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Montage Joyce: Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and "Ulysses"Author(s): Thomas W. SheehanReviewed work(s):Source: James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 42/43, No. 1/4 (Fall, 2004 - Summer, 2006), pp. 69-86Published by: University of TulsaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25570959 .Accessed: 12/12/2011 16:05

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Montage Joyce: Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Ulysses

Thomas W. Sheehan

whenever I am obliged to lie with my eyes closed I see a cinematograph going on and on and it brings back to my memory things I had almost forgotten.

James Joyce, Letters! 216

Ulysses is no longer concerned with representation but with montage.

Colin MacCabe1

At any rate/however odd it may seem, I am familiar with Joyce's writings.

Sergei Eisenstein, 19282

Introduction

Discussions of cinematic technique in Ulysses have often cen tered on montage, typically enumerating the ways it is used in the book. There is, however, a deeper meaning for montage

in Ulysses, and it requires more than a typology of various forms. In a

characteristically penetrating comment, Fritz Senn remarks:

In its descriptive passages, Ulysses seems to move from a more imita

tive cinematographic mode to increasingly overt artistic manipulation and reprocessing. But even the later temporal transpositions could be termed cinematographic with emphasis on the graphic (the process of verbal depiction). The new medium film also instantly proceeded to take movement apart and reassemble it in artful ways, for example showing it in reverse or by contracting or

expanding time... .Joyce, at

any rate, just like the new film makers, was fascinated by how move ment evolves in time, how we come to perceive it, and how in artificial recreations we can

manipulate it.3

Joyce and cinema are, thus, engaged in a parallel enterprise; the rec

reation or reconstruction of perception. Describing or recording such

movements, furthermore, requires that the organization of the mate

rials also performs the work of description. That is, it is necessary to

put the "emphasis on the graphic/' as Senn says, and thus articulate the spatial with the verbal or the visual. In this way, one can "build

69 V-'"'. .

up" the object or narrative and its movements instead of just stating it

monochromatically. Furthermore, this "building up" also follows the

process of human perception?of figuring out what an object is rather

than the object just presenting itself. This essay will utilize "montage theory," which is associated most

often with the Soviet Russian filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s.

Sergei Eisenstein's theories of montage are extremely valuable for a

study of Joyce, not least because he was in awe of Joyce and met him

at least once. I argue, however, that Dziga Vertov's work is actually closer to the aesthetic practices of Joyce because his montage is freer

and more open than Eisenstein's. In part, this is because Vertov's

individualist anarchist tendencies,4 like Joyce's, are opposed to

Eisenstein's more orthodox Marxist ones, which demand a synthetic reunification of montage's fragmentation on a higher plane. Vertov's

theory and practice of the "kino-eye,"5 in fact, has many parallels with Joyce's Ulysses, not least their common basis in an antirealist

paradigm. In an earlier section of "Sequential Close-Ups in Joyce's Ulysses,"

Serin looks at this sentence from "Lestrygonians": "Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt quaywalls, gulls" (U 8.51-52). He analyzes the sentence in this way: "In a saliently cin

ematographic mode, attention moves from flapping and wheeling to the flapping and wheeling gulls, as though the birds were not recog nized, or registered, before the end. Empirically we may well notice

something moving before the thing moving is determined?motion before identification" (256).

"Cinematographic perception" thus frames movements in such a

way that those movements become paramount. Boris Eikhenbaum, the Russian Formalist, gives a historical reason for this:

In the stage which we are now witnessing, the cinema represents a new

syncretic art form. The invention of the movie camera made possible the

exclusion of the basic dominant of theatrical syncretism, the audible word, and its replacement by another dominant, motion seen in detail Thus, the theatrical system based on the audible word was turned upside-down. The film viewer was placed in completely new conditions of percep tion, the opposite of the process of reading: from the object, from visual

motion, to die process of making sense of it.6

The stage that Eikhenbaum refers to was short-lived, cut off by the advent of sound film. What he is saying here, though, is correct in relation to Ulysses, which was written and published before sound arrived in the late 1920s. Joyce's book is obsessed with "motion seen in detail" and the organized process of making sense of what is being presented. This process itself, in fact, can best be understood as "mon

tage."

70

Soviet Montage Theory

In its earliest articulation, montage was defined as film's basic structure, the one element that distinguishes it from the other arts. Eisenstein and Vertov both concur with this founding assumption but differ significantly in their assumptions about how it should be used to construct films. Moving beyond the pioneer of Soviet montage theory, Lev Kuleshov, who opted for the simplest and clearest mode of construction of montage, Eisenstein insists on a more complicated schema built on the dialectic of conflict and resolution. Vertov, by arguing for the creation of nonfiction film (newsreel or documentary), uses montage as a tool to discover "the truth/'7 This "truth" imaged by the "camera-eye" can be attained by any appropriate style of film

recording and processing whatsoever, including slow-motion, double

images, and abstract rhythm-?complicated techniques not unlike those of Ulysses. It is here, I argue, that Vertov approaches the core of

Joyce's own practice, one quite distinct from Eisenstein's now more familiar concepts of montage.

Kuleshov maintains that the organization of shots in film must be displayed for the spectator, that the organization must be utterly mechanical, and that it must create a narrative space,8 Eisenstein's work is, in some ways, merely a more aesthetic and less narrow articulation of these principles. In other ways, however, Eisenstein's

work illuminates Joyce's use of montage. Eisenstein "sees" the way Joyce does; but he sees a different world, a constructed rather than created world. That is, Eisenstein's world is an effect produced by the construction of raw materials and raw footage. His string of names for montage?montage of attractions, metric montage, rhythmic

montage, harmonic montage, tonal montage, overtonal montage, intellectual montage, vertical montage?are all terms for the kinds of effects the construction of montage generates. As R, Barton Palmer

comments, "For Eisenstein, a reality effect was also (and most impor tantly) to be achieved by the double effect of decomposition and reconstruction which is montage, a process which by its very nature is a construction rather than a reproduction of what the camera can

view."9 This construction is not linear like Kuleshov's but dialecti

cal, based on contradiction: "A simplified definition of Eisenstein's

montage of attractions might be that [shots] are linked with a view to

creating uninterrupted tension between them. The tension between the [shots] was to him the artistic expression of the conflict itself."10

Eisenstein's reasons for this "decomposition" and "conflict" are

located at the most basic level: the individual film frame. Francois Albera calls this "the theory of the photogram":

71

Eisenstein locates the minimal space of filmic articulation between frames, rather than between shots. Two frames which follow each other

. . . can differ minimally (Al + A2 + A3 . . .), to a greater degree (Al +

A15), or can be totally disjunctive (A + B or Z). In the first case, move ment will seem continuous; in the others it will be increasingly intel

lectualised, to the point of becoming a purely filmic movement, as in the example of the young peasant at the end of October who jumps with

joy on the Tsar's throne. Here there is "movement" in the form of a vio

lent displacement of the subject from one side of the frame to the other without any transition. To define the frame sequence as a sequence of

successive phases of real movement, broken down into stills and recon

stituted by projection, is thus to describe only one case and to capitulate to the dogma of continuity.11

Eisenstein thus breaks away from a false mimesis in cinema and also from the principle of continuity, but the direction he takes leads to

the montage of attractions?an idea derived from the circus, which

he sees as the essence of theatricality. Eisenstein's theory of the "pho togram," furthermore, does not address the ontological issues raised

by this. It never asks, in effect, whether or not the world that has been

"decomposed" by the photogram is "really real" or not. One could lament this decomposition as destruction?as Henri Bergson does in speaking of the "cinematographical imitation"12?or celebrate it as the discovery of a new world. Eisenstein, on the other hand, as

Albera points out, regards the material of the world "as inert (nature as passivity)" (204). He does not care what it is, since it exists only to be remade by the artist. As Jacques Aumont writes, "He thinks of his

films, his texts, and his drawings in terms of a whole oeuvre, where

everything is interrelated in some way, and where the whole balance or structure of these relations is governed by a proprietary subject author."13

Eisenstein, therefore, starts from Kuleshov's position in order to rework it "because the most important thing is to convey the rep resentation of murder, the feeling of murder as such," as he notes in "The Dramaturgy of Film Form" (1:179). Further, as he writes in "Beyond the Shot," "[t]he intensity of our perception increases because the process of identification is easier when the movement is decomposed" (1:149). Notice how Kuleshov's narrative clarity is here exchanged for emotional intensity: "The degree of incongru ity determines the intensity of impression" (1:165). Eisenstein thus rounds on Kuleshov's simplicity by declaring that "each sequential element is arrayed, not next to the one it follows, but on top of it"

(1:164). hi an examination of an alternative version of this article that was not published, Albera notes that Eisenstein is referring to what is now called in the literature the "phi-effect." This is the physiological basis of the filmic illusion of movement?the flicker of the motion

72

less frames passing in front of the eye ("piling up"), which blends into the illusion of a continuously moving image (200). In a sense, all, Eisenstein's film theory comes from this, as he says in this alternative version: "For here we seek to define the whole nature of the principle and spirit of the film from its technical (optical) basis."14

In the published essay, Eisenstein derives this sense of the tension between the frames of film arrayed "on top" of each other from an

analogy to Asian ideograms: "As in Japanese hieroglyphics in which two independent ideographic characters ('shots') are juxtaposed and

explode into a concept. THUS: Eye + Water = Crying" (1:164). More

revealingly, he comments, "material ideogram set against material

ideogram produces transcendental result (concept)"?this is "intellectu al cinema" (1:164,158). Through dialectic?that is, the super-imposition of photograms?Eisenstein moves through emotion to the synthesis of the intellect. He states his goal clearly: "An intellectual cinema of

unprecedented form and social functionalism. A cinema of extreme

cognition and extreme sensuality that has mastered the entire arsena of affective optical, acoustical and biomechanical stimulants" (1:158).

Eisenstein's theory is most clearly described by the word "affective." He was fascinated by the biomechanics prevalent in this period, and

particularly Vsevolod E. Meyerhold's acting techniques, which orga nize the actor's body movements in order to organize the audience's reactions. Despite Eisenstein's attempt to open up Kuleshov's work

through conflict and dialectic, there is a basically similar intention:

organizing the audience's reactions affectively. Kuleshov believes this can be done most effectively by clear and simple narrative; Eisenstein thinks he can use the mechanics of film to work directly on the minds and emotions of the audience.

Eisenstein articulates this aim most clearly in his 1925 essay "The

Materialist Approach to Form," where he defines cinema direction as

"the organisation of the audience through organized material" (1:63). That

is, the audience is ideologically instructed by the construction of its

members through organized stimuli applied directly to their nervous

systems. Eisenstein is Pavlov, and the audience is his dog. The goal of

this direction is also stated clearly: "In our conception a work of art (at least in the two spheres in which I work: theatre and cinema) is first

and foremost a tractor ploughing over the audience's psyche in a particular class context" (1:62).

Joyce and Ulysses

To move from Eisenstein to Joyce in this context is to move from

Marxism to anarchism, from a class approach to an individualist one.

Parmer compares Eisenstein's methods with Joyce's and finds the

former's techniques somewhat limited: "The director's thinking thus

73

diverges from and modifies traditional concepts of representation but

finally remains within the same problematic-What is interesting about [Ulysses], however, is that it also manifests techniques which

resemble cinematic montage and whose effect is to overthrow the

premises of the realist tradition. Joyce, in short, goes further than

Eisenstein" (78-79).

Joyce does this, I suggest, in two ways: he abandons the basic real

ist assumptions that Eisenstein maintains as the synthesis of his film

dialectic, and he withdraws the sole creative role from the author/ director and reassigns at least a portion of it to the reader/audi ence. He does, however, accept the conflict, contradiction, and dis

continuity?the "decomposition/reconstruction"?of Eisensteinian

montage. Joyce does not synthesize the contradictions of his text, nor

does he arrogate to himself all of its direction: the reader can move

along any plane of discourse. Joyce exceeds Eisenstein, according to Colin MacCabe, by using a "montage of discourses, without at

any time offering us a final meta-language (an author's impersonal voice)" (90). This effect is essentially antirealist MacCabe notes that

"[i]nstead of a traditional organization of discourses which confer an

imaginary unity on the reader, there is a disruption of any such posi tion" (152). More significantly, Joyce's contradictions stay contradictory

because his interpretation of artistic creation rules out the realist

paradigm from the start. This comes from Joyce's idiosyncratic read

ing of Aristotle and Aquinas and also from what Umberto Eco calls his "medieval" world view.15

Ulysses is a fiction that understands itself as a world made out of language. Joyce rejects truth as correspondence with a world to be imitated (the realist position) and instead substitutes a recreated world of language with an anarchic "truth" of its own. This "truth" is reflected in the linguistic world of Ulysses: it is active at the level of each part of the text and in each contextualized sentence. That

is, the decomposition and reconstruction of language this creates is

everywhere in Ulysses, not just in the thematic attention to language that "Oxen of the Sun," for example, foregrounds. Such discontinu

ity is indexed iconically in various parts of the novel: in "Aeolus," with its division of text by newspaper headlines; in the stream of musical abbreviations and truncations in "Sirens"; in the mock

epic interpolations in "Cyclops"; in the camera movement of the

"[projected [m]irage" in "Nausicaa"16; and even in Molly's blinding shifts from topic to topic in "Penelope." But the iconicity is greatest in "Wandering Rocks," an episode structured around the spatiotem poral discontinuity of montage.

Joyce's goals differ significantly from Eisenstein's since the latter drives toward generalization?toward a grand system of nature,

74

man, and art?while the former refuses this. But in their shared meth ods, there is considerable agreement, especially in their various debts to Symbolism.17 Eisenstein writes, in "Literature and Cinema":

[Alexey] Fedorchenko and Joyce are very close to contemporary cin ema. Certainly more than half way to what lay ahead. They use the same "de-anecdotalisation" and the direct emergence of the theme

through powerfully effective raw material. This may be completely tangential to the plot that only figures in the work because the author is conscientious. The same "physiologism" of detail. In close-up. In a

purely intellectual effect, an abstract conclusion from their physiological methods. Cinema again. There is, of course, significantly more in Joyce. To meet the demands of the denunciatory, polemical and other multiple tasks that Ulysses or The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [sic] set themselves. (1:96)

Here Eisenstein brings out Joyce's cinematic quality through his references to "de-anecdotalisation" and "physiologism." Joyce's expressiveness detaches objects from their background, much like A Portrait's procedure of "a bounding line drawn about the object to be

apprehended" (P 212). In this process, objects are not props in stories;

they exist on their own as such, in the same way that a camera's frame cuts out an object for viewing without reducing its reality. The "physi ologism" is the "snap," the vivid quality of details in Ulysses: as Joyce writes in A Portrait, "[y]ou see that it is that thing which it is and no

other thing. . . . quidditas, the whatness of a thing" (P 213), Eisenstein

uses the "close-up" as the name for a now familiar technique. This is the effect of many sentences in Ulysses, for instance, "the blond girl's slim fingers reckoned the fruits" (II 10.326), Instead of this person

doing something, the part of her body that performs the task is shown

doing it. In the sentence, we have a close-up of the fruits and her hands touching, as she "reckonfs]" them. Through Eisenstein, we can see Joyce framing things in close-up.

Eisenstein, however, always tries to reduce Joyce to the role of

fulfilling his own theories. A book-length manuscript from 1937 that

attempts to justify his methods in the face of the rejection (and the

burning of the footage) of Bezhin Meadow ends with a chapter entitled

"Laocoon." Calling the novelist "the last bourgeois writer" (2:19?1 Eisenstein sums up Ulysses by emphasizing its montage const*

tion:

To begin with, the whole novel is in essence .., one man, and its ei

content is a picture of everything that happens, that passes through a

man or passes a man through itself in the course of a few days. The

interweaving of a recital of events with the interior monologue of the

person who passes through these events, and with those, his passing

75

through which the main character experiences as an event: that is what

Ulysses consists of in terms of plot and thematic material. (2:194)

There seems to be a major omission in reducing the novel to one

man, in this case Bloom, but what is highlighted here are the move

ments that Eisenstein places at the center of attention, signaled by the

use of "events" and "passes through." The odd sense of balance we

find in Ulysses?oi Bloom or Stephen passing through the narrative,

while, at the same time, the narrative appears to pass through them?

is marked and then re-marked as Eisenstein assigns the structure of

the novel a third term. While taking account of the parallel montage of the interior monologue and the narrative as Craig Wallace Barrow

does,18 Eisenstein goes beyond that mere enumeration to observe

also his "passing through which the main character experiences as an

event." That is, he notes that interior monologue plus narrative does not equal the experienced events but that those experienced events

have their own status. This expressive surplus beyond the traditional novelistic dualism is marked by the unusual temporality and formal structure of Ulysses,

Eisenstein writes, "A novel which is thematically the absolute

equivalent of a human being must take as its perfect compositional exemplar the human body" (2:195). Here Eisenstein touches on the function of Joycean practice?"the artistic process is like the natural

process" (CW 145). The natural process of creating a human being must start with a body, and so the artistic process follows this. Notice,

though, how this process is closed off by Eisenstein: "The principle of a body dismembered into chapters is the model for all the other unities that have been broken up and scattered among the constituent

parts of the novel, and when the chapters are collected together they reassemble these too" (2:195). The process comes to a halt with a cul

mination, a reassembly, If, however, we consider the natural process in more depth, it becomes clear'that this' is too static. The human body is always changing, growing, or decaying. Bloom's body changes

minutely during Bloomsday: he eats, urinates, defecates, and ejacu lates. In a wider sense, we see Bloom in "Calypso" in mediasres (rela tive to the novel itself), and, when he falls asleep in "Ithaca," he is still in medias res..The novel begins and ends without him. Ulysses does not begin him or end him; he is both more and less than Odysseus. Eisenstein's conception is quite different:

Everywhere we have been pursuing a single characteristic in the whole range of "montage" elements, wherever, however and by what means

they were represented in all the possible areas of our observations. Everywhere their fundamental, defining feature was their potential urge to combine, to join into a whole; and if wholeness broke up into

76

fragments, then it was in order to be not only reassembled but assem

bled anew into a more perfect whole imagined by the human mind, a new, transformed, exemplary whole. (2:197)

"[N]ot only reassembled but assembled anew" could be a motto for

Ulysses, but Ulysses's fragmentation is of a special kind; it can be

(re)assembled infinitely but never into an "exemplary whole/' There are many principles of assembly but not a single overarching one and

certainly not one wholly indexed to the human mind.

Joyce's fascination with science ("Ithaca") and the presence or absence of God (Stephen) introduces elements of the nonhuman into the novel. The key concept of parallax or "retrospective arrange

ment" is "simultaneously" human and nonhuman. The nonhuman is something that Eisenstein cannot completely come to terms with, as his attitude toward "inert nature" makes clear. Joyce's fascination with the nonhuman, "the void," is a wild card, the disruption of Eisenstein's overarching montage principle. Eisenstein describes the movement of this principle in "Montage 1938":

The strength of montage lies in the fact that it involves the spectator's emotions and reason. The spectator is forced to follow the same creative

path that the author followed when creating the image. The spectator does not only see the depicted elements of the work; he also experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and formation of the image in the same way that the author experienced it. This is obviously as close

as it is possible to get to conveying visually the fullness of the author's

thought and intention, to conveying them "with the same force of

physical perception" with which they faced the author in his moments of creative vision. (2:309)

Eisenstein is working here with a theory of depiction and image, according to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (izobrazhenie and obraz?2:xv): that is, there can be mere representations of objects, mere static shots of them, or formal "imitations" that are only "depictions." Inadequate in themselves, when strung together or superimposed as shots in. a

montage sequence, they construct an "image," which is, metaphori cally, both the thematic intellectual "instruction" of what something

means and the actual cognitive construction or organization of that

thing graphically. The influence of Ulysses is obvious here: the book "means" a day in the life of Bloom, Stephen, and Molly, and it con

structs that day before our eyes?not to mention constructing their

bodies as another analogon or organon of the book. By leading the spec tator through the image's construction or organization, Eisenstein

observes, "he ., . experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and formation of the image,"

Notice, however, his language: "[tjhe spectator is forced to folio

'. .' ":.:"" 77

the same creative path.. . . the same way that the author experienced

it." The "author" is still directing the spectator as much as the film; the spectator (or perhaps it would be better to say here "the mass

audience") is organized in the same way the film is. Eisenstein con

tinues:

All these conceptions are, as images, individual and different, yet at the same time they are thematically identical. And each reader's/spec tator's image of that midnight is simultaneously the author's image and?equally?his own image, which is alive and "intimate." The image conceived by the author has become flesh of the flesh of the spectator's image

., . which was created by me, the spectator. Thus the process is

creative not only for the author, but also for me, the spectator, in whose

mind it has also taken shape. (2:310)

If one singles out the notion of the reader or spectator actively partici

pating in the creation of the image, we have a new idea of the orga nization present in Ulysses. The book as a whole can be reoriented around what Vertov calls "truth," a concept which acknowledges that the reader or spectator's image may be different from the author/ director's. As Michael Wood observes, "What Vertov is stiggesting, I take it, is that film neither invents the world nor simply records it."19 For Vertov, as for Joyce, art recreates the world.

Eisenstein's usual idea of montage involves an overdetermined

organization that synthesizes juxtapositions or superimpositions, creating a graphic succession of frames that circle back around a

single theme, meaning, idea, or ideology. It didactically "leads up to" something. Vertovean and Joycean montage, however, "leads out of" something. There is an awareness of process beyond the frame, where Eisenstein is only concerned with the relation of frames and their contents to each other. With Vertov and Joyce, there is awareness of "life"?to use a word the very young Joyce employs20?of what

always lies beyond the frame, discontinuous with what is framed. Vertov conceives this in terms of the apparatus of cinema itself: for

example, in his 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera, where the film

being shot by the titular "man" is also shown being edited and then shown to an audience. We watch as the editor cuts up a sequence of frames we have been shown; we are literally outside a frame which

we once inhabited. Joyce too prods us with this kind of dislocation

throughout his work. The headlines in "Aeolus" occur, famously, when the frame of the narrative becomes formally open, when we

suddenly realize that there is something beyond the narrative.

Against Eisenstein's overdetermined organization of montage, Vertov and Joyce thus pose a kind of "de-termined" organization that encompasses and surpasses Eisensteinian montage. In Kino-Eye,

78

Vertov defines montage in this way:

Our montage goes through a whole series of stages. It begins with observations on a definite theme. This theme includes a given number of phenomena in a given place. And this first editing is done with noth ing in hand, but your conception, your theme. During reconnaissance

you examine your ideas and choose what's most valuable and interest

ing from everything you've seen. The second stage of editing is when you arrive on location with a movie camera. You now approach your

surroundings, not from the viewpoint of the human eye, but from that of the kino-eye, and you make the first adjustment with regard to what you first saw. You make the second adjustment, taking into account all the changes that have occurred at the location you've selected. When all the footage has been shot, you then make a third adjustment, choosing the shots that are most expedient, that best express your theme. After this you reach the fourth stage?the organization of the footage select ed. The filmed pieces are combined according to linkage of meaning. You try to make the linkage of meaning coincide with that of images. The rest is eliminated. (99-100).

Vertov's key term "kino-eye" comes from "kino" (the Russian word for cinema), and a camera is a "kino-apparat" Another way of describ

ing the process, he writes, is the following: "Kino-eye =

kino-seeing (I see through the camera) + kino-writing (I write on film with the

camera) + kino-organization (I edit)" (87). Vertov elaborates on this terse formula in a way that makes clearer the purity of his technique and its vision: "As the final result of all these mixings, shifts, cancel lations [of editing], we obtain a visual equation, a visual formula, as

it were. This formula, this equation, obtained as a result of the general montage of the recorded film-documents 'is a 100 percent film-object, the concentrated essence of 1 see7?-1 kino-see'" (90).

Vertov "sees" from a perspective that he specifically acknowl

edges: the limits (the frame) of human vision, the limits (the frame) of camera vision. As Wood notes, "[E]yes inhabit human heads, and are instructed by passions and prejudices as well as optics" (229). In

the first stage of Vertov's montage, he knows he is looking through human eyes; then when he reaches the location and looks through the viewfinder, he knows he is looking through the camera-eye. Both

eyes see different aspects, different "truths" of vision. The scientific terms Vertov uses are attempts to express the purity of this seeing. In Vertov's characterization of montage, this is just another stage of

montage, of the deepening of aspect, moving towards the distillate or

essence. In this way, an aspect of vision becomes a vision of aspects, an organization of framing that precedes and exceeds Eisensteinian

montage.

Thus, the "impediment" or "advantage" built into human eyes or

:">': 79

camera eyes will be exploited to the full and become a formal method.

In sculpture or painting, this would be mere common sense?"you use the materials"?but when the material is the perception of the

world itself?as in cinema or the linguistic world of literature?it is

not so obvious. It is important to point out here that Vertov and Joyce

approach montage as a method, a technique, unlike Eisenstein, for

whom it is a principle of mastery. For Eisenstein, it is an end in itself, whereas for Joyce and Vertov it is a means to an end. This is how they can go beyond montage into an aspectual vision of framing: Joyce with the human eye, Vertov with the kino-eye.

Eisenstein and Vertov both, of course, share a certain Bolshevik

aim, as noted by Vertov: "To see and hear life, to note its turns and

turning points, to catch the crunch of the old bones of everyday existence beneath the press of the Revolution, to follow the growth of the young Soviet organism, to record and organize the individual

characteristics of life's phenomena into a whole, an essence, a conclu

sion?this is our immediate objective" (47). Here a certain end-point is in view, a dialectical synthesis, a statement of the kind Eisenstein

embraces. Defining the Revolution is their impetus, but Vertov goes on to note in the same article, "It's a general checkup on our entire

transitional time and, at the same time, an on-the-spot checkup, among the masses, on each individual decree or resolution. It's a

thermometer or aerometer of our reality" (48). Vertov makes clear that this is only a snapshot, a framing of an ongoing process. His reference to the masses actually "checking up" on Soviet decrees?by show

ing what's really happening?-could not be further from Eisenstein's

attempts to train an audience to see and feel his own perception of the world. Vertov wants to index vision itself: the masses see, Vertov

sees, the camera-eye sees, and, as in a dialogue or conversation, they will show what they see to the leaders, so that they too can see it. In his film The Man with a Movie Camera, for example, Vertov shows an audience viewing the same film the "man with a movie camera" is seen shooting. The vision is common, so all are allowed to see its

conditions, unlike Eisenstein's imposition of manipulative spectacle. It is the vision of many people, not just the director.

Both Vertov and Eisenstein speak directly of movements. Eisenstein writes that "[t]he connecting link between sound and vision, the lin

gua franca of synclironicity is, of course, movement" (2:334). Vertov too contends that "we seek our own rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else, and we find it in the movements of things" (7). Vertov contin ues:

WE fall, we rise . . . together with the rhythm of movements?-slowed

and accelerated,

running from us, past us, toward us,

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in a circle, or straight line, or ellipse, to the right and left, with plus and minus signs;

movements bend, straighten, divide, break apart,

multiply, shooting noiselessly through space. (9)

Movement for both is basic to cinema, but what kind of movement? Notice how Eisenstein's interest in movement here is as a common

denominator, "the lingua franca of synchronicity." Eisenstein is writ

ing in the context of a discussion of sound film, of what he calls "audiovisual montage" (2:327). To reduce sound and image to the same measure, Eisenstein observes, enables one to use them "simul

taneously" as interchangeable and discrete, blocks of material to be mounted together ("montage"): "it is the one preconceived, generalis ing image arising from them that is decisive, the fact that those sepa rate component features may belong to different modes of expression is not of primary importance" (2:327). Meanwhile, Vertov's manifesto speaks of being in the movements

(not standing above them and reducing them to a generalized mea

sure) and also of their organization into geometrical shapes: "Hurrah for dynamic geometry, the race of points, lines, planes, volumes" (9). He

speaks of calculating and using movements and of loving machines and ignoring man, but nowhere do movements become merely a common denominator, an abstraction that can develop into the theory of a composition. The kino-eye never becomes wholly naturalized as an instrument that "gives" a reality. Senn notes, in a meditative

essay,21 that the experience of reading Ulysses is like reading a foreign tongue: we are aliens to the text no matter what our mother tongue.

We are never at home with Ulysses or with the kino-eye. To provide a broader idea of what I am calling the "aspectual

vision" of the kino-eye, I quote Vertov's "Kinoks: A Revolution" again at length:22

I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world

as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobil

ity, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl

under, I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I

fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane, I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording

movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations. (17)

In the same article, Vertov dwells more on the movement of the cam era: "The mechanical eye, the camera, rejecting the human eye as crib

sheet, gropes its way through the chaos of visual events, letting itself

81

be drawn or repelled by movement, probing, as it goes, the path of its own movement" (19).

The kino-eye thus has a path of its own, which it discovers by itself,

through its relation to the visual phenomena of movements. Besides

pure scientific and artistic experimentation, Vertov sees the discovery of the autonomous movement of the camera-eye as having polemical and ideological content: "The most scrupulous examination does not reveal a single film, a single artistic experiment, properly directed to the emancipation of the camera, which is reduced to a state of pitiable slavery, of subordination to the imperfections and the shortsighted ness of the human eye" (14). The camera, this wonderful invention, has been reduced to the position of merely sharing a recognizable and followable human reality?one that Joyce in Ulysses also rejects as a

complete account?while Bolshevik reality is a reality of machines, which allows the "emancipation" of a machinic consciousness, with its organs of sight (kino-eye) and sound (radio-ear) and its own

movements. Such an attitude results in this kind of pronouncement from Vertov: "We affirm the kino-eye, discovering within the chaos of movement the result of the kino-eye's own movement; we affirm the kino-eye with its own dimensions of time and space, growing in

strength and potential to the point of self-affirmation" (16). From the point of view of itself, the kino-eye regards its path

through the movements of things as its own, "reflected" in those

things' various movements. This reciprocity of the "same" move ments is the third term Eisenstein mentions in analyzing Ulysses: "the

passing through which the main character experiences as an event." This "event" is present in Ulysses as embodiment, in effect, the aspec tual vision of the human eye.

To turn to Joyce, and an embodied eye, let us examine Stephen's interaction with Almidano Artifoni in "Wandering Rocks": "His

heavy hand took Stephen's firmly. Human eyes. They gazed curiously an instant and turned quickly towards a Dalkey tram" (U 10.356-57). Stephen discovers his own movements in those of Artifoni. His two words of internal monologue ("Human eyes") are part of an event of

"passing through" that Artifoni reflects back at him. Stephen's pas sivity here sharpens Artifoni's activity through his eyes at the "same" time that we as readers are made to feel Stephen's own potential (embodied23) autonomy?existent, exigent, but unused. Unlike classi cal narrative fiction, Stephen's eyes see hands, eyes, and trams but not another's mind. Even further from that paradigm, the embodiedness is reflected through another's: consciousness, as embodied, is shown to be a social act. There is a reciprocity to the organization of this event of passing through.

One could say that observing Artifoni's individual actions indi vidualizes Stephen. By seeing and feeling Artifoni's actions on a

82

micro-logical, mimetic, and iconic level?in an aspectual framing that includes analytical montage?Stephen experiences them himself

along with his own reactions to them. In each action of Artifoni's, there is an reaction of Stephen's perceptions, caught by the aspectual framing: Artifoni's eyes "gazed curiously" and "turned quickly" By seeing Artifoni's eyes, by reading them with his own eyes in this embodied fashion, Stephen is located in a body reacting to that of another. His perceptions meet his reactions to the actions of another in an event of passing through. He becomes "an" individual rather than "the" individual?an opened-out individualized anarchy rather than Eisenstein's closed-off general (or class) synthesis.

Thus, Joyce always shows the organization of an event in mon

tage, always already analyzed, always already in different aspectual frames, one of which is the major aspect of embodiment. "Aspectual vision," its ability to "frame" events through the human eye (or other

organs) without capturing them, is the novel's dominant mode of

organization. By always making us aware of a frame, Joyce explores an array of other aspectual elements. He maintains this awareness of the frame by analyzing each event in montage so that it can be seen variously at varying times. Here is an extreme example from "Sirens": "Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair. Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a

curving ear" (U 11.81-83), By using musical repetition and rhythm, .varying the placement of clauses and syntactic elements, and using different gerunds and verb forms/Joyce moves this event through changing analyses that have strange speeds and stranger qualities. It is the "same" event in different frames, or it is cut together in other

ways. The point is that the aspect can change: to see another aspect and know that it is different24 What we have here, above all, is observation?the human eye and

the movements it sees, the kino-eye and the movements it sees, and, more importantly, the way these eyes and these movements interact.

Joyce's sentences and Vertov's "film-documents" have no agenda but these events of interaction they describe, The events must be ren

dered with as much fullness and as little impedimenta as possible; paradoxically, this means that the recording of them becomes very

complicated. To illustrate what I mean, I will revert to a metaphor from the history of film technology.

In the era of silent film, there was no absolute standard for either

recording or projection. That is, without having to index the images to

a soundtrack (the current standard is twenty-four frames per second), one could record and project at any speed one wanted. The camera

had a crank that could be turned at any speed to expose the film, and

the very early film projectors (such as the one Joyce had installed in

the Cinema Volta in Dublin in 190925) were hand-cranked also. To

achieve slow motion, the recording camera was cranked quickly; to

achieve fast motion, the camera was cranked slowly; with the projec tor, the opposite was true. Obviously, many kinds of effects could be

achieved. I suggest that in these sentences from "Sirens," we can per

haps see the under- or over-cranked recording or projection of events

both musical and visual, an overlaying of the kino-eye on the human

eye. Where Eisenstein's Marxist leanings dictate one event and one

emotion for one audience, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera shows us a sequence, freezes it, and then reveals it being cut together in the

lab. Vertov's workshop is open, and so is Joyce's, in these and many other sentences in Ulysses. Their montage is open by always giving us a frame that we are aware of and then showing us what is outside

it, methodically making and breaking frames. Their recreations thus

become autonomous, finding their own way and creating their own

truths in the interaction of eyes and movements, societies and indi viduals.

NOTES

1 Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1979; New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 100. Further references will be cited parentheti cally in the text,

2 Sergei Eisenstein, S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works: Volume I: Writings, 1922

34, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 1:96. Further references to Eisenstein's essays will be cited parenthetically in the text to this collection by volume and page number.

3 Fritz Senn, "Sequential Close-Ups in Joyce's Ulysses/ Modes of Narrative:

Approaches to American, Canadian and British Literature, ed, Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte (Wurzburg, Germany: Konigshausen and Neumann,

1990), p. 262. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 4 See Vladimir Magidov, "Dziga Vertov: Archives, Research, and Findings,"

a paper presented at the International Symposium, entitled "The Vertov Jump: Up or Down," in Moscow, Russia, 7-13 June 1992, and quoted in Vlada Petric, "Vertov's Cinematic Transposition of Reality," Beyond Document: Essays on

Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New

England, 1996), p. 287 n21:

Vertov's individuality and openness dated from the start of his film career. After spending close to five months at the Moscow Film Committee as a cameraman, Vertov had to answer an official question naire sent to all employees (on 21 December 1918). Under the heading "What party do you belong to, or, are you affiliated with any party?" he stated: "I am not committed to any party, but I sympathize with the anarchisHndividualists [anarkhisti-individualisti]." By expressing his sympathy with anarchism and individualism, Vertov revealed his antagonism to the Bolshevik practice of imposing social order by brute

.,84,

force. Clearly, Bolshevism did not suit Vertov's humane concept, of a classless society, let alone his strong commitment to the freedom of the creative spirit, as he searched for a communism "with a human face," as it was later called by the Communists who opposed Stalinism.

I would like to thank Jesse Cohn for bringing this reference to my attention. 5 See Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette

Michelson, trans. Kevin O'Brien (Berkeley: Univ, of California Press, 1984). Further references to Vertov's essays will be cited parenthetically in the text to this collection. Vertov's 1924 film Kino-Eye (Kino-glaz, meaning "cinema eye" or "camera-eye") represented his rebellion against the traditional plot-driven movie and was composed of cleverly edited random images drawn together to tell a story. 6 Boris Eikhenbaum, "Problems of Cinema Stylistics," Russian Formalist Film Theonf, ed. and trans. Herbert Eagle (1927; Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1981), p. 61. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

7 See Petric, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera: A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 132. Petric also comments: "one can conclude that Vertov's concept of truth , ? . is not

identical with objective truth, not even with truth as it is initially recorded on the celluloid strip" (p. 4). 8 See Lev Kuleshov, Kuleshov on Film: Writings, ed. and trans. Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), pp. 47-62, 9 R. Barton Palmer, "Eisensteinian Montage and Joyce's Ulysses: The

Analogy Reconsidered," Mosaic, 18 (Summer 1985), 77, Further references will be cited parenthetically in me text.

10 Gosta Werner, "James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein," trans. Erik Gun nemark, JJQ, 27 (Spring 1990), 492, 11

Francois Albera, "Eisenstein and the Theory of the Photogram," Eisenstein Rediscovered, ed. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor, trans. Christie

(New York: Routledge Publishers, 1993), p. 202. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text

12 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1911; Mineola, NX: Dover Books, 1998), p. 313. 13

Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press,

1987),p.l2. 14 Albera quotes this passage from a speech "prepared by Eisenstein for the 1929 Stuttgart 'Film und Photo' exhibition" (p. 200). hi an endnote, Albera

explains that the typescript "was commissioned from Eisenstein by . ,. the

organizers of the Soviet section" of the exhibition, but it remains "unpub lished" and was eventually "deposited ... in the Museum of Modern Art,

New York. The English translation made by Ivor Montague in Hollywood in 1930 under Eisenstein's supervision served as the basis for publication in Close Up and Experimental Cinema" (pp. 250, 250-51), 15 Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans. Ellen Esrock (Tulsa: Univ. of Tulsa, 1982), p. 6. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. Eco describes this view as "art reproduce nature by the imitation of its formative processes and therefore becomes

equivalent of nature (a point that, according to the 'Paris Notebook',, ? Joy

:v-88"\

understood quite well)...'. This presupposes the identification between the real universe and the work of art, a narrative convention that is essential for

understanding Joycean poetics" (p. 42). 16 See the Linati schema in the appendix to Richard Ellmann's "Ulysses" on

the Liffey (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), n.p. 17 See Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "Eisenstein on Montage," 5. M. Eisenstein:

Selected Works: Volume II: Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and Taylor, trans, Glenny (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 2:xiii-xvi. Further references to this essay will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. For the first and possibly the best commentary on

Joyce's Symbolist influences, see Edmund Wilson's AxeVs Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870 to 1930 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931).

18 See Craig Wallace Barrow, Montage in James Joyce's "Ulysses" (Madrid: Studio Humanitatis, 1980).

19 Michael Wood, "Modernism and Film," The Cambridge Companion to

Modernism, ed, Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 228. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

20 See "Drama and Life," a lecture delivered by Joyce in 1900 (CW 38-46). ai See Senn, "Foreign Readings," Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays,

ed. Richard R Peterson, Alan M, Cohn, and Edmund L. Epstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ, Press, 1983), pp. 82-105.

22 "Kinoks" was a neologism of Vertov's meaning "cinema-eye men"; it

employed "kino"?cinema or film?and "ok," a transliteration of a Russian

suffix indicating a "male, human agent" (p. 5). 23 Though "Telemachus does not yet bear a body," he does have the

potential to bear it?see the Linati schema cited in endnote 16 to Ellmann's

"Ulysses" on the Liffey. 24 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1958), p, 194, which contains the famous duck-rabbit diagram and begins the discussion of aspect-perception that follows in Part II, section xi, of that work. For further elaboration, see

my article "Wittgenstein and Vertov: Aspectuality and Anarchy/' Discourse, 24 (Fall2002), 95-113.

251 take this information from Anthony Paraskeva's paper, "In the Beginning Was the Gest," delivered at the International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin, 17 June 2004.

?6 .'; '