Slave To His Own Rebellion

What you are willing to see depends on what you are prepared to interpret with reference to your own expectations.

The Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein, made a categorical statement: "To build cinema starting from the idea of cinematography and from abstract principles is barbarism and stupidity."

It should also be added that the film "October" tries, in an original way, to compensate visually, in several cases, the absence of sound in the film. The echo of the cannon shot of the cruiser "Aurora" echoes through the halls of the Winter Palace, which are filmed by a rhythmic opening and closing of the diaphragm. Thus, the echo is "seen". As the noises of machine guns in the assault of the same palace are "seen", signaled by the corresponding movements of a crystal chandelier, violently shaken. In the latter case, it is obviously an associative equivalent (the shaking of the crystal directly evokes the noise), while in the former case, we are dealing with a graphic equivalent of the sound.

For all its obvious big misses, the film "October" remains an experience of great proportions. Eisenstein always thinks big. That's why his mistakes are also amazing: they take your breath away. Like a fearless Achilles in his iconoclastic fight against traditionalism, but also a strange Don Quixote, haunted by his own hallucinations, Eisenstein sometimes becomes a slave to his own rebellion.

How do the expressive equivalents in your creation reveal the possibility of a purely visual message, so that the echo of "seen" is followed by the echo of the "as seen" image?

In the study of cinema, visual experiences propagate like sound waves, undergoing creative transformations and modulations. The cannon's echo and reverberation phenomena are translated into visual language through the bold pacing of the diaphragm, transforming the abstract energy of sound into palpable cinematic representations. Visual structures, such as the vibrating chandelier, become mediums for the transmission of absent sounds, in an experimental rebellion against technical limitations. Like a physicist studying sound waves, Eisenstein transforms these artistic hallucinations into graphic equivalents of acoustic reality. In this attempt to build a new form of expression, he overcomes the barriers of traditionalism, even if he sometimes becomes a slave to his own visual experiments.

As noted, Eisenstein categorically rejects the idea of building cinema on abstract principles, considering it nonsense, just as the psychology of perception explains that the lack of a stimulus can only be compensated for by concrete associations.

In the film "October", the director tries to compensate for the absence of sound with an original visual language: the echo of the cannon shot of the cruiser "Aurora" travels through the halls of the Winter Palace through a rhythmic opening and closing of the diaphragm, making the "echo" visible. The sound of assault machine guns is also visually transposed through the image of a violently shaking crystal chandelier, a graphic equivalent meant to evoke the absent sound.

Thus, Eisenstein creates a visual equivalent of auditory perception, trying to provide a unitary experience to the viewer. This ambitious approach, of adding visual dimensions to compensate for missing sound, makes "October" an experience of impressive scope, but also one of stunning failure resulting from its iconoclastic and sometimes hallucinatory approach. Eisenstein thus becomes a prisoner of his own rebellion, oscillating between the role of a daring Achilles in the fight against traditionalism and a Don Quixote pursued by his artistic hallucinations.

Leadership means turning absence into creative presence. How do you transform apparent limitation into a triumph of the visual, where absence becomes presence and silence takes visible form in your creation?

the slave of his own rebellion who creates fascinating, but sometimes difficult to understand works by reference to his own standards and radical visions, resulting in both masterpieces and spectacular errors. I say this because in "October" you can see a combination of innovative genius and stylistic excess, with reference to the novel way of visually equating sound, in the idea that constant experimentation can sometimes exceed the limits of the viewer's comprehension.

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