Eisenstein and Truffaut:

An analysis of innovation

by

Tao Ruspoli

May 6, 1995

Creative genius seldom exists without an acute understanding of and connection with the work of one’s predecessors. The directors of the French New Wave, a movement whose main concern seems to have been originality through a rejection of cinematic traditions, were no exception to this rule. For financial reasons, directors like Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol were unable to make films in the beginnings of their careers. Instead, they devoted their time to being film critics, and for ten years they watched what is estimated to be 1,000 films per year. Therefore, the films of Francois Truffaut and his contemporaries grew out of a thorough education in film history. The style of these films is a mixture of revolutionary techniques and hommages to previously made innovations.

Sergei Eisenstein was another director whose movement, that of Soviet Montage, is said to have reinvented film language. However, this director’s work, like that of the New Wave directors, should not be viewed as an isolated occurrence. Like the later movement, Soviet Montage had its roots in the broader context of film history. The events which most influenced and shaped Eisenstein’s art cover a broad spectrum.

Most of these concern his fascination with the powers of editing to create certain responses in the viewer. The work of Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov can be seen as early predecessors of Eisenstein’s montage theories and practices. Vertov realized the potential film had to capture reality, and his early work was made up of exclusively documentary footage. However, he soon saw the "necessity to arrange this reality into an expressive and persuasive whole." This got him to begin experimenting with editing techniques, which included splicing together series of very quick shots. This also lead to experiments with self-reflexivity, or the ability of film to call attention to itself and its own making.

For a short time, Eisenstein was a part of the "Kuleshov Workshop", a group of young film makers who considered editing the essence of film making. They made extensive experiments with the ability of editing to manipulate audience response. The biggest foreign influence on Eisenstein’s work was the film making of DW Griffith. The latter’s film, Intolerance, was viewed extensively by the young Russian film lovers in the Kuleshov workshop.

Finally, Eisenstein brought to his film making the goals he had attempted to achieve with his early work in the theater. It was here that he invented the "montage of attractions", whereby the audience would be continuously jolted out of its expectations through the juxtaposition of seemingly arbitrary "attractions’ or "impressions".

Although the New Wave directors and critics theoretically rejected the theories of Soviet montage in favor of the aesthetics of mise-en-scene and the long take, we shall see that the two movements were more alike than many realize, and that the innovations made by Soviet directors like Eisenstein actually played an important role in some New Wave films. The primary way they did this was through their interest in making films call attention to themselves as films, or as created works of art. Both movements, although often for different reasons, did this, in part, through editing.

Let us take a specific scene in Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin, and compare it to a few scenes of Jules et Jim, a film that ranks among Francois Truffaut’s most original and creative works. In Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein used fast rhythmic cutting to expand time, to create conflict and suspense, and to portray different angles of a character, emotion, or object. Of course, he also used this type of editing for aesthetic reasons, for he felt that the creative montage of individual shots was a large part of the essence of film art.

The last sequence of the first part of the film shows a sailor washing dishes. As he works, he notices an inscription on one of the plates: "Give us this day our daily bread." He looks up and reflects on the hypocrisy and injustice this inscription possesses, for he and his comrades have been consistently denied this basic right to decent food. In a sudden fit of rage, the sailor smashes the plate on the table in front of him.

In real time, this entire chain of events would not have taken more than a couple of seconds. However, through editing, Eisenstein expanded the time to almost 15 seconds. The plate smashing alone is divided into ten separate shots, some of which are only four frames long. This juxtaposition of shots has a number of startling effects on the viewer. First, it emphasizes the anger felt by the sailor first by repeatedly returning to an extreme close up of his face as his rage builds, and then by showing us a number of angles of the actual smashing of the plate.

The latter is said to be influenced by cubism, a movement in painting that attempted to depict a more complete illustration of the painted subject by showing it from a number of different perspectives. Therefore, the aim of this technique is not to show an abstracted version of reality. Instead, the cubists, as well as Eisenstein, realized that there is more to an emotion or action than what happens to be the viewers perspective at a certain instance.

A very similar technique is used by Truffaut when he introduces us to one of the protagonists of Jules and Jim, a beautiful woman named Catherine (played by Jeanne Morreau.) We first see her coming down a flight of stairs in a medium long shot. As soon as she has approached the camera enough for her face to fill the screen, there is an abrupt cut to an extreme close up of the upper portion of her face. A fraction of a second later, the sequence cuts to a shot an extreme close up of her profile. In the meantime, the narrator lists the features of her face, and tells of how they resemble a statue Jules and Jim had seen earlier in the film. The camera then cuts to a medium close up of her profile for less than half a second, and then returns to a shot exactly the same as the first one. The sequence continues in this manner for ten shots, which last a total of less than three seconds.

The above sequence seems also to be strongly influenced by cubism. The viewer is forced to notice each detail of Catherine’s face. The speed of the sequence, however, makes this endeavor almost subliminal. As in cubist painting this juxtaposition of a large number of images seems almost abstract, but the effect is completely different. Whereas abstract art is often non-representational, these two sequences attempt to be extra-representational. Both Eisenstein and Truffaut probably felt that the restrictions of ordinary time and space did not allow them to adequately represent their respective subjects. The time it takes to smash a plate is not sufficient to realize the anger that exists as its motivation, and the view of a woman at a single arbitrary angle does not suffice to notice the depth of each of her features.

These two sequences alone may seem to have nothing in common except that they were both influenced by the same movement in another medium. However, Truffaut also seems to have been influenced directly by Eisenstein’s techniques. In three separate sequences of Jules and Jim, Truffaut accomplishes three of the things achieved by Eisenstein in this one plate smashing sequence. In other words, in the above mentioned sequence, Truffaut only exploits one of the effects Eisenstein uses in his sequence: he shows us a number of angles of the same thing, without respect to time. Truffaut’s introduction to Catherine neither expands or condenses time in the same way Eisenstein does, for each shot is in fact continuous. In the second shot, Catherine is seen lifting her veil, and in the third shot there is a logical continuation of this action, albeit from a different angle.

Instead, as was mentioned above, while showing us a number of angles of the same shot, Eisenstein also shows us the same movement repeated a number of times. Truffaut does this in a different sequence of Jules and Jim. At one point, while walking along the Seine with her two friends, Catherine suddenly jumps into the river. We see first a long shot of her jump, followed by five shots of her actual fall. Again, these shots are from different angles, but the emphasis this time seems to be not on the different perspectives of the jump, for each shot is rather similar. Instead, in this sequence, Truffaut explicitly emphasizes the expansion of time. In the first sequence, Truffaut uses the multiple shot technique to introduce us to Catherine’s timeless features. This time, a similar technique is used to illustrate the power of her action. As in Eisenstein’s sequence, the time it would take for the actual fall is not enough to realize its impact, and by repeating it a number of times, the impact is underlined. This technique may have its roots in cubism, but it is essentially cinematic, since the passage of time is obviously irrelevant in painting.

The third effect Eisenstein is able to achieve in his short sequence is the way he is able to thoroughly engage the viewer in the object of the sailor’s anger: the plate. In addition to being involved in the emotional turmoil the sailor is experiencing, the viewer’s attention is focused on the external cause of his action. Eisenstein repeatedly intercuts extreme close ups of the sailors face with extreme close-ups of the plate. During the actions preceding the actual breaking of the plate we see a number of shots of the sailor preparing his action by lifting the plate above his shoulder. However, the final three shots ignore the sailor’s face altogether in favor of the physical destruction of the lifeless object.

Truffaut does this in a third sequence which shows us a statue, an object of Jules’ and Jim’s fascination. We first see them descending a flight of stairs, which leads them to where the statue is. After this, we never see the protagonists faces or movements. Instead, the camera quickly cuts to a number of shots of the statue as it was viewed by the characters. As in Eisenstein’s work, this sequence utilizes a lot of conflicting movement. For instance, a quick pan around the statue from right to left is followed by a pan in the opposite direction. The result is similar to that of the other two techniques embodied in Eisenstein’s short sequence: an underlined focus on both the statue itself and on the actual process of filming and editing.

The end of this essay seems to have disappeared…but hopefully you have found it informative even without a conclusion…