Maggie Johnson Midterm Paper

Maggie Johnson
FILM 201 Midterm
February 15, 2010

Eisenstein & Iñárritu: Collision Through Medium and Story

Film theories from the early to mid twentieth century are difficult to grasp without a valid application to contemporary film. The concepts seem limited by the technological restraints, and the development of film and its industry may have outrun the foundation set by classic theorists. However, a comparative analysis of classic theories and current cinema brings validity and sustainability to early theory. Eisenstein’s ideas about conflict and collision in cinema are particularly relevant to the hyperlink genre of film that has become extremely popular in the last couple decades. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s films are dominant products of this genre, and their success and emotional appeal are directly related to the elements that Eisenstein prizes in his study of film. Eisenstein writes about the psychological and ideological impact that montage editing has on viewers and on the film system as a whole. Conflict and collision define an art form, and individual shots only express meaning when in juxaposition with other shots. Through collision in editing, Eisenstein hopes to create new meaning. Iñárritu’s films also achieve their meaningful affect through collision. However, in addition to periodically using montage, they express meaning and conflict through colliding storylines. Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel (2006) each use intertwining storylines in order to create impact and suggest large meanings. Arguably, Eisenstein would support Iñárritu’s filmmaking techniques because of the role that conflict and collision play in the presentation of ideas, and therefore, Iñárritu proves that in the twenty-first century, collision through storyline can be as powerful and meaningful as collision through editing. Close attention to Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel reveals many of Eisenstein’s primary concepts actively working. By utilizing separate but violently connected storylines, Iñárritu aligns with Eisenstein’s preference for montage, neutralization, active viewership, and inner speech.
Eisenstein most definitively discusses his idea of artistic conflict in “Beyond the Shot”. He explains the idea of montage as “Collision. Conflict between two neighbouring fragments. Conflict. Collision”. His fragmental and dialectical writing style also clearly expresses his ideas. He goes on to say that the “collision of two factors gives rise to an idea,” and that “conflict lies at the basis of every art”. The most expressive forms of cinema will, therefore, express the human condition through conflicting ideas, plot lines, and characterizations, as well as through montage editing. Eisenstein offers the director an authorizing voice in the organization of shots and structure, and seems to suggest that the director carefully manufactures important meanings through conflicting ideas. Elaborating on conflict as the nature of art in “The Dramaturgy of Film Form”, Eisenstein explains that conflict is the “essential basic principle of the existence of every work of art and every form”. Not only is art defined by its ability to create meaning with conflicting elements, it is socially responsible to dynamically expose the contradictions of being. Eisenstein articulates the value of conflict because in addition to eliciting an emotional response from viewers, this style of filming has the potential to engage audience members in a new, elevated thought processes and to offer effective presentation of ideologies. Each film in Iñárritu’s “Death Trilogy” succeeds brilliantly according to Eisenstein’s standards. The characters and storylines in Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel are isolated and united at the same time; they individually show small tragedies while colliding on a larger scale to make ideological and emotional connections that apply to the human condition.
The most compelling element of Iñárritu’s films is the way his stories violently converge. The characters in Amores Perros and 21 Grams are connected by fatal car crashes, and the plot-lines in Babel are linked by a powerful instance of gun-violence. Amores Perros tells three unique stories: “Octavio and Susana”, “Daniel and Valeria”, and “El Chivo and Maru”. Each story is tragically connected by the violent car crash caused by Octavio’s frantic escape from a dog-fighting gang. The collision leaves Octavio and supermodel Valeria severely incapacitated, and it unites El Chivo with Octavio’s wounded dog. Ironically, once El Chivo nurses the dog back to health, the dog causes another tragic round of violent destruction by attacking El Chivo’s other beloved pets. Each story revolves around the painful realities of love and loss in a conflicted society. Octavio’s love for his brother’s wife Susana drives him to participate in underground dogfighting, David and Valeria’s affair breaks up David’s nuclear family and puts the couple under tremendous stress after the car accident, and El Chivo’s pining love for his estranged daughter guides his contradictory violent actions and gentle caretaking of his dogs. Eisenstein’s theory resonates in Amores Perros in several ways. First, the collision of storylines raises questions of meaning around love and violence. The differences between characters in each storyline imply that this is an ultimate collision in humanity; the characters of each storyline drastically differ in age, socioeconomic status, and family life but they endure comparable tragedies connected by lost love the crashing of a car. Iñárritu constantly negotiates the tension between love and violence, and uses elements of Eisenstein’s theory to deliver the meaning. For example, shots of characters from the parallel storylines appear briefly in each narrative. The characters’ visual collision with the film’s other worlds creates meaning around the largely connected experiences that the conflicting events share. Additionally, Iñárritu does use Eisenstein’s montage editing to create impact and meaning. The strongest examples occur in “Octavio and Susana”. Early in the story, Iñárritu alternates shots of dogfighting with shots of Octavio angrily looking on as his brother Ramiro abuses Susana. Later, shots of Octavio and Susana together in intimacy collide with violent shots of Ramiro being beaten. These conflicts draw meaningful connections between the apparently inevitable violence associated with love in this society. The same question of meaning arises in El Chivo’s story as violence intersects with family dynamics. El Chivo sadly mourns the loss of his ex-wife and the nonexistent relationship he has with his daughter. We see his sadness as he watches his daughter at his ex-wife’s funeral, and as he tries to make connections with her before finally breaking into her house to leave money and a touching voicemail. These intimate shots of El Chivo conflict with his hitman violence against the dubious pair of brothers. The idea of inner speech is present throughout Amores Perros as it relates to active viewership. The colliding ideas and resulting meanings must be thought through by an audience, and the emotional experience that arises from this interaction is a byproduct of Amores Perros’ inner speech; Andrew explains that Eisenstein hoped for inner speech, or the soulful system of messages embedded in cinema, to be expressed through montage and to eventually arrive at an emotionally significant event. The emotional event which binds the characters in Amores Perros at a point of collision is the car accident, and once the audience perceives this shared experience, it is made to mentally and emotionally process the human condition that now applies across demographics and different forms of love. The inner speech of Amores Perros guides us back and forth through the stories to draw commonalities between each characters’ experience with violence and love.
21 Grams employs many of the same cinematic and story-related functions that make Amores Perros a psychologically impactful film. Again, characters who span social and economic classes collide realities in a violent car accident. 21 Grams is similar to Amores Perros in the way it forces us to pull meaning from colliding storylines, but it expands on Iñárritu’s earlier efforts to incorporate more of Eisenstein’s concepts. The filmmaker’s ability to disrupt temporal and spatial continuity contributes to Eisenstein’s hope for audiences to participate in a conflicting art form to discover a theme. In 21 Grams, Iñárritu shares scenes without chronological continuity. Before we are even made privy to the details of the plot, we see powerful shots of death and anguish that, chronologically, should appear at the end of 21 Grams’ series of events. Throughout the film, Innaritu frequently uses flashbacks and montage of intense shots between Christina, Jack, and Paul. These techniques are mostly used to portray the pain each character feels: Christina’s pain over her family’s death, Jack’s pain over his fatal act and subsequent failure of faith, and Paul’s pain over his complete deterioration. The audience’s emotional response is elicited immediately both because of the filmmaking and the strength in performance, but Eisenstein’s ideas on collision suggest that Iñárritu’s audience finds a collective theme because of the mental process which occurs beyond the emotional response. Viewers have to keep track of each character and mentally document how they connect. Yes, Jack is the man responsible for the death of Christina’s family, and Paul is the man who receives Christina’s husband’s heart. But, how does their filmic connection extend beyond storyline? What does it mean for Christina and Paul to enter into a romantic relationship? What greater significance comes from the final act of chaos between the three protagonists? Iñárritu’s viewers cannot help but ask these questions while watching 21 Grams. Eisenstein’s idea of neutralization plays an important role in 21 Grams as well. Andrew explains neutralization as the breakdown of reality into usable blocks (46). The director’s choices surrounding neutralization determine the surprising relationships built by the careful placement of these blocks in an order that emphasizes the conflict of art. Clearly, the decomposed blocks of reality in 21 Grams appear as Christina’s story, Paul’s story, and Jack’s story. With these blocks, Iñárritu has made stylistic choices to conflict and intertwine them in a way to suggested a “higher signification” (Andrew, 46). Eisenstein’s emphasis on juxtaposition can also be seen in 21 Grams. Images of Jack’s daughter juxtapose images of Christina’s daughters in order to enhance the thematic string of attractions related to the fatal conflict between both families, and to develop stronger meaning between Jack and Christina. Similarly, Marianne and Christina exist dichotomously within the film. Each woman is a grieving wife in her own right, but the conflict between their demeanors and the tension between protecting a family and mourning one imply an overarching meaning about the women as character foils. Overall, 21 Grams establishes itself as successful film art by Eisenstein’s standards because it uses the conflict between Christina, Jack, and Paul as a way to prompt an audience to extract meaning or theme.
Babel is the final film of Iñárritu’s death trilogy. Iñárritu continues to violently interlock and collide storylines to evoke a common meaning. Like 21 Grams, some of the events of Babel stray from traditional chronology, and the characters come into major conflict with a single gunshot. For example, in the storyline featuring Debbie and Mike Jones and their nanny Amelia, Iñárritu brings Richard Jones into the action to vaguely mention Susan’s shooting before the audience has experienced it. We watch Debbie and Mike travel to Mexico for a wedding with the knowledge that something terrible has happened to their mother, but Iñárritu waits to reveal the incident. This manipulation of chronology intensifies the anticipation and the emotional reaction as viewers wait for the violent incident. Kolker explains that, like Iñárritu, Eisenstein “resfused to indulge in an illusion of linear time, replacing it instead with an emotional time, the time of suspense and of thought” (102). The system of events in Iñárritu’s films follows an emotional experience above a temporal order. Although Iñárritu does use Eisenstein’s montage techniques as part of his Babel repertoire, the most important connection between Babel and Eisenstein is what the film offers conceptually. Not only do the four primary storylines span the world with action in Mexico, San Diego, Morocco, and Japan, the stories are told through five different languages. Spanish, English, Arabic, Japanese, and sign language combine throughout the film to create a conflict of culture and communication. The inclusion of so many cultures and languages could potentially provide the foundation for a film about harmonious relationships across the globe, but in Babel it is a reflection on the struggle of cross-cultural communication. The appearance of each language constitutes conflict in a different way: Richard and Susan feel blocked in their English-speaking attempts to find medical attention in Morocco; Chieko is isolated by her deafness and inability to communicate fully and grieve her mother’s suicide; and Amelia’s language barriers with the hostile American border patrollers compromises her identity as caretaker of the children. The interplay of the different cultures and languages is a particularly compelling example of how Iñárritu proves that Eisenstein’s hopes for montage’s collision of shots can be achieved through the collision of storylines, especially if through violence. Conflict across storylines in Babel completely aligns with Eisenstein’s theory on cinema in “Beyond the Shot”: “the position of the cinema represents the materialization of the conflict between the organizing logic of the director and the inert logic of the phenomenon in collision”. Iñárritu carefully organizes Babel in a way that creates a maximally impactful experience based on the combination of his stylistic, hyperlinked choices with the theme of violence, communication, and cultural clashing.
Ultimately, the emotional impact and thought-provoking nature of Iñárritu’s colliding films gives validity to Eisenstein’s theories. Andrew articulates an element of Eisenstein’s beliefs that explains the viewers experience with Iñárritu:
Through simple juxtapositions of these primary stimuli, basic cinematic meanings are created. These innumerable moments of montage-meaning begin to coalesce into lines of development, including a dominant line and several attendant lines. The most common such lines are characterization, plot, overall lighting tone, and so on. The spectator takes these clusters of dramatic meaning and actually re-creates the story of the film by resolving the tension with which he is confronted (62).
This illuminates the audience experience with the “Death Trilogy”; Iñárritu’s storylines and stylistic choices create constant tension and force the audience to identify its own meaning. Many conflicting reviews, blogs, and digital rants have surfaced in response to the meanings of Iñárritu’s films. For example, no respondent seems to completely agree on what Chieko’s note to the detective says at the end of Babel, or what exactly Iñárritu is saying about love in Amores Perros. Is love actually a bitch? Or are we lost in the translation of these colliding experiences? Eisenstein would commend this dialectic interaction between film critics and Iñárritu fans alike, and he would say that Iñárritu’s style deliberately sparks the dialectics that constitute an art form. Though Iñárritu strays somewhat from Eisenstein’s approach to filmmaking by using collision relatively more conceptually, Eisenstein would undoubtedly applaud the emotional and communicative impact that Iñárritu has as a result of the collision of stories. Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel deliver a tremendous psychological impact by projecting experiences that unite humanity in a system of conflict.




Works Cited
Andrew, J. Dudley. The Major Film Theories. New York, New York: Oxford University Press,
1976. Print.
Eisenstein, Sergei. “Beyond the Shot.” Film Theory & Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall
Cohen. New York, NY: 2009. 13-23. Print.
Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” Film Theory & Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy
and Marshall Cohen. New York, NY: 2009. 24-40. Print.
Kolker, Robert. Film, Form & Culture. New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Print.