Movement first attracts attention, only then do you think about what is moving

Discovering beauty in simple forms can transform your perspectives on the world, along the lines of a lifelong passion in a never-ending odyssey of creation.

Eisenstein had never learned to draw. He had started drawing following an impression from his childhood: while waiting for the game to start, the engineer Afrosimov would draw animal outlines with a chalk on the dark blue board of the game table. Eisenstein had remained fascinated by the white arabesque of the line that was born under his eyes and that in its movement made dogs, deer, cats appear. The line moved along the invisible outline of an object which, through a miracle, thus gave existence to the table setting. The dynamism of the line was a sensation that fascinated him for years.

Engineer Afrosimov had instilled in him the pleasure of drawing. Later, at the Polytechnic, the arid subject of analytical geometry acquired a special charm for the young student because it translated precisely the movement of lines into mysterious algebraic formulas. The dynamism of "becoming", as opposed to the static, will fascinate him all his life, whether it is the movement of the line or that of the phenomena. It was a fascination for the genesis of things that has its origin here as well, in this early impression in relation to drawing.

Can your work, as a complete and authentic representation of an artistic vision, be perceived as a masterpiece of a scene separated from an artistic symbiosis?

He drew, as we know, a lot in his youth. Much and stupid, because, abandoning the primary inspiration, he loaded the drawing with details under the influence of the Russian school of genre painting. School calligraphy according to the model never succeeded. His manner was that of linear drawing. Then, abandoning the drawing, he remained passionate, in his first films, for the mathematical purity of the montage in his movement. The taste for the sequence appeared later, and he explained the strangeness of this delay, through the logic of Engels' thought: " the movement first attracts attention, only then do you think about what is moving."

An organic being of cinema, for example, could not build itself up as a creative force without borrowing something from the universal elements of expression of the things it surrounds itself with, of art, techniques, or constructive science. And perhaps any of these would have but a truncated being without the contribution of all the others, including choreographic practice.

The order in which these things predominate in importance and value makes room for an infinite diversity of embodiments under which the creator is seen: as a master, or as a visionary. Just as a painting by Rembrandt, for example, a model for what we might call artistic symbiosis, includes harmoniously, in the subsidiary of its expressiveness, certain elements of balance (colors, lines, shapes), in the same way the creation of a director must merge all elements. By this I mean that a director's work is incomparably more complete than a kitsch in which one or more of these constitutive elements of a total expression are completely missing.

Leadership emphasizes the ability to harmoniously combine all the constituent elements of artistic expression - movement, colors, lines, shapes - to create a complete and balanced work, like a remarkable "artistic symbiosis" like Rembrandt's paintings.

In the visual arts, leadership consists in the vision and mastery of integrating various expressive components into a coherent and engaging whole, thus avoiding a "kitsch" that would lack some essential elements of the total expression.

The movement first attracts attention, only then do you think about what is moving, because in cinematography you have to take into account the dynamic visual action. Moving elements capture the viewer's eye and contribute to the pace and energy of the film. A static frame can be boring, while movement creates tension, suspense and emotional involvement for the viewer.

* Note: Ion Barna - Eisenstein, Tineretului Publishing House, 1966.