THE CoNCEPT oF PLASMATICENESS

Eisenstein's Claims for the Concept of Plasmaticeness and Discussion Regard to Examples from Animation

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Eisenstein's Claims for the Concept of Plasmaticeness and Discussion Regard to Examples from Animation

Eisenstein's first move toward applied sound cinema ran counter to giving sound precedence; it was a plan to add sound after-the-fact to The General Line (1929), renamed old and New. Unfortunately, financing for the project promised by a London firm was withdrawn,12 his first use coming years later with the banned Bezhin Meadow (1935-37) and then finally in Alexander Nevsky (1937-38),13 but by that time his approach and the times had become conservative. The sound script for old and New, on the other hand, was very adventurous despite the fact that the story - the efforts of a peasant woman, Marfa, to collectivise and technologise farming in her community - might seem like an unlikely vehicle for major experimentation. Eisenstein's lack of experience apparently sanctioned a wish list freed from practicality - just as well, many ideas would have been technically difficult or impossible to realise at the time - or perhaps he was intent with his very first sound project to establish a cinematic practice commensurate in sophistication with visual montage. For whatever reasons, the script demonstrates a systematic attempt to achieve an auditive montage very much along the lines proposed in the 'Statement'. The very fact that he chose to retroactively add sound assured, again, a diminution of language. Likewise, the autonomy of the sound montage was established. In fact, there could be little other response; if the quickness of the visual cutting had been paralleled with like speed in sound cutting the result would have fallen on laggard ears. Historically, there had not yet been the cumulative decades of auditive mass media needed to produce a properly accelerated comprehension of code, such as television channel switching. Instead, Eisenstein was still relying on the cumbersome Wagnerian leitmotiv, i.e., a cliched music or an internal construction of code.

one way Eisenstein proposed to use sound was similar to how conventional cinema uses music: to bridge the cut/s. For example, in an early scene in old and New where two brothers cut their hut down the middle and inefficiently partition their fields simply because they are separating (set as an example of irrational peasant behaviour), the sound in the script moves from a crosscut saw, to a circular saw, to the "...deformation of the saw sound (Zeitlup [slow-motion]) into sobbing,"14 - the sobbing signalling the poverty and suffering such irrationality imposes. This ability to stretch across the cut (of the hut and montage), to meld continuously from one 'object' or entity to another, is a feature intrinsic to sound and it has had little parallel with in the cinema or videography until the recent computer-based capacity for 'morphing'. Yet it was the same nonobject-like stretching that gave Disney an early success with oswald the Lucky Rabbit just prior to Steamboat Willie. oswald's selling point ...