one based on the idea that a film was not shot, but
rather built up from its footage. This is reflected
in his film Mother (1926), which uses extensive
crosscutting of images, such as a sequence of shots
showing a prison riot intercut with shots of ice
breaking up on a river (a reference to Griffith’s Wa y
down East[1920]). Because his approach empha-
sized the continuity of the film, where the shots
are connected like the links in a chain, it is called
linkage.
In the first two decades after the birth of the
movies, two pioneering geniuses tower above
all other filmmakers: D. W. Griffith and Sergei
Eisenstein. While they share several notable
characteristics—chiefly, inventing new modes of
cinematic expression and producing epic historical
movies—they are very different artists. Griffith
was an American, a capitalist in his entrepreneur-
ial production activities, and a Southern sentimen-
talist at heart. Unlike Eisenstein, he was self-taught
(there were no film schools in the United States
until the 1930s); he was not an intellectual, and he
was influenced primarily by English literature and
theater, in which he worked as an actor and direc-
tor before turning to film. He did not write theory,
but rather produced movies that exemplified his
concepts.
By contrast, Eisenstein, a Russian Orthodox
Christian, was also a Marxist intellectual whose
propaganda movies were financed by the Soviet
government. He studied to be an engineer, but after
the 1917 revolution joined an avant-garde theater
group, where he was shaped by many powerful
influences, including the theory and practice of
world-famous directors Konstantin Stanislavsky
and Vsevolod Meyerhold, by Marx and Freud, and
by contemporary German, Russian, and American
movies, including those of Griffith. From these var-
ied sources, he developed his own theories of how
an aesthetic experience can influence a viewer’s
psychological and emotional reactions. Unlike Grif-
fith, Eisenstein was a modernist with a commit-
ment to making cinema an art independent from
the other forms of creative expression. His films,
few in number, are stirring achievements: Strike
(1925), The Battleship Potemkin(1925), October(Ten
Days That Shook the World, 1928), Alexander Nevsky
(1938; codirected by Dmitri Vasilyev), Ivan the Ter-
rible, Parts I and II(1944, 1958), and Que Viva México
(1930–32, uncompleted and unreleased).
Eisenstein regarded film editing as a creative
process that functioned according to the dialectic
propounded by Karl Marx, as well as the editing
concepts of Griffith and Kuleshov. In theory, Eisen-
stein viewed the process of historical change as a
perpetual conflict of opposing forces, in which a
primary force (thesis) collides with a counterforce
(antithesis) to produce a third force (synthesis),
a new contradiction that is more than the sum of its
parts and that will become the basis of a new conflict.
In filmmaking practice, one shot (thesis) collides with
another shot of opposing content (antithesis) toEisenstein’s battle spectacle: Alexander Nevsky
Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky(1938) stands out
among Eisenstein’s other movies, concerned chiefly with the
class wars, for its emphasis on nationalism and patriotism.
Focusing on Alexander Nevsky, a Russian prince who
defended Russia’s northwest territories against invading
Teutonic hordes in the thirteenth century, the movie’s
parallels to contemporary events (i.e., the threat of invasion
of Russia by Nazi Germany) were unmistakable. But the
movie is far more than a political parable. The movie’s set
piece—the “Battle on the Ice” sequence, choreographed to
Sergei Prokofiev’s stirring score—has influenced many other
movie battle scenes (e.g., battles in the Star Warssaga),
particularly in its massing of forces, brutal warfare, and
defining costumes. Noteworthy is Eisenstein’s reversal of
traditional iconography: throughout, as in this image, the bad
guys (the Teutons) are in white, while the Russian forces are
in black.A SHORT OVERVIEW OF FILM HISTORY 449