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E

is for Eisenstein. Disney leads us naturally forward to Eisenstein -- despite the fact that he was deeply disappointed by Bambi, although not so much as he was by Fantasia.

Sergei Eisenstein and Mickey Mouse.

Eisenstein was fascinated by the use of 'metamorphosis' -- shape-shifting -- in Disney's earlier films and he eagerly studied Disney's first sound work -- especially the Mickey Mouse films -- in which gesture and editing were synchronized with the musical score. In his own Alexander Nevsky, he worked with the composer, Prokoviev, to create a kind of integrated audio-visual spectacle, a synchronization of the senses. Tragically, the political situation in the Soviet Union prevented Eisenstein from fulfilling his plans. Unable to work in the cinema, he tried to realize them in opera, through presenting Wagner, the great nineteenth century theorist of the integration of music, drama and spectacle.

For me the most significant side-effect of Eisenstein's attempt to get to grips with the aesthetic opportunities and dangers of sound film was his turn towards theory. Partly this was because, out of favour with the Communist establishment, and unable to direct, he was employed as a teacher in the Moscow Film School. But, basically, it was because he was trying to formulate a new aesthetic for sound film, which he saw as a completely different medium from silent cinema.

Eisenstein's sound/image designs for Alexander Nevsky.

Eisenstein's attempt to combine film theory with film practise, film study with film-making, made an enormous impact on me. It was connected, in my mind, with the transition of the Cahiers du Cinéma group from film critics to film-makers. At the same time, however, they moved from one to the other, rather than combining the two as Eisenstein had tried to do.

Today, sadly, I am more sceptical about the possibility of bringing Production together with Theory. Most film-makers seem to have a very different outlook from most film-theorists and, even in film schools, neither of them are really encouraged to co-operate. Nonetheless I still cling to my old belief that it is a great achievement when theory and practice are united and in my own work I have always tried to bring the two together. It still surprises me when people try to interpret things I have written as a theorist as though they had no relation to my work as a film-maker. The same is true of Laura Mulvey's much-cited and much-misunderstood essay on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', whose full meaning is lost unless it is read as an anti-Hollywood manifesto for the kind of avant-garde film-making she was committed to at the time -- Penthesilea and Riddles of the Sphinx, to be specific.

Eisenstein, of course, was not only a theorist but also an experimental, even an avant-garde film-maker, paradoxically trapped within the Soviet film industry. In a later generation he would have been considered a maker of experimental art-movies rather than political block-busters and it would have seemed strange to try and combine the two, Bernardo Bertolucci notwithstanding. Given his theoretical curiosity, he would surely have pioneered the use of new technology. He would have used the new media to create new metamorphoses, to return cinema to its experimental roots, to dynamize the screen, to take cinema forward into his beloved Fourth Dimension.

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