Beyond The Shot Essay

In “Beyond the Shot”, Sergei Eisenstein breaks down cinematography and defines his concept of montage. With the emergence of cinema comes new modes of theatrical expression not possible in stage plays. Although Eisenstein “shifted his attention to film, hoping to find an art form capable of a more thorough-going realism” (Eisenstein, 35), what he finds is merely a new method at defying positivist realism. Positivist realism being the idea that sensory experience filtered by rational thought creates the laws through which the world around us operates. In some ways, cinema allows for realism. On screen performances can become more realistic and less theatrical, content can become more mundane and familiar. Actors on a stage no longer need to

It does not look to represent events how they may actually happen, in the same strict and fleeting time-frame, with one singular and sweeping perspective with no cuts to various shots and frames. This goes against the very notion of positivist realism. Cinematography works to re-create the moments in how they resonate within us. When compared to the events in reality, cinema can seem like “a monstrous disproportion between the parts of a normally occurring phenomenon, when we suddenly divide it into 'close-up of hands clasped', 'medium shots of a battle' and 'big close-ups of staring eyes' and produce a montage division of the phenomenon” (Eisenstein, 37). The fact that these individual shots are not how we realistically experience phenomenon reveals the challenge to positivist realism. However, the fact that these shots in succession resonate to how we perceive and understand these phenomenons reveal the function of expression through montage, and “from the juxtaposition of these monstrous incongruities we reassemble the disintegrated phenomena into a single whole bit from our own perspective, in the light of our own orientation towards the phenomenon” (Eisenstein, 37). Our integration of our understanding, our proactive spectatorship, reveals the vast difference between realism and resonance in cinema. Resonance can feel the most real to us, but it lacks the uniformity of thought that reality cannot escape and that cinema does not