When we examine the formation of film theory in Russia after the Revolution, we are requested to pay attention to the various movements and critical activities in the other arts of the time.
Russian Formalism, which had been forgotten by scholars for a long time but which is now being revaluated, is one of the literary cultural activities which shares some basic ideas and realizations with film world. In this short essay, from the two reasons, I tried to bring into focus Boris Eikhenbaum's view of film. My two main points are one; in his essays, we can easily find a similar concept to the Montage Theory in Russia, two; it is possible that Eisenstein got a suggestion for his Montage on the "dominant" from the musical term "dominant", which was one of the Eikhenbaum's keyword used for literary arts.
As to the concept of film montage, it is not, of course, Eikhenbaum's origination. But his emphasis on the function of the methodical style in literature - that is, by his own words, through art "We see things anew" - was a resonance of Eisenstein's Montage of Attractions as well as Shklovsky's view of art. To some of the Russian Formalists, as J. Narboni points out, L. Delluc's photogénie was an equivalant of R. Jakobson's literariness. Eikhenbaum thought that photogénie was a significant idea for film world: a principle of choosing materials based on a specific sign or indication. This view is similar to Eisenstein's Montage on the dominant.
Moreover, Eikhenbaum referred to the inner speech which occured to the spectator. As widely known, Eisenstein, too, developed his thoughts on the auditory and the visual; from the inner monologue, the inner speech, to the image-language of primitive people. However, Eikhenbaum seems to have gotten his concept of film montage from his contemporary Russian cinéast S. Timoshenko.
Another Formalist, Y. Tynyanov, looked for the "Dominant" and the "System" in the interrelation of the various elements in the literary text or texts which he examined. This, too, is to be found again later in the method of Structuralism; the study of narrative genre.
When Formalists were trying to find the structure of a relationship, in the field of language, between the narrator (poet, artist, etc., ...) and the world he lived in, Russian cinéasts were doing almost the same in the field of visuals. Because, Montage is an expression of the structure of the relationship between a viewer and a viewed world.
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