Perhaps the greatest influences upon Eisenstein's theories of montage are, somewhat surprisingly, to be found in the cultural icons and artforms of the Far East. Of particular interest was the Japanese Kabuki Theatre, Sino-Japanese ideographic writing and both Chinese and Japanese poetry.Eisenstein's interest in Far-Eastern culture could be traced back to as early as 1920 when, undertaking active service on the Civil War front, he was sent to Moscow where he studied the Japanese language. Although he struggled to grasp its complexities, his studies of Japanese were enough to generate what proved to be an undiminishing admiration of Oriental culture.In his 1929 essay, 'The Unexpected', Eisenstein wrote glowingly of the Kabuki Theatre group which had visited Moscow just a year earlier. He described the group, headed by the internationally renowned Ichikawa Sadanji, as a 'wonderful manifestation of theatrical culture.'(27) Indeed, he was at pains in both 'The Unexpected' and his subsequent essay, 'A Dialectic Approach to Film Form', to laud both the Kabuki theatre and Japanese culture as a whole observing that it adopted as its 'basic nerve', montage. Yet what, in terms of montage, did Eisenstein find so inspirational in the workings of a culture so seemingly divorced from his own?What Eisenstein found in Oriental culture was the near-perfect manifestation of a doctrine which was to underlie his montage theories; the doctrine that art will always function as conflict.For example, in the Kabuki Theatre, Eisenstein observed what, according to him, was essentially a version of his dialectical montage acted out on stage. What Eisenstein particularly admired was the mechanical cutting or 'acting without transitions' found within the Kabuki plays.In the play Narukami, attended by Eisenstein in 1928, the actor Sadjani changes from a state of drunkenness to madness. This transformation to a new emotional intensity, mirroring the shot juxtapositions of Eisenstein's dialectical montage, is achieved by a 'mechanical cut' where the actor halts, conceals his face, changes his make-up and thus somewhat disjointedly moves to a completely new emotional plain.
Indeed, another feature of the Kabuki style of performance which appealed to Eisenstein concerned what he described as the principle of "disintegrated" acting; a style which relies upon 'fragments' of acting functioning in complete dissociation from one another. The Kabuki actor would, for example, in one moment act with only his left arm and then, at another moment act with only his neck and head. The body would thus effectively break-up into 'shots' and, in accordance with the principles of dialectical montage, as these'shots' or pieces of acting became shorter so the dramatic power of the tragic end would accelerate and intensify.
Fig 1. The Kabuki Theatre, with its' highly stylised acting methods and visual intensity captivated Eisenstein and influenced his theories of dialectical montage. In 'The Unexpected' Eisenstein illustrated the link between his own montage in The Battleship Potemkin and the Kabuki performances with the following example from the play, Chushingura:
After a short fight ("for several feet") we have a "break" - an empty stage, a landscape. Then more fighting. Exactly as if, in a film, we had cut in a piece of landscape to create mood in a scene, here is cut in an empty nocturnal snow landscape (on an empty stage). And here after several feet, two of the "forty-seven faithful" observe a shed where the villain has hidden (of which the spectator is already aware). Just as in cinema, within such a sharpened dramatic moment some brake has to be applied. In Potemkin, after the preparation for the command to "Fire!" on the sailors covered by the tarpaulin, there are several shots of "indifferent parts of of the battleship before the final command is given: the prow, the gun muzzles, a life-preserver, etc. A brake is applied to the action, and the tension is screwed tighter.(28)For example, the Chinese combined a picture of a mouth and a picture of a bird to create the abstract concept "to sing". In the same way, Eisenstein would cement two seemingly unrelated film shots in an attempt to depict various intellectual and emotional concepts (i.e. via intellectual montage).
Thus as in film montage, this cinematographic theatre brings with it, in Eisenstinian terms at least, the dialectic (through the juxtaposition of the fighting 'shot' and the bleak landscape) and the overtonal (the intercut landscape shots, 'cut' in accordance with mood), mounting the tension in an attempt to hit 'the spectator's cerebral target' with an obfuscating visual blow. Another of the Far-Eastern influences to touch Eisenstein's work was Sino-Japanese ideographic writing within which, as Eisenstein himself once suggested, lay the basic principles of montage.These hieroglyphics combined pictures of various objects to convey otherwise undepictable concepts.
Fig 2. As with the 'Vakulinchuk mourning' sequence in The Battleship Potemkin, Kabuki plays, at certain moments, dramatically change tone and mood.Indeed, in Japanese Poetry or, to be more precise the Haiku, Eisenstein found a form of literature which essentially replicated in the written word the visual conflict generated by dialectical montage. For example when Bashu writes,
A lonely crowWhat we find are two 'material' shots, the crow and the leafless bough, combining to form a psychological, physically undepictable concept, the autumn eve. Eisenstein cites several more of these 'montage phrases' in his 1929 essay 'The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram.'
On leafless bough,
One autumn eve.(29)Thus whether it be Japanese poetry or the Kabuki Theatre, it was clear that Eisenstein took more than just a passing interest in Far-Eastern culture. Indeed while he admired this culture it also was a source of frustration for him. He was saddened that the montage principles exhibited by the Kabuki plays and the Sino-Japanese ideograms had not been adopted within Far-Eastern cinema which, in the end, like so many others had embraced the 'revolting' aesthetic styles of American and European cinema. As he commented in 1929, 'To understand and apply her cultural peculiarities to the cinema, this is the task of Japan! Colleagues of Japan, are you really going to leave this for us to do?'