In his own words 'a queer fish', Sergei Eisenstein declares at one point in this 1946 memoir that he worked amphibiously, by extremes. 'I create an arbitrary and capricious flood in my films. Then I endeavour to divide this flood with the dry beats of a metronome, according to its conformity with certain principles.' Eisenstein's dialectic of riot and order can stand as a prime instance of the way in which others have struggled to discipline, exorcise or justify their passionate relations with films. This powerful medium is still less than a hundred years old, its soundtracks less than sixty, its success with colour about fifty. We don't yet know - or at least we don't agree - how seriously to take it; but in its reduced form (television's screens are on average 160 times smaller) most of us do take it somehow.

LRB 1 August 1985 | PDF Download