SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

we are now no longer dealing with a narrative account of a dismembered damon
undergoing his “epiphany,” or even with the structure of the consecutive
peripeteiasinhisstory(whichformthebasisofadifferentplot-line),butwith
a principle, which has absorbed the basic characteristics of the narrative and
reassembled them in a form that gives it a new quality.
This, as a principle, permeates the structure of all possible kinds of artistic
composition.
In the course of its progress, the principle oscillates between being directly
figurative and moving away as far as possible from figurative representation
in the direction of pure principle. This does not only involve a simple forward
development in a straight line; it can also include unexpected reversals and
regressions [Zdes’ est’ i neozhidannye vozvraty, retsidivy]. 169
The second attempt to establish a psychological and anthropological foundation
of the principle of montage can be found in another section of the same chapter
of Montage entitled “Laocoön.” Here Eisenstein presents what he considers as
“themostfundamentalcinematicphenomenon”(samyiosnovnoikinofenomen):
The most fundamental cinematic phenomenon – the fact that the picture
moves – is a montage phenomenon. What does this phenomenon of the
moving photographic image consist of?
A series of still photographs of different stages of a single movement are
taken. The result is a succession of what are called “frames.”
Connecting them up with one another in montage by passing the film at a
certain speed through a projector reduces them to a single process which our
perception interprets as movement. 170
AccordingtoEisenstein,thisbasicformofcinematicmontagecanbeconsidered
“mostfundamental”foratleasttworeasons.
On the one hand, it exhibits in a simple form the human mind’s capacity of
uniting “separate phenomena into a generalised image”: 171 a capacity that the
mind exercises not only in the specific case of viewing a film, but in every cognitive
activity. Interpreted in thisperspective, perception and memory, imagination
andlogicalreasoningareallcarriedoutbythemindthroughsomeformofmontageinwhichmultipleimpressions,memories,images,orconcepts,are“edited”
together in order to produce an “image” (obraz) imbued with a broader meaning.
“To think,” writes Eisenstein, “is above all to generalise.” 172 As we read in “Laocoön,”whenweconsider
the unique nature of the cinematic phenomenon – the creation of motion out
of the collision of two motionless forms – […] we are not dealing with
natural, physical movement but with something that has to do with the way
eisenstein’s media archaeology 65