Dear Mike,

I guess I'm not really sure what Eisenstein meant and I welcome discussion of
this point.  I'm not sure, though, when you say he thinks it should operate at
the perceptual rather than the conceptual level.  Doesn't he insist that the
conceptual level emerges from the perceptual through viewer 
participation? I.e. there are two images presented sequentially that 
can't be synthesized
according to a spatiotemporal or causal logic, and yet they demand a kind of
synthesis and the viewer constructs that synthesis in terms of meaning.  The
examples he gives (both in his films and his writings) seem to bear 
this up: in
Strike we have the soldiers attacking workers juxtaposed with images of cows
being slaughtered, there are no cues to suggest that the workers are being
attacked near a slaughterhouse so the mind makes a kind of direct comparison;
in Battleship Potemkin we have the lions rising on their pedestals -- that by
itself just strikes me as a clever illusion of motion and not what he means by
intellectual montage, but he uses it as an example of intellectual montage so
what he must mean is that in the context of the massacre taking place 
the lions
rising up suggests a sense of outrage -- as in: "even the statues which 
are in a
way symbols of the old aristocracy and are mere products of stone are outraged
at this offense against the people."  The key point I saw in Eisenstein's
conception of montage (and maybe this is reading him too loosely) is that bits
of film are not bricks whose significance is already settled when they 
get lain
next to one another, but are cells whose meaning is not given all at once with
their appearance but only in the context of the organic unities that surround
them -- so that the stone lion can in fact come to life when placed in a
context that suggests the demand to do so.

Given that (probably loose) reading of Eisenstein, I take there to be an
intellectual montage wherever the "point" of a cut or a sequence cannot be
gathered simply by considering narrative thrust, but by drawing 
comparisons and
contrasts suggestive of a layer of meaning independent from or building 
upon the
narrative level.  If that is so, in addition to a number of other 
things at work
in the Godfather scene there seeems to be some intellectual montage at 
work. Can you say why that is not helpful or plausible to read it that 
way?  (I
really am interested, because I assume there probably is something simplistic
about my approach to these things.)

Take care,

Nate




> Date:    Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:32:06 -0500
> From:    Mike Frank <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Intellectual Montage in Modern Cinema
>
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>
> i've admitted to never being really sure about what exactly
> eisenstein meant in talking about intellectual montage --
>
> but if not REALLY  sure i'm at least PRETTY sure that he
> meant something very different from what most of the
> posters are suggesting . . . while these posts have been
> very illuminating to me, making me see patterns of meaning
> that i've previously overlooked, they are generally examples
> of thematic criticism, seeing in the arrangement of details
> within a film a pattern of emergent meanings . . . thus
> the narrative DEVICE of parallel editing at the end of
> godfather  serves  to advance the narrative STRATEGY of
> comparing the mafia and the church . . . seeing meanings
> in this kind of construction has always been a concern of
> criticism -- both of films and of other texts --  and has been
> a preoccupation of criticism for much of the last half century
> since the heyday of the new critics . .
>
> but eisenstein, whatever he meant, was almost certainly talking
> about the perceptual rather than conceptual level, and as such
> was talking about cinematic DEVICES and not cinematic
> STRATEGIES . . . the fact that these strategies of creating thematic
> complexity are achievable within the strict bounds of continuity
> editing would seem to clinch it that they can hardly be what
> our friend sergei was talking about
>
> mike


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