about the film.
The film Battleship Potemkin
was produced in 1925
at a point when Eisenstein was
now at the height of his power
and authority.
And it commemorates a moment in
an abortive revolution of 1905
so that by the time Eisenstein
came to make the film,
Battleship Potemkin was kind
of like a founding story,
or at least, it was about
an abortive founding that
would then occur years later.
What it dramatized
was a historical fact.
There was a rebellion by the
crew of the Battleship Potemkin
against its officers,
and it the battleship
sailed into the port of
Odessa, and its mutineers
were welcomed by the people
in the port of Odessa.
And then the czar, angry that
his Navy and his Naval officers
had been mutinied against,
sent soldiers to Odessa
to decimate not
just the mutineers,
but the population of Odessa.
And so the film, it was
understood in a way,
it was a revolutionary
document or an attempt
to sort of create a
kind of founding myth
for Russian society, because
everyone watching the film
would have known that the
real revolution occurred only
whatever it was, 12
or 13 years later,
and that this was a
kind of rehearsal.
And so the film would have
had a kind of patriotic aura
for its audience.
So the passage I'm going to
show you is the famous passage.
I think David Cook calls
this the most famous montage
sequence in the
history of cinema.
It was certainly
profoundly influential,
and as we're watching
it, I may interrupt
it to say a few things
as you're watching,
but I'll try not to do
too much interruption.
What I want you to watch
for especially is not only--
I will have to make some
commentary-- as you're watching
it, among other things,
watch for the way
in which the length of the
shots or the time between shots
varies.
And as this passage
begins to increase
in intensity and terror, the
cuts become even briefer.
And then watch also
the way in which
certain other strategies
of Eisenstein's reinforce
these montage strategies.
For example, where the
camera is positioned.
Is it looking up at a character,
or is it looking down?
And very different thing.
If you look up, you
enlarge, and you mythify.
If you look down, you
humiliate and minimize.
Watch how he does
that sort of thing.
You'll find it, I think, very
illuminating and significant.
The sequence is
often seen today,
and rightfully, I suppose,
as deeply heavy-handed,
because you're not allowed when
you're looking at this film
to have an alternative
view of things.
The film doesn't leave you room.
Eisenstein's strategies
don't leave you
room for independent judgment.
You're immersed in a spectacle
so emotional and so wrenching
that you don't have
time to sort of sit back
and think and come
to conclusions.
And one could say
that this is one
of the great differences
between montage directors
and mise en scene directors.
Not an accident most horror
movies, all horror movies
really, are a form of montage,
because your feelings are
being manipulated.
You're not supposed to
be allowed to sit back
and say how ridiculously
implausible these events are.
If that happened, it
would spoil the film.
We'll come back to these things.
So here is the
Odessa step sequence
from the Battleship Potemkin.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
These are the Odessans
welcoming the mutineers.
One of the things that
Eisenstein was fond of
was a theory of montage that
was based on two principles.
One he called typage,
typage-- T-Y-P-A-G-E.
And what he meant by typage
was the idea that there were
ethnic, very racist in a
way, that there were ethnic
and social types that could
be recognized visually.
So he would type.
So he felt, if I
show you this face,
you'll know he's a
working class character.
If I show you a
woman with a parasol,
you'll know that she belongs
to the upper classes.
And in fact, he's
probably right about that.
Here are the czar's forces,
come to punish the mutineers
and the city of Odessa.
So the soldiers are on top,
and they're forcing people down
the steps, and they are
presumably shooting them. .
Kristen, freeze it for a second.
I don't want to distract you
by talking while it's running,
so let me interrupt
it for a second
and say something else about
the way the film works.
One of the things
Eisenstein understood was--
and it's actually a
brilliant discovery.
He realized that he could
create through his strategies,
especially of
dramatic editing, he
could create a
situation in which
the actual time of the
experience that you're watching
was not real time, but was what
might be called emotional time.
That is to say what's happening
here, it's probably in the film
taking longer than
it took in reality,
because in moments of horror,
the horror is extended.
And watch how those kinds of
rhythms operate in the film.
OK.
Seems like a naive hope.
Freeze it again, Kristen.
One other quick observation.
I hope you recognize
how artful this
is, even if you're
not moved in the way
the original audiences
would have been.
I think contemporary
audiences often
feel it's too heavy-handed.
They resist the extent to which
the film is manipulating them,
but think back to the
earliest days of film.
What an unbelievable, shocking,
incredibly exciting experience
it must have been
for early film-goers
to have an experience
that-- certainly
for the Russian audience, but I
think for every audience-- that
was so intense and so
emotionally powerful, so full
of fear and violence
that can be evoked
by the rhythms of the
editing, by the music,
by how close-- I hope
you noticed the way
he mixes in closeups in
incredibly powerful ways trying
to create certain effects.
Again, you're not given a choice
about how to feel about this.
You can descend from it by
withdrawing your interest,
but you can't say, oh, I
really love those soldiers
who were doing the shooting.
Let's make a case for them.
The film won't allow
you to do that, will it?
In that sense, it's
manipulating you,
but it's telling us a
story about the creation
of a revolutionary society.
Finally, remember,
I said that this
is a question about emotional
time as against real time.
Think how long this
has been going on.
You think that this
massacre is over,
but in fact, it's only
half over, as you'll see.
There's going to
be a moment when
horse-mounted cossacks,
horsemen, show up
at the bottom of the steps
and get them in a pincher.
Go on.
I don't think this soundtrack
is the original soundtrack.
It's very good though.
This is a brilliant moment.
I don't know whether we can
attribute this to Eisenstein
or not when suddenly
the music stops.
There should be sound now.
Maybe something
wrong with our print.
I wanted to wait at
least until you saw this,
because some of
you may recognize
this moment as something
that's been copied
in recent American
movies, a kind of allusion
or a reference to this scene.
The moment I wanted you to think
about is this baby carriage.
OK.
Thanks, Kristen.
Blood in the
eyeglasses-- can you
think of a movie in which
you've seen that recently?
Maybe not that recently.
It's actually an ancient
film now by your standards.
How about The Godfather?
There's a wonderful
scene in The Godfather
where a guy looks up
from a massage table,
and he's shot through
the eyeglasses.
Very memorable moment.
It's surely an
allusion to this movie,
but how about the
carriage going down?
There have been several
films that actually
recreate that
moment, but the one
I'm thinking of-- Who is it?
AUDIENCE: The Untouchables.
DAVID THORBURN: Yes.
From The Untouchables.
Who's the director?
Do you remember?
Yes.
Brian De Palma's film,
The Untouchables,
has a moment just like that.
And De Palma, of course, is a
kind of historian of movies.
Virtually every scene
in a De Palma film
is a reference or an
allusion to an earlier film.
And part of the importance
of Battleship Potemkin
is that it is still a fruitful
and fructifying source
of imagery for
contemporary filmmakers.
So let me conclude then
by simply reminding you
that, as Cook
suggests in his book,
this is the single most
influential montage
sequence in cinema
history, and that it's
a wonderful instance for us, I
think, of the way in which film
in a different kind of culture,
in an authoritarian culture,
in a revolutionary culture,
full of moral fervor,
would be conceived
both as an apparatus,
as an engine of social
transformation by a society
that controlled film in a
way fundamentally different
from the way in which
film developed, let's say,
in the United States.
We will continue
these arguments,
and I hope complicate
them this evening.
