Sergei Eisenstein: Principle of the Montage in October: Ten Days that Shook the World

The Montage as Syntagm Eisenstein called montage “the hieroglyph of the intellectual cinema.” Combinations of shots create what is graphically inexpressible in a single shot, just as a single word alone cannot express what a combination can. Studying Chinese ideograms, Eisenstein noted...

“The combination of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as a value of another dimension; each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept.” For example, a dog + a mouth = “to bark” a mouth + a child = “to scream” a mouth + a bird = “ to sing” a knife + a heart = “sorrow”

2 April 1928 journal entry: “A brilliant way of imparting synonymity to a shot is simply to repeat it. The quite baroque complexity of the sequence of the Jordan stairs + Karensky + the two adjutants + the statues, etc. -- is quite unlike a ‘monosemous’ sign. But through repetition it acquires a single meaning -- ‘ascension’.” “Il se souligne lui-meme” [“It (the sign-shot) underlines itself.”]

Temporality and Semiotics Film shots (signs on the paradigmatic plane) combine to form film syntax (sequence of shots on the syntagmatic plane). Film is a diachronic medium, i.e., the meaning of signs accrue over time to create and form expectations. So is film history itself: Any given syntagm leads forward and backward in time to other syntagms. (e.g., Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables and Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin). Certain types of shots and camera angles have become standardized.

All syntagms and paradigms are subject to transformation over time. (Eisensteinian montage transformed into jump cuts and seamless editing by Hollywood) These transformations are a result of concrete actions in the real world, by real people with real reasons. (Hollywood wants Action!) Transformations can have meaningful consequences even if we don’t always understand or even notice them. (Try watching an Eisenstein film now and you’ll see how the Hollywood transformation constrains your interpretation.)