Offscreen Notes
Eisenstein on the Audiovisual
Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema
by Robert Robertson
I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2009, p. 239
It has been a good week for Offscreen contributors. Only yesterday I posted notice of a new book by Roberto Curti, and a day later I receive a brand new book by another long-time Offscreen contributor, Robert Robertson, who has just published a new book of illuminating research and scholarship on the ideas in and around Sergei Eisenstein’s sound-music-image (audiovisual) montage theories. As a filmmaker and composer himself, Robertson brings to Eisenstein’s complex Chinese Box of ‘facets’ the right blend of theoretical and practical knowledge (as Robertson writes, when studying Eisenstein you soon notice that “this facet inter-reflects with other facets, which in turn relate organically to other aspects of his achievements”). Offscreen is especially proud of this book because of the tiny (and I stress tiny) role we have played in its development, having published several essays (six in fact) dating back to 2005 which bore the fruit of Robertson’s research in this area (and Robertson gives Offscreen a gracious notice in the Acknowledgements section). The bulk of Robertson’s ongoing research (since 1977) on Eisenstein is broken up into four major chapters in the book: 1. Audiovisual Counterpoint 2. Organic Unity 3. Nonindifferent Nature 4. Synaesthesia. If you do a ‘keyword’ search on Offscreen on Sergei Eisenstein you will come up with the six essays, and if you read them you will get a flavor of Robertson’s book (and its breadth and scope, covering Eisenstein’s affinities with architecture, music, philosophy, religion, the Occult, and literature). Offscreen will be publishing a review of Robertson’s book by Randolph Jordan in an upcoming issues. Please stay tuned for it.
