Art & Creativity Quote by Sergei Eisenstein

Eisenstein is quietly trash-talking the idea that cinema is just “filmed theater” or, worse, photographed reality. He’s drawing a hard line between arts that begin in abstraction and an art that begins in evidence. A painter can summon a world from line and color; film inherits a world already stubbornly there, with faces, streets, light, weather, the whole messy surplus of the real. That “material concreteness” is both cinema’s seduction and its trap: the camera doesn’t merely depict, it testifies.

The intent is practical and polemical. As a director-theorist obsessed with montage, Eisenstein is defending the need for aggressive construction. If the raw image arrives loaded with reality-effects, then the filmmaker’s job isn’t to “capture” but to wrestle meaning out of what looks self-explanatory. The subtext is ideological: realism is not neutral. A concrete image can lull an audience into thinking they’re seeing truth, when they’re seeing an arrangement. Eisenstein’s solution was to treat shots like shards, not windows - to collide them so that ideas emerge in the cut, not in the photographed object.

Context matters: early Soviet cinema was building a new visual language under revolutionary pressure, suspicious of bourgeois naturalism and hungry for a medium that could teach people how to see history. In that environment, “difficulty in manipulation” isn’t a complaint; it’s a challenge and a mandate. Cinema, precisely because it looks like reality, must be made - visibly, deliberately made - into argument.