Summary of the June 12 Lecture
"The Japanese Literary and Theatrical Tradition in Eisenstein's
Theory of Montage and his Films", by Prof.
Koichi and Mrs. June H. Nakamura
The hall of OAG House was once again comfortably filled for the last meeting
before the summer recess, when we were treated to an unusual presentation
involving the showing of two videos.
Professor Nakamura led off by introducing the subject and speaking on "Eisentein
and the Japanese Literary Tradition". 1995, he said, marked the centennial
of film-making, and one name stood out above all others, that of Sergei
M. Eisentein, in spite of the fact that he made only six films. He was not
only a great creative artist but a great master of film theory, and unlike
other Western film-makers he was deeply interested in the relation between
the cinema and traditional Japanese arts.
Eisenstein was born in Riga, Latvia, in the old Russian Empire, in 1898
to a typical middle-class family. His father was a civil engineer, and he
planned to follow in his father's footsteps. But one childhood experience
made a deep impression on him. In his bedroom was a Japanese screen with
a picture of a white lilac, and this picture fused in his mind a combined
image of the close-up and composition in depth. During the civil war of
1917-20 he served as a soldier in the Red Army, and while in Minsk he met
a former instructor of Japanese and decided to master the Japanese language
in order to understand the country and its art better. In an article "How
I Became a Film Director", written in 1945, he described the methods
he worked out for memorizing Japanese words during countless nights of study.
He found Japanese unusually difficult, not only because of the lack of association
with the vocabulary of any European language, but also because the way of
thinking was entirely different, and this affected the structure of the
whole sentence.
He decided to study further at the General Staff Academy in Moscow, and
to qualify for this set himself to master hundreds of Chinese characters.
He became fascinated with these, and traced their origin. He was particularly
interested in the "kaii moji", in which two pictorial elements
are combined to make a third idea, thus "water" and "eye"
are synthesized to mean "tear", "mouth" and "dog"
to mean "bark", and "mother" and "child" to
mean "good" or "like". This study of Chinese characters
was to serve later as a cornerstone for his film technique of "montage",
as it gave him the idea of combining two separate images to create a third
image that was greater than the sum of the two. At this stage he decided
to abandon his plans of becoming an engineer and devote himself to studying
Japanese.
His dreams were shattered, however, when he arrived in Moscow in 1920. The
Academy had not reopened and he did not know where to go and study. He then
chanced to meet a childhood friend, who introduced him to a job in the Workers'
Theatre. He threw himself into this work passionately, and forgot his plans
of becoming a professor of Japanese. But he took his knowledge of Japanese
into the theatre with him, and combined this with his theatrical experience,
leading to his concept of montage and its application to film-making, especially
in his masterpiece "Potemkin".
This film was originally intended as an episode in a spectacle commemorating
the anniversary of the revolution, but it grew to become a full-length film.
It dealt with a mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin in 1905, which was
supported by the townspeople of Odessa until the Cossack soldiers came and
shot down all the resisters. It was divided into five episodes, of which
the fourth, "The Odessa Steps", particularly demonstrated Eisenstein's
use of montage, combining seemingly disassociated close-ups so that they
took on a new qualitative relationship with each other in the eyes of the
spectator. Professor Nakamura now showed a video of the episode. The intertwining
of shots of a child being killed, advancing Cossacks, a mother who is hit
and falls, sending her baby in its pram careering down the steps to its
death, an old woman transfixed in horror, a Cossack cutting her down with
his sabre, the same old woman now with shattered pince-nez and a bleeding
eye, all conjure up the impression of the Tsarist forces. Finally there
is a famous montage scene of three stone lions, one sleeping, one awakening,
and one rising, which combine to give the impression of a single lion rearing
up as if in protest. As already noted, this principle of montage was based
on Eisenstein's analysis of the Chinese characters; but at the same time
he saw this imagery also in "tanka" and "haiku", and
concluded that all the various branches of Japanese art were permeated by
the same cinematic element, so that it was appropriate that the cinema should
learn from other forms of Japanese artistic practice. With this comment,
Professor Nakamura prepared the way for Mrs. Nakamura to take over and speak
about "Eisenstein and the Japanese Theatrical Tradition".
Eisenstein's interest in Japan was regenerated, she said, by a visit to
Moscow of the Kabuki theatre in August 1928. Eisenstein went backstage nearly
every day and spoke to the actors of the Sadanji Troupe and Shiro Kido who
was accompanying them. Later Kido recalled how surprised they were at Eisenstein's
insight into Kabuki; he did not see it as an exotic art, but was able to
grasp its essence at a single glance. He saw in Kabuki a "monistic
ensemble"; all the theatrical elements - the language, the costumes,
the movements of the actors, the sets, the music - combined to create a
single unit of theatre. In Kabuki the sound effects are integrally related
to the visual effects. In particular the wooden clappers ("hyoushigi")
are used to increase the tension of the action. The drum too is used to
bring out natural elements like wind or rain. A Japanese film director,
Teinosuke Kinugasa, was sitting next to Eisenstein at a performance of "Chuushingura",
and later recalled Eisenstein's delight at seeing that Wakanosuke's kicking
of his "hakama" to express his disgust as he made his exit was
timed to fit in with the sound of the drum. In this "contrapuntal"
combination of visual and sound images Eisenstein felt that Kabuki offered
a kind of Wagnerian synthesis of the arts from which sound film must learn.
He also found things to learn from in the acting technique, which he called
"the cut", "disintegration" and "slow-motion".
A change in one character from drunkenness to madness was effected by cutting
to another actor's face. The movements of the different parts of an actor's
body to express the death agony suggested to Eisenstein the "disintegration"
of a film by breaking it up into separate shots of the different parts of
the body of an actor. And the famous scene of the "seppuku" in
"Chuushingura" was to him a kind of "slow-motion". Thus
we can say that all the aspects of Kabuki penetrated deeply into Eisenstein's
theory of montage. At this point Mrs. Nakamura showed a scene from "Ivan
the Terrible", Part I, to demonstrate the acting technique and the
contrapuntal combination of visual and sound images. In this scene Ivan
is lamenting by the bier of his beloved wife, who has been poisoned, while
news is being brought to him of the boyars who are stirring the people up
to rebellion. At the end of the scene Ivan abdicates and retires to Alexandrov
to await a new summons to the throne from the people of Moscow.
When this film was released, one of Eisenstein's friends was baffled as
to why there was such stylized movement and formal make-up, and his biographer
concludes that he had created a film in which every detail was enlarged,
like the gestures of the Kabuki theatre. This formalization is one of the
aesthetic principles on which Kabuki is founded. The actors model themselves
on the style perfected by their predecessors, which has become formalized
and symbolical. This style of acting was reproduced in "Ivan the Terrible",
with the difference that the actors had not studied the technique for themselves
but were forced into the shapes demanded by Eisenstein, and were only marionettes
manipulated by him. The actor playing Ivan commented that the muscular tension
demanded of him by Eisenstein did not always agree with his emotional and
mental state, yet Eisenstein's persuasive power was contagious and the actors
were carried along by his enthusiasm. The influence of Kabuki on this film
could be seen more specifically in the ensemble of acting and music. Just
as dialogues and monologues in Kabuki are recited to the accompaniment of
music, so in "Ivan the Terrible" Eisenstein made his actors speak
in declamations, often with a musical accompaniment provided by Prokofiev,
who used a similar contrapuntal technique to mould the score to the images.
In conclusion, Mrs. Nakamura said that besides extracting techniques from
Chinese characters and the Kabuki theatre, Eisenstein had also drawn on
the prints of Sharaku and Hokusai and traditional scroll paintings. There
had been other studies made of the relation between Eisenstein's aesthetics
and traditional Japanese arts, but tonight's presentation had been an attempt,
perhaps the first of its kind, to give an extended analysis of the ways
in which Eisenstein had interpreted Japanese literary and theatrical traditions
in his theory of montage and his films.
A brief question time followed, and then the meeting was brought to a conclusion
with a vote of thanks proposed by the noted film critic Donald Richie, who
declared that we had heard a very fair exposition of a little-studied subject.
The point was not whether Eisenstein had succeeded in his experiments; it
was that he had thought one COULD succeed in making one and one equal three.
He also took the opportunity to note that the video we had seen of "Potemkin"
was the result of later editing with the addition of music that was not
part of Eisenstein's ensemble! There had been many instances of the Japanese
arts and culture being taken to Europe and then being brought back again
in a new form which somehow seemed oddly familiar to Japanese. In Eisenstein's
case he had been prevented from coming to Japan for political reasons, but
if he had he would surely have seen that in Japan too there had been a synthesis
of the art in the film world.
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society
of Japan Bulletin No. 7", September 1995, compiled by Hugh Wilkinson.
return to Asiatic Society Home Page, 1995
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