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DAVID THORBURN: This afternoon, by welcoming
our virtual audience, the audience that's
looking at this lecture on MIT'S OpenCourseWare, some of you
attentive viewers may notice what the students here
would not notice-- that seven years have elapsed.
There's no podium-- some of you may have gotten that--
and a much older professor.
I hope that our completion of these lectures seven years
later will not result in a reduced or less energetic
performance.
I'll do my best.
We come now to the end of our first segment
in the course on silent film.
And I thought it would be helpful to use
today's lecture in part to create some perspectives
on both the silent film, the idea of the silent film--
not just the particular films we've
looked at, but more generally the phenomenon of silent film,
the whole phenomenon-- and some perspectives that will also
help us look forward to what will follow,
to the sound films that will follow this week.
I'd like in a certain way to do this
by complicating an idea I've already
suggested to you about the notion
of the film as a cultural form.
What does it actually mean to say
that a film is a cultural form?
What, in a concrete sense, does this phrase signify?
Well, one answer I think I can offer by drawing
on your own experience.
My guess is that all of you have watched older films, films
from 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, and immediately
been struck as soon as you began to watch
the film by certain kinds of differences
that the original filmmakers would have been oblivious to.
And I'm talking about things like the hairdos of people,
the clothing that they wear, the way automobiles look, or even
a world in which there are no automobiles,
the physical environment that is shown.
One of the things that this reminds us of
is that always, even the most surreal
and imaginative and science-fictiony
films, always inevitably in some deep way,
in some essential ways, reflect the society
from which they come.
They may reflect more than that, and they
may be influenced by other factors as well,
but they are expressions of the culture that
gave rise to them in certain really essential ways.
And one of the things this means,
among other significance, one of the most interesting aspects
of this recognition is the fact that films
get richer over time.
They become artifacts of immense anthropological interest,
even if they're terrible films, because they show us
what the world of 50 or 25 or 30 years ago actually looked like
and how people walked and how people combed their hair
and what kind of makeup they wore,
all of the things, many of the things, which
in many respects, the people making the original film
would simply have taken for granted as part of the reality
they were trying to dramatize.
So one way of thinking about film as a cultural form
is to recognize that as films grow older,
they create meaning.
They become more interesting.
They become richer, and a corollary implication
of this idea that films become richer
is that the meaning of any individual artifact,
cultural artifact, especially cultural artifacts as complex
as films, is always in process.
But the meaning is never fully fixed or finished,
that new significance and new meanings emerge
from these texts with the passage of time,
as if the texts themselves undergo
a kind of transformation.
One final point about this, just to sort of tweak
your broader understanding of these kinds of questions--
one of the kinds of transitions that
occurs with particular artifacts is they sometimes move or make
a kind of transition from being recognized
as merely ordinary and uninteresting parts
of the society from which they grow, from which they emerge,
simply ordinary routine aspects of the experience of society.
Later ages may value these routine objects
as profoundly valuable works of art.
And in a certain sense, one could
say that the film in the United States
underwent a transition of that kind,
that at a certain point in the history of our understanding
of movies, American culture began to recognize that movies
were actually works of art, that they deserved comparison
with novels and plays and poems and so forth, probably
an idea that all of you folks take for granted.
Many of members of your generation
admire movie directors more than they do novelists and poets--
a radical mistake it seems to me,
but that's my literary bias showing through.
I certainly admire great directors certainly as much
as I do good novelists.
But the fact is that this is really not the case.
This recognition of the film as an artistic object,
as I've suggested earlier in the course,
is not some fixed or stable identity
that the film has had from the beginning.
It's an identity that the film has garnered,
that has been laid on the film later
as cultural changes have occurred
and as other forms of expression have emerged
that have put the film in a kind of different position
hierarchically from other kinds of imaginative expressions.
And as I've already suggested many times in this course,
we'll come back to this principle, because it's
such a central historical fact about the nature, the content
of American movies especially.
It's the advent of television that
is partly responsible for the transformation,
although it takes some time for the transformation
in American attitudes toward what movies are,
because television became the throwaway item,
the routine item, the thing Americans
experienced every day.
And the consequence of that was to change our understanding
of what the film was.
Now of course, the Europeans had an insight like this long
before the Americans did, and that's
something I'll talk about a bit later today
and also at other times in our course.
So that's one way of thinking about what it means to say
that a film is a cultural form.
It means that it's unstable in the sense
that its meanings are not fixed, and the way
in which a culture categorizes and understands
a particular artifact is also something that's unstable,
that undergoes change over time.
But there are other ways to think
about this problem of film as a cultural formation,
as an expression of society, and I
want to tease out some of those meanings for you as well.
One way to come at this problem is
to think of a kind of tension or even contention
between our recognition that film is a global form-- that
is to say that because the movies are watched
across national boundaries, movies that are made
in the United States can influence movies that are made
in Europe and vice versa.
So in one sense, the film, especially
after film got going within the first 10 years of its life,
it had become an international phenomenon,
and American films were watched in Europe,
and European films influenced American directors, even
at very early stages so that we begin
to get certain kinds of films that certainly appealed
across national boundaries.
And so there is a kind of global dimension
to what film might be.
And there's another way of thinking
about what it means to talk about film
as a global phenomenon, not as a merely national expression.
And that has to do specifically with the way in which
particular directors and films in particular societies
can influence world cinema.
And from the very earliest days of cinema, as I suggested,
this has been a reality.
As David Cook's History of Narrative Film informs you,
and I hope you'll read the assigned chapters
on Russian film closely, because I can only skim
these topics in my lecture.
What you'll discover among other things
is that the great American director, DW Griffith,
had a profound impact on Russian films
and that, in fact, at a certain point
in the history of Russian films, there
was a workshop run by a man named Kuleshov,
who actually took DW Griffith's movies
and disassembled them shot by shot
and studied the editing rhythms in his workshop.
This had a profound impact not only on Russian cinema,
but Griffith's practices had a profound impact
on virtually all filmmakers.
And there's a kind of reverse influence,
because certain Russian directors, Eisenstein
especially, but also Dziga Vertov,
their work had a profound impact on the films
from Western Europe and from the United States.
So it's a two-way process.
It's too simple to say that particular films are only
an expression of French culture or only an expression
of Russian culture or only an expression of American culture.
They are also global phenomena, and they
were global phenomena from almost the earliest stages.
So it's important to recognize this tension or this balance.
There are dimensions of film that reach
across national boundaries.
And as we've already suggested, one
of the explanations for the success of American movies
in the United States was in part a function
of the fact that they did not require language
in nearly the same degree.
They were visual experiences, and an immigrant population
coming into the large cities of the United States
at the turn of the century was one of the primary factors that
helps to explain the phenomenal quick growth of the movies
from a novelty into a profound embedded cultural experience.
So it is a global phenomenon in a certain way
and reaches across national boundaries.
But there's also-- and we need to acknowledge
this side of the equation too-- there's also a profound,
a really deep fundamental sense in which
films, at least until very recently,
are an expression of the individual national cultures
from which they come.
I say until very recently, because some of you
must be aware of the fact that a new kind of film
is being made now by which I mean a film that
seems to appeal across all national boundaries, that
doesn't seem to have a decisive national identity.
At least some films like that.
I think the Bollywood people are making films like this.
Americans are certainly making films like this now.
And sometimes if you think of some of the action
adventure films that will have a cast that
is drawn from different cultures, a sort
of multiethnic and multilingual cast, all of them dubbed
into whatever language the film is being exhibited in,
you'll see an example.
What's begun to emerge now in our 21st century world
is a kind of movie that already conceives of itself
as belonging to a kind of global culture.
So far I'm not sure these movies have as much artistic interest
as one would like, but it's a new phenomenon,
and the globalizing tendencies of digital technology
are certainly encouraging new ways
to think about the origins or the central sources of movies.
But until very recently, it is still the case
that virtually every film made in any society
reflected in deep and fundamental ways
aspects of that society.
And one of the reasons that this is such an important thing
to recognize is it means that, especially
in cultures like the European societies
and those in the United States, the movies are profoundly
illuminating source of cultural and social history.
Even if they had no artistic interest,
they would be worth teaching and studying.
And the fact that some of them are luminous works of art
makes teaching them a particular pleasure, a particular joy,
a real vocation.
So if we talk about films as a national expression, what we're
talking about here is the extent to which
the assumptions about personal relationships
and the assumptions about the way society operates
are going to be grounded in culturally, socially
specific phenomena, socially specific practices.
And we're also talking not just about the content of movies,
but also about the structure of the industries which end up
providing movies to the public.
And part of what I want to at least allude
to today in the lectures and materials
that we're looking at today is to crystallize or concretize
this idea that the variations that
are possible within the broad universe of the cinema so
that, for example, the individual and atomistic system
that developed in the United States
for the production of movies, the capitalist arrangements
that developed in the United States
for the development of movies, are in many ways
radically different from the systems that
were developed in some European societies
or in the Soviet Union.
And there's a particular contrast
with the Soviet Union, which developed movies
in a quite different way and had a quite different notion
about them.
The emergence of the movies coincides
in some degree with the turmoil in the Soviet Union.
The Russian Revolution is 1917.
Movies become a central source of information and propaganda
for the emerging of Soviet culture.
Lenin called movies our greatest art form,
because he understood how important they
were in promulgating certain ideals
and embedding those ideals in the society.
And in fact, there were not in Russia
a series of independent companies that produced films.
There was a top-down arrangement in which the government
controlled filmmaking.
It doesn't mean that they didn't make
remarkable and interesting films,
but it was a different system.
It was a top-down system.
We had central government financing
in which the genres in Soviet films
could be said to have had what we
might call rhetorical sources.
For example, a revolution story is one genre of Russian film,
celebrating the heroic struggle of the people.
There were even sort of genres that we
might call building genres or creating genres,
and they were about creating a farm or building a skyscraper.
And the film was put in the service by the Soviet state,
was put in the service of this emerging society.
It was understood as a system that
would mobilize mass social forces
for the betterment of society.
And these differences in attitudes and in the ways films
are financed and who makes the decisions about what films will
go forward, of course, has a profound impact
on the nature of those movies.
Our demonstration instance today will
be one of the most famous passages from Eisenstein's
Potemkin to demonstrate some of the,
in a much more concrete way, some
of the implications of this difference
between American and Russian film that I'm suggesting.
There also profound differences, and I'll develop this argument
a little more fully to this evening when we shift over
to the great German silent film that we're
going to look at tonight.
There are profound differences between the American and German
systems of moviemaking and attitudes
toward the making of movies.
And I'll elaborate on some of those notions later today
in the evening lecture.
But for the moment then, suffice it
to say that virtually all movies are going to reveal
or are going to embody the values
and assumptions of the culture from which they come,
that that makes them anthropological artifacts
of profound significance and distinguishes French film
from British film from American film
in ways that continue to be illuminating and significant.
But there's certain other contrasts or potential tensions
in this notion of film as a cultural form
that I'd also like to develop or spend
a little bit more time on.
One of them is the notion that there's a profound, even
a fundamental difference, more broadly,
not just between French and American cinema,
but between all forms of European cinema
and the American version.
And this is a principle we'll talk about more this evening,
but I want to allude to it now.
One of the ways to crystallize this
is to remind you of something we've already
talked about briefly in the course, which
is the migration of filmmaking from the east coast
to the west coast in the early days of filmmaking
in the United States, the flight of filmmakers to California.
And we've talked a little bit about why
that's a significant transformation
and a significant move.
But perhaps, the most important aspect of this historical fact,
the migration of the movies to the west coast,
is that what this meant is that the movies in the United States
were able to develop in a culture whose intellectual
and artistic and cultural authorities
were on the east coast, as far away as possible from where
movies were developing.
In other words, the American movie
is much more fundamentally in its emergence a popular form,
a form that has no consciousness of itself as a work of art.
It knows that what it's trying to do
is make money and entertain people,
and the earliest-- very early, there
were some directors like DW Griffith who
recognized the artistic importance of movies.
I don't mean there weren't directors who recognized it.
Chaplin surely thought of himself as making works of art,
especially later in his career.
But the fact is the American movies
begin on the farthest Western verge of the society.
Nothing developed there.
New York is the cultural center.
Boston is a cultural center.
Maybe we could even say some of the great Midwestern cities
have some kind of cultural authority,
but there's nothing on the west coast.
And what that means is that all the writers, all
the dramatists, all the actors, all the theater actors,
all the poets, all the musicians--
they were in the East.
They lived in New York, and there was a kind of freedom
that this imparted to American movies.
And this is a very sharp contrast
with the development of almost all forms of European cinema,
partly because the cultures are literally geographically more
limited, unlike the vast expanse of the United States.
But also because of the much stronger traditions
in these European societies of high culture, the much stronger
respect in these societies for theater and for poetry
and for prose narrative.
In the European societies, and this was especially true
in Germany, but it was true in some degree
in every European society, including the Soviet Union,
there was a sense that the movies
were emerging in the shadow of older art forms whose greatness
and grandeur shadowed, menaced this emerging form.
And in a way, the distinction I'm mentioning,
the difference I'm mentioning, accounts
both for the limitations and for the glories
of both kinds of film, because if the European film
was more static-- and we'll talk much more.
I'll give you some examples of this tonight.
If the European film was more static,
it was less cinematic in a way in its early years,
because it thought of itself as emerging from literature,
from theater, from poetry.
And in fact, some of the important early German
filmmakers especially were people who came from theater,
and they had theatrical notions of what art was.
We'll talk more about this this evening.
So because that was true, the glory
of the early European cinema was its recognition
that it could be artistically powerful,
its sense that it was talking about important subjects.
But of course, the limitations were
that it was often very boring visually, that it was serious,
but not a movie, that it didn't exploit
the properties of the medium nearly as quickly.
It didn't try to explore the unique properties of the medium
nearly as quickly, in part because it was so in thrall
to inherited ideas of artistic value and artistic expression.
This isn't entirely a disadvantage, as I said,
because it also imparted to European filmmakers
a sense of dignity and the importance of their enterprise
that served them well in certain ways
and made them pick ambitious subjects.
And you'll see the outcome, the final outcome,
once the European film was liberated into a greater
cinematic freedom.
And I'll show you an example or two tonight of that.
It became something immensely rich
in part because it had this legacy of high art
behind it and high artistic ambitions.
The United States' story is almost the opposite.
In the United States, there was a kind
of glorious sense of having no responsibility toward older art
forms.
There was something exuberant, experimental, joyous,
unembarrassed about early American films.
They didn't think of themselves as artwork,
so it gave them a kind of freedom.
They were also vulgar as hell.
They were often trivial and silly.
They often had limited artistic ambitions,
but they explored the nature of the medium
in a way that became the legacy of movies and a legacy
that was communicated to other societies as well.
Well, this distinction then between American and European
cinema is something I'll develop a little bit more
fully with examples this evening.
But it's a crucial distinction.
It's a crucial difference, and it tells us a lot
about both forms of filmmaking.
There's one final tension that I want to mention here.
We'll return to it again when we come
to look at Singing in the Rain later
in the course, which dramatizes this subject among others.
There's another kind of tension implicit in what I've already
said, which is the tension between what we might call
popular culture, notions of culture that are enjoyed
by the masses, by everyone as against high culture like opera
and poetry and theater, which only the educated people go to.
And this tension is especially important-- it's
important in many films-- but it's
an especially important tension in American movies.
And one of things that we will come back to in different ways
as we think about these American films is the way in which
very often, American films position themselves
as the antagonist of high culture.
And there are many films that actually
do that, and some of the Marx Brothers
films systematically dismantle the objects of high culture.
There's one Marx Brothers film called A Night
at the Opera, which takes place in an opera,
and the whole set comes crashing down.
The whole place falls apart in the course of the film,
acting out a kind of aggression against the older art form.
And this is a tension also that we will see played out
in some of the films we're going to be looking at a bit
later in the course.
So this notion of Hollywood as the embodiment
of a certain kind of demotic vigor and populist energy
is a helpful way of thinking about
how, especially in the early years,
American film was somewhat different from European film,
and how it also very aggressively was
happy to distinguish itself from established art forms.
I want to take a quick, what will appear to be a digression,
but actually isn't.
I want to talk a bit now about two crucial terms that
will be useful in our discussions of the matters I've
already raised and some other matters that
will come up later in the course,
and then return after clarifying these terms to an example
from Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein's most famous film,
to demonstrate something of what I mean
by the principles of top-down organization and film
as propaganda that I was talking about earlier,
as well as calling your attention to some
of the artistic innovations that we still
attribute to Sergei Eisenstein.
The two terms I want to discuss are the terms montage and mise
en scene.
They're contrasting elements of what is in all movies.
In a certain way, the term montage and the term mise
en scene describe the most essential features
of what movies are.
Mise en scene, a term drawn from the theater, which
literally, it's a French word.
It literally means what is put or placed
in the scene, what is in the scene.
Mise en scene refers to the single shot,
to what goes on within the single continuous unedited shot
of film, the frame of film, however long it lasts.
And the mise en scene of that shot
is virtually everything inside that frame.
In other words, even how the actors move in the frame
is part of the mise en scene, but especially, the mise
en scene emphasizes what is the environment like,
what's the furniture like, what's
the relation between the foreground, the middle ground,
and the background.
And in mise en scene, the emphasis
is on the composition within the frame,
and sometimes very great directors
will compose their frames with such subtlety
that if you freeze them, they look like paintings.
They're balanced or unbalanced if that's
the artist's intention in particularly
artistic and complex ways.
So we can think of this in some sense
almost as having a kind of painterly equivalent.
What goes on in the scene within?
The other great term, montage, which is also a French term,
comes from the verb the French verb monter, which means
to assemble or to put together.
And a montage means what is put together, what is edited,
what is linked together.
So a montage means the editing of continuous shots
in a sequence.
So the montage of a film is the rhythm of its editing.
So all films have both elements in them,
and in fact, we need to be aware of both of them.
When we look at a film, it's often very helpful
to ask yourself questions about the rhythm of the editing,
to pay attention to how long the shots are held,
to the way the film is edited.
Again, the Eisenstein example we're
going to look at in a minute will give you
some dramatic instances of why manipulating
the editing and the montage can be
so dramatic and so signifying.
So there's a kind of convention that has developed,
and though ti radically simplifies in some ways,
it's a simplification that's immensely instructive.
One way you can talk about directors
is to categorize them as montage directors
or mise en scene directors.
Mise en scene directors-- I'm oversimplifying,
remember, because there's montage in every film.
So a mise en scene director can be
a master of editing too, and a director
that we identify as a montage director certainly
has to know how to manipulate his mise en scene.
So it's not as if one kind of director
doesn't do the other thing, but what it does try to signify,
what it does try to indicate is that directors
we call montage directors are directors whose effects come
in a central way from the way they edit the film,
from the quickness of their editing,
from the way their editing manipulates or controls
meaning in some sense.
And we therefore would think of montage directors-- Eisenstein
is a classic example.
Hitchcock is probably the contemporary example,
near contemporary example, that most of you might have in mind,
in which the editing of the film, the quickness with which
the shots develop, the way the music
is superimposed on the editing rhythm,
to increase your emotional response to the film.
What we would say is that that's what
a montage director embodies.
So if we say that Hitchcock is a montage director, what we mean
is that most of his most profound meanings
come from the way in which he edits his film.
And a contrast would be, let's say, with a director
like the director we're going to see in a few weeks later
in the term, Jean Renoir, a realistic director
who might be called much more fully a mise en scene director,
because he does edit.
His editing rhythms are subtle, but he's
interested in long takes.
Montage directors like short takes,
shots that last only a short time.
In the most dramatic segments of the segment
from Battleship Potemkin that I'm
going to show you this afternoon in a few minutes,
sometimes the edits are so brief that they don't even
last a second and a half.
The average number of shots in the film as a whole,
in Battleship Potemkin as a whole,
the shots last four seconds.
That's not very long.
In a Renoir film, they might last 10, 15 seconds, sometimes
much longer than that.
That's a very long time for a shot to be held,
and if a shot is held that long, it means the camera will move,
action will occur in it, but it'll still be a single shot.
And can you see that if you hold the shot for that time,
and the camera moves like this, what is it encouraging?
It's encouraging you to think about the relation
between characters and the environment.
It's encouraging a kind of realistic response
to what the film is showing you, whereas if you're
looking at a film in which the cuts occur every two seconds,
you don't have time to sort of take
in what's the relation between the actor and the furniture.
You're disoriented, and in fact, Hitchcock often
brought his editing to a point just below the threshold
of disorientation.
When Eisenstein was theorizing about the power of editing--
he was one of the first great film theorists--
he talked about the way in which you could control an audience
physiologically by manipulating montage.
And it's true.
You can, as you will know, and something
that fascist societies are fully aware of and make use of.
So this distinction between montage and mise en scene
is immensely useful, and in some degree,
if you apply the terms generously
and tactfully, you can learn something about every film
you look at by thinking about how these elements work
in the film.
I want to turn now to arguably, certainly
one of the most famous films in the history of cinema
and to a particular fragment from the film
or an extended one, which I think
embodies and will help clarify many of the abstract ideas I've
just been suggesting to you.
Let me say a word about the film.
The film Battleship Potemkin was produced in 1925
at a point when Eisenstein was now at the height of his power
and authority.
And it commemorates a moment in an abortive revolution of 1905
so that by the time Eisenstein came to make the film,
Battleship Potemkin was kind of like a founding story,
or at least, it was about an abortive founding that
would then occur years later.
What it dramatized was a historical fact.
There was a rebellion by the crew of the Battleship Potemkin
against its officers, and it the battleship
sailed into the port of Odessa, and its mutineers
were welcomed by the people in the port of Odessa.
And then the czar, angry that his Navy and his Naval officers
had been mutinied against, sent soldiers to Odessa
to decimate not just the mutineers,
but the population of Odessa.
And so the film, it was understood in a way,
it was a revolutionary document or an attempt
to sort of create a kind of founding myth
for Russian society, because everyone watching the film
would have known that the real revolution occurred only
whatever it was, 12 or 13 years later,
and that this was a kind of rehearsal.
And so the film would have had a kind of patriotic aura
for its audience.
So the passage I'm going to show you is the famous passage.
I think David Cook calls this the most famous montage
sequence in the history of cinema.
It was certainly profoundly influential,
and as we're watching it, I may interrupt
it to say a few things as you're watching,
but I'll try not to do too much interruption.
What I want you to watch for especially is not only--
I will have to make some commentary-- as you're watching
it, among other things, watch for the way
in which the length of the shots or the time between shots
varies.
And as this passage begins to increase
in intensity and terror, the cuts become even briefer.
And then watch also the way in which
certain other strategies of Eisenstein's reinforce
these montage strategies.
For example, where the camera is positioned.
Is it looking up at a character, or is it looking down?
And very different thing.
If you look up, you enlarge, and you mythify.
If you look down, you humiliate and minimize.
Watch how he does that sort of thing.
You'll find it, I think, very illuminating and significant.
The sequence is often seen today,
and rightfully, I suppose, as deeply heavy-handed,
because you're not allowed when you're looking at this film
to have an alternative view of things.
The film doesn't leave you room.
Eisenstein's strategies don't leave you
room for independent judgment.
You're immersed in a spectacle so emotional and so wrenching
that you don't have time to sort of sit back
and think and come to conclusions.
And one could say that this is one
of the great differences between montage directors
and mise en scene directors.
Not an accident most horror movies, all horror movies
really, are a form of montage, because your feelings are
being manipulated.
You're not supposed to be allowed to sit back
and say how ridiculously implausible these events are.
If that happened, it would spoil the film.
We'll come back to these things.
So here is the Odessa step sequence
from the Battleship Potemkin.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
These are the Odessans welcoming the mutineers.
One of the things that Eisenstein was fond of
was a theory of montage that was based on two principles.
One he called typage, typage-- T-Y-P-A-G-E.
And what he meant by typage was the idea that there were
ethnic, very racist in a way, that there were ethnic
and social types that could be recognized visually.
So he would type.
So he felt, if I show you this face,
you'll know he's a working class character.
If I show you a woman with a parasol,
you'll know that she belongs to the upper classes.
And in fact, he's probably right about that.
Here are the czar's forces, come to punish the mutineers
and the city of Odessa.
So the soldiers are on top, and they're forcing people down
the steps, and they are presumably shooting them. .
Kristen, freeze it for a second.
I don't want to distract you by talking while it's running,
so let me interrupt it for a second
and say something else about the way the film works.
One of the things Eisenstein understood was--
and it's actually a brilliant discovery.
He realized that he could create through his strategies,
especially of dramatic editing, he
could create a situation in which
the actual time of the experience that you're watching
was not real time, but was what might be called emotional time.
That is to say what's happening here, it's probably in the film
taking longer than it took in reality,
because in moments of horror, the horror is extended.
And watch how those kinds of rhythms operate in the film.
OK.
Seems like a naive hope.
Freeze it again, Kristen.
One other quick observation.
I hope you recognize how artful this
is, even if you're not moved in the way
the original audiences would have been.
I think contemporary audiences often
feel it's too heavy-handed.
They resist the extent to which the film is manipulating them,
but think back to the earliest days of film.
What an unbelievable, shocking, incredibly exciting experience
it must have been for early film-goers
to have an experience that-- certainly
for the Russian audience, but I think for every audience-- that
was so intense and so emotionally powerful, so full
of fear and violence that can be evoked
by the rhythms of the editing, by the music,
by how close-- I hope you noticed the way
he mixes in closeups in incredibly powerful ways trying
to create certain effects.
Again, you're not given a choice about how to feel about this.
You can descend from it by withdrawing your interest,
but you can't say, oh, I really love those soldiers
who were doing the shooting.
Let's make a case for them.
The film won't allow you to do that, will it?
In that sense, it's manipulating you,
but it's telling us a story about the creation
of a revolutionary society.
Finally, remember, I said that this
is a question about emotional time as against real time.
Think how long this has been going on.
You think that this massacre is over,
but in fact, it's only half over, as you'll see.
There's going to be a moment when
horse-mounted cossacks, horsemen, show up
at the bottom of the steps and get them in a pincher.
Go on.
I don't think this soundtrack is the original soundtrack.
It's very good though.
This is a brilliant moment.
I don't know whether we can attribute this to Eisenstein
or not when suddenly the music stops.
There should be sound now.
Maybe something wrong with our print.
I wanted to wait at least until you saw this,
because some of you may recognize
this moment as something that's been copied
in recent American movies, a kind of allusion
or a reference to this scene.
The moment I wanted you to think about is this baby carriage.
OK.
Thanks, Kristen.
Blood in the eyeglasses-- can you
think of a movie in which you've seen that recently?
Maybe not that recently.
It's actually an ancient film now by your standards.
How about The Godfather?
There's a wonderful scene in The Godfather
where a guy looks up from a massage table,
and he's shot through the eyeglasses.
Very memorable moment.
It's surely an allusion to this movie,
but how about the carriage going down?
There have been several films that actually
recreate that moment, but the one
I'm thinking of-- Who is it?
AUDIENCE: The Untouchables.
DAVID THORBURN: Yes.
From The Untouchables.
Who's the director?
Do you remember?
Yes.
Brian De Palma's film, The Untouchables,
has a moment just like that.
And De Palma, of course, is a kind of historian of movies.
Virtually every scene in a De Palma film
is a reference or an allusion to an earlier film.
And part of the importance of Battleship Potemkin
is that it is still a fruitful and fructifying source
of imagery for contemporary filmmakers.
So let me conclude then by simply reminding you
that, as Cook suggests in his book,
this is the single most influential montage
sequence in cinema history, and that it's
a wonderful instance for us, I think, of the way in which film
in a different kind of culture, in an authoritarian culture,
in a revolutionary culture, full of moral fervor,
would be conceived both as an apparatus,
as an engine of social transformation by a society
that controlled film in a way fundamentally different
from the way in which film developed, let's say,
in the United States.
We will continue these arguments,
and I hope complicate them this evening.