Although Eisenstein's 'montage' has been treated almost exhaustively at home as well as abroad, these seems to be still open for further discussion a question how the artist's assimilation, with the insight of a genius, of Western and Russian arts conduced to the innovation of the film art at its early stage.

  The subject to be discussed here is on the process of his analysis and assimilation of literature, drama and fine arts which extends over the days of "The Battleship Potemkin" and those of "Ivan the Terrible". Two of his writings, " Montage of Cuttings" will be treated with particular attention to 'physical expression' in these arts, which seems to have had no little influence on Eisenstein in his invention of the visual devices so full of power.

The text of visual image is an organic entity of multi-layered bundle of functions as a faculty of structure. Such entity becomes an art only when its aesthetic function takes on a dominant role and when the visual image manifests itself in the foreground as an object for seeing. In this respect, the aesthetic character of visual image is attained through self-realization. The content of such is diverse and not always semantic. Naturally there exists conventional aesthetic code. The aesthetic function can not escape from being institutional.

Generally speaking, the institution serves to substantiate the connotation. The aesthetic consciousness is precisely its pattern and is subject to normalization historically and collectiely. The problem here is the conservative binding character of such aesthetic normalization. As long as we are aware of the fact that this weakens the structural dyanmism of art, the principle of creative activation of aesthetic functions must be sought by stepping out of the preceding dominant aesthetic norm and decodifying the operational circuit of the automatized aesthetic consciousness. In the very process of entropy increased by this and the negentropy of normalization working against each other and generating genuine surprises and newness in terms of visual experience, we must recognize the basic exixtence of esthetic function in the text of visual image. The importance lies not only in such "codified structure" but more precisely in a "structure to codify".