Eisenstein articles

I thought Eisenstein's comparision of writing (in Japanese hieroglyphs) to montage (in filmmaking) was genius. Of course we all know that putting two words together creates a third and different meaning, and so it makes sense that the same happens when two images are put together, but I had simply never thought of it that way before. I also had never thought of the distinction he goes on to make in the second article, saying that while words on a page are perceived as one being next to the other, images on a screen are perceived one on top of the other.

I liked the idea of viewing many things that we would call formal elements as "cinematographic conflicts within the frame," for example the conflict of "pieces of darkness and pieces of lightness" where we might just say "lighting," although some of these conflicts mentioned in the second article were less clear to me.

In general found the second article more difficult than the first, but I still felt like I got something out of it. Overall I enjoyed Eisenstein's accessible writing style and use of easy to understand comparisons complete with illustrations to make his points. The only thing I found truly frustrating about this article was the way the pages got progressively more cut off at the bottoms.