Sergei Eisenstein’s Collage

Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s films have become nearly synonymous with cinematic montage’s birth and development. Yet scholars have almost never aligned Eisenstein’s inventiveness with painterly collage, a deeply connected trend appearing in European art. This chapter considers why thinking about Eisenstein’s theory and practice of cinematic montage, in connection with the theory and practice of painterly collage, matters to the history of modernist meaning. For artists and filmmakers alike, cutting and pasting together disparate fragments of art’s elements (its units of sense) raised one of modernism’s most misunderstood yet obsessive concerns: understanding the basic relation between art objects and beholders as a problem of how artistic meaning could be communicated. Analyzing instances of montage in his early film Strike (1925) as a chief illustration, the chapter explores the semiology of collage in comparison with Eisenstein’s semiology of montage, inserting the filmmaker as both practitioner and theorist into a conversation with “decadent” western modernism.