Sergei Eizenshtein, The Method of Making Workers Films. August 11, 1925

Original Source: Kino, 11 August 1925.

There is only one method for making any film. A montage of attractions. To know what this is, and why--see the book Cinema Today. In that book my approach to the construction of film is laid out, although, to be sure, in a rather confused and abstruse way.

Our class orientation is set out:

1) in a definite purpose for the work-in a socially useful emotional and psychological effect on the audience, emerging from a chain of appropriately directed stimuli. This socially useful effect I call the content of the work.

Thus it is possible to define the content of the film Are You Listening, Moscow? The maximal tension of aggressive reflexes of social protest in the film Strike is an accumulation of reflexes which do not allow any relief (satisfaction), that is, the concentration of reflexes of struggle (raising the potential class tone).

2) in the selection of irritants themselves. In two directions. In a correct appraisal of their inevitable class nature; that is, certain irritants are capable of evoking a specific reaction (effect) only in an audience with a specific class character. For a more detailed work there must be an even more unified audience, perhaps by profession. Any director, for example, of a "living newspaper" in clubs knows how different audiences, say metal workers and textile workers, react completely differently and at different places to one and the same work.

Class "inevitability" in questions of action is easily illustrated by the amusing failure of one attraction, which was felt very strongly by film makers in the circumstances of a workers' audience. I have in mind the slaughterhouse scene [in the Eisenstein film Strike]. The effect of its concentrated bloodiness on a certain stratum of the public is rather well known. The Crimean censor even cut it, together with the latrine scene. (The inadmissibility of such sharp effects was pointed out by an American after seeing Strike--, he said that this scene would have to be cut for foreign audiences). The "bloody" effect, however, was not produced by, the slaughterhouse scene on a workers' audience, and for the simple reason that for workers a steer's blood is associated first of all with the processing plant connected with the slaughterhouse! And there would similarly be no effect whatsoever for peasants who are used to slaughtering their own cattle.

A second element in the election of irritants is the class accessibility of this or that stimulant.

Negative examples are: the assortment of sexual attractions which are fundamental to the majority of bourgeois films placed on the market; stimulants which lead one away from concrete reality, as, for example, the expressionism of Doctor Caligari; or the sweet poison of middle class existence in the scenes of Mary Pickford; or the stimuli of all middle class inclinations which are exploited and systematically focused even in our healthy and advanced audiences.

Bourgeois film knows similar class "taboos" no less than we do. Thus, in the book The Art of the Motion Picture (N.Y., 1911) first place on the list in a review of thematic attractions considered undesirable for use are "relations between labor and capital," as well as "sexual perversion," "excessive brutality," and "physical deformity." ..

The study of stimulants and their montage for a special purpose ought to provide an enormous amount of material on the question of form. Content, as I understand it, is the sum total of what is laid out to produce the special tension which the film-maker wishes a particular audience to experience in a specifically defined order. (Or, more crudely, such and such a percent of material to fix attention, such and such a percent to evoke anger, etc.) But this material must be organized according to a principle that will enable the desired effect to be produced.

Form is the realization of these intentions in a particular piece of material by means of creating and pulling together precisely the stimuli which are able to evoke those necessary percents, that is, the concretized and factual side of the production.

One must, moreover, keep particularly in mind the "attractions of the moment," that is, those reactions that temporarily flare up in connection with particular tendencies or events in current social affairs.

In contrast to these are a series of "eternally" attractive phenomena and devices.

Some of these have a class usefulness. For example, the inevitable reaction of a healthy and whole audience to the epic of class struggle.

And equal with these are the "neutrally" effective attractions, such as death-defying stunts, double entendres and the like.

The independent use of these leads to "l'art pour l'art " to an extent sufficient to reveal their counter-revolutionary essence.

Just as with the elements of attraction, which ought not speculate on the evil of the day, one must keep clearly in mind that the ideologically allowable use of neutral or accidental stimuli can be only as a mode of inducing those unconditioned reflexes which are necessary to us, not as independent phenomena, but for the formation of conditioned reflexes useful in class terms, which we want to match with certain objectives of our social principles.

Source: William G. Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), pp. 375-77.