An analytical assessment of the audio-visual structure in Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky" which utilizes both primary and secondary sources. I focus on the functional and conceptual aspects of the film's score by contextualizing it within the framework of Eisenstein's theory of sound-film and the nature of Eisenstein-Prokofiev collaboration.

Summary:

As the title suggests, Gallez’s article examines two artists‘ collaboration not only on Nevsky, but also on Ivan the Terrible, a movie Eisenstein made few years after Nevsky. The essay is structured around the scope of Prokofiev’s film music and his collaboration with Eisenstein, in order to offer a comprehensive analysis of the audio-visual structure of Nevsky and Ivan (the latter is unimportant for the purpose of this bibliography). Gallez notes that although neither artist characterized their approach to Nevsky as approaching a production of an opera, when wedding music and film in this movie their style is ultimately “operatic”. Echoing another film critic Sadoul, Gallez argues that Nevsky is an instance of a “cinematographic opera”, employing “aural-visual counterpoint” (16) - it intertwines the realism of cinema per se (film as a medium of art) with the stylization of dramatic work (opera as an art form). However, for Gallez, the result of such mixing produced an “awkward result” (17). He identifies the “inconsistent design” as the major fault - Eisenstein switching between the realistic and symbolic approaches; between using pre-recorded score and altering the music to fit the edited material; and the overall absence of logic in musical entrances and exits (20). Nevertheless, Gallez also admits it is partly due to the obsolete film and sound equipment in the Soviet Union at that time, and ultimately declares that Nevsky is more than a clumsy attempt at creating a cinematic opera; because above all, it is a unique and totally original film music work that “should be judged for its overall merit and the totality of its effect” (28).

Evaluation & Analysis:

This article is by far the most outstanding academic work on Prokofiev-Eisenstein collaboration and with its special emphasis on placing the Nevsky score within the larger context of Prokofiev-Eisenstein teamwork, it is also the most significant one within this annotated bibliography. Gallez offers a very systematic and structural analysis – he divides the essay into various themes and topics and then peels off the unimportant stuff by either refuting, or taking useful insights, from others’ arguments, and eventually getting to the real core of the issue and offering his own standpoint. His research on this topic is the most extensive among others, he presents correct factual information, his reasoning is very sound and to-the-point, and his writing style is truly elaborate. In pure analytical terms, Gallez’s article does not have any logical inconsistencies. The only challenging aspect to Gallez is the fact that he is asking himself “How does the music relate to the film?” while he could be further asking “And how does the film relate to the music?”. But not to be unfair to Gallez, his thesis does state that he intends to consider “the merits of the music as support for the films and as pure music” and not vice-versa. From this perspective, Gallez’s assessment of the Eisenstein-Prokofiev collaboration and his analysis of the functional and conceptual aspects of Nevsky film score are unmatched in the academic circles.

Summary:

Merritt divides up his essay into three distinct parts: an introduction with historical background, a formal musical analysis of the score, and an assessment of the Eisenstein-Prokofiev collaboration. In the first part, he delivers a harsh criticism against both artists. He accuses Eisenstein of “inconsistencies, contradictions and confusions” in Nevsky and condemns his tactics of manipulating the epic compression and ellipsis in order to reinvent Nevsky for war propaganda purposes. These ellipses in the narrative are underscored by Prokofiev’s music, which opens up “fissures between the soundtrack and the images, commenting on and occasionally even contradicting what is seen on the screen” (36). The analysis of the music is very formalistic and examines the interplay of audio and visual forms, eventually arriving at the conclusion that sequences in the movie work through “principles of irony and denial” – the sound denies the evidence before our eyes and there are no attempts to resolve these contradictions (39). The third part is the most interesting one and it does a superb job in integrating Prokofiev’s experience in Hollywood with the conditions for sound-production in the Soviet Union, claiming that Nevsky is “the greatest film score ever written trapped inside the worst sound track ever recorded” (44). It also reiterates the fact that “by all accounts, the Eisenstein/Prokofiev collaboration was a remarkably creative and congenial one” (42).

Evaluation & Analysis:

The most interesting aspect of Merritt’s essay is the influence of Walt Disney on Prokofiev and thus on the sound design of Alexander Nevsky. Other secondary sources tend to either overlook this fact or assign only a minor importance to it. The Eisenstein/Prokofiev occasional operational method of shooting film to a pre-recorded score has been frequently – albeit incorrectly – labeled as first director/composer collaboration where the composer composed a score before the images were filmed. Merritt does a brilliant job in pointing out that Prokofiev’s visit of the Walt Disney studio in 1938 – the most ignored one in all of Prokofiev’s studies - had intrigued Prokofiev, particularly the fact that Disney’s animators synchronized their drawings to the comic scores and were able to an create an absolute, close synchronization (in fact, the term is “Mickey-mousing”). Ergo, Prokofiev witnessed for the first time a branch of film-making where music was recorded before the images were animated. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that the relationship between music and visuals created by Eisenstein/Prokofiev in Alexander Nevsky are almost devoid of minute synchronization, because the music does not accompany or punctuate the action, but merges with the structure of the film and thus comments on the images. Merritt acknowledges this fact, but asserts that there is something “Disneyesque” in the comic effects of Prokofiev’s score, which is basically a very sound argument, but unfortunately, Merritt designates only one short paragraph to it and the argument therefore remains in its embryonic form.

Summary:

This is a compilation of correspondence between Eisenstein and Prokofiev from July 1939 to February 1946, with a short analysis and background written by Levaco at the beginning of the article. Although none of the letters directly refers to their collaboration on Alexander Nevsky, Levaco correctly points out that “these fragments of the writings of both artists provide…cursory insights into the character of their relationship, {but} do not reveal, for instance, the state of their being” (7). He also places this brief correspondence in its historical context (high Stalinism) and reminds the readers that both of them certainly exercised a measure of restraint, which consequently obscures the real dimensions of their personalities and collaboration.

Evaluation & Analysis:

    The Eisenstein-Prokofiev correspondence is a primary source that is a direct evidence for their mutual professional respect. Prokofiev’s letter of July 30, 1939 is particularly important, because it suggests that a composer should only commit himself to work in the film industry only if his investment would contribute significantly, that is only if his music would play a creative role in the movie by integrating with the film structure, rather than only accompanying it. It is a super-temporal idea shared by the majority of contemporary composers, but at that time, Prokofiev was frustrated that the audience considers the “music to be some sort of appendage, not deserving any particular attention” (9). At the end of the letter, Prokofiev exclaims that he “a priori believes in Eisenstein – as an opera régisseur!” what further underlines the tendency of academia to consider Nevsky a film of operatic character (also discussed in other articles presented here). Their letter exchanges strongly indicate their absolute artistic compatibility, which is manifested in their works that stand out as shining examples of the ground-breaking design in mixing film and music.
    Levaco does a good job in summarizing their professional relationship, but at one point, he lacks clarity and his statement becomes ambiguous. He claims Prokofiev wrote around 29 musical numbers for the cinema, but because Prokofiev wrote music only for eight movies, Levaco’s number is either plain wrong or stands for something else.

Summary:

Seroff’s book is another biography of Sergei Prokofiev. Chapter 26 of his book opens up with Prokofiev’s journey to the US in early 1938 and ends a year later when Prokofiev himself conducted the first performance of the cantata Alexander Nevsky, which he adapted from his score for the movie. The chapter is heavily based on primary sources - Prokofiev’s and Eisenstein’s statements about each other, their quotes and letters about their collaboration on Nevsky, but it also includes an article that Prokofiev wrote later on about his journey to the US, which includes his opinions on contemporary American music. Seroff gives a full picture of the character of Prokofiev’s composition, ranging from the “upside-down” means of orchestration, to placement of the microphones and mixing experiments in the studios. He also examines the “exceptionally harmonious relationship that stemmed from Eisenstein’s understanding and knowledge of Prokofiev’s works, and of Prokofiev the man” (217), but also asserts that “the two collaborators, however, did not always agree” (219). Seroff also talks about Prokofiev’s “nationalistic” music, but agrees with Eisenstein that through his “true originality in the Hegelian sense, Prokofiev was both national and international” (218).

Evaluation & Analysis:

    Seroff’s discourse on the nature of collaboration between Eisenstein and Prokofiev is exceptional, although Seroff mistakenly dates Prokofiev’s visit to United States to 1939, instead of 1938. Unlike Robinson, Seroff acknowledges the fact that Prokofiev bought home with him some technical knowledge in sound-film production, which he had acquired while visiting film studios in Hollywood. Although they both explore Prokofiev’s guiding principle in using Russian folk music of the 13th century by recomposing it with the instrumental possibilities of the 20th century orchestra, Seroff adds another dimension to his music by convincingly presenting Prokofiev’s score not only as profoundly nationalistic, but also as very international, due to the variety of his musical language that incorporates not only purely national, historical or patriotic themes, but themes of Renaissance Italy and Shakespearean England. This logically implicates that there was also a temporal juxtaposition in Prokofiev’s score on various levels – using contemporary orchestra to recreate the Russian folksongs of the 13th century but also drawing the inspiration from the past, from the heroic deeds of Russia in 19th century (defeating Napoleon), while simultaneously subtly integrating into the score the elements from the Byzantine and European cultures of medieval times. Based on this, the affinity between Eisenstein and Prokofiev has a common ground; one that might be labeled paradoxical synchronization. For Eisenstein, it would be the non-synchronization of sound to visual images (music not as mere accompaniment) and his endorsement of the contrapuntal use of sound, while for Prokofiev it would be a two-layered paradoxical synchronization of a huge variety of musical themes (old & new, national & international).

Summary:

In this chapter, temporally bound to years 1938 and 1939 and thus coinciding with Eisenstein’s production of Alexander Nevsky, Robinson offers a close look on Prokofiev’s life in the harsh climate of Soviet reality and describes his professional relationship with Eisenstein before and during the shooting of the movie. He notes that both of them had actually a great deal of common, particularly the suspicion shadow casting over them for their international connections, travel abroad and supposed “cosmopolitanism”, but affirms that Alexander Nevsky “would open an important new stage in the careers of both director and composer” (350), since it re-instigated Eisenstein’s reputation as a director and inspire Prokofiev’s first successful “nationalistic” music. Robinson echoes Prokofiev’s enthusiasm about the possibilities of music in cinema and Eisenstein’s inclusion of Prokofiev in all aspects of the production of Nevsky. The chapter also provides a short description of the film score, ranging from themes, choice of instruments, folk motifs and elaborates on Prokofiev’s discovery of the enormous potential of recorded sound (mixing, distortion, etc.)

Evaluation & Analysis:

    This chapter in Prokofiev’s biography does not pretend to offer any deep analytical assessment of Eisenstein-Prokofiev collaboration; as any other biography it only describes the facts that happened in someone’s life at certain point (naturally, some sort of cause-effect relationship between the events has to be outlined or logically discernible). Yet, even in this respect, Robinson could have done a little more. For example, he mentions that in early 1938 (prior to the beginning of Nevsky shooting), Prokofiev went to visit Hollywood, where he took a firsthand look at the latest advances in filmmaking technology. Taking into account the undisputable fact that the Hollywood cinema at the time was technologically (sound and camera equipment, studios, etc.) far ahead of the Soviet film industry, it seems peculiar that Robinson mentions it in only one sentence and then swiftly moves to the discussion of Nevsky. Robinson seems to ignore the well-documented fact that Prokofiev’s encounter with Hollywood enabled him to study - in-depth and around the most prominent Hollywood filmmakers of that era - the use sound and music in the cinema. Robinson is either unaware or indifferent to the fact that the enormous knowledge Prokofiev gained in the US, and especially from Walt Disney, was subsequently applied at the shooting sessions of Nevsky and in the composition of musical score for the movie.
On the other hand, Robinson makes a very wise observation that the foundation for a successful collaboration between Eisenstein and Prokofiev is to be found in their similar understanding of the active (not just accompanying) role the music could and should play in film – indeed, a radically different position from Hollywood. Yet overall, Robinson fails to connect the important dots – he completely disregards Hollywood’s influence on Prokofiev in terms of sound technology and experimentation; and he also falls short to explain that despite this influence, Prokofiev believed the film music has more than an accompanying function to images presented on the screen. Eisenstein and Prokofiev shared this philosophical platform and could therefore establish a very beneficial working relationship, but Robinson’s cause-effect explanation for that is simply inadequate and insufficient.

Summary:

The short section in this collection of Eisenstein’s writings, entitled “P-R-K-F-V” (Prokofiev’s signature), has a form of a blend between Eisenstein’s memoir on Prokofiev and his “internal monologue” about the interaction of film and music in general. Eisenstein presents an almost idolized version of Prokofiev, comparing his working methods to a clock, linking his musical work to the writings of Stendhal and calling him the “wisest of modern composers” (153). In his theoretical digressions, Eisenstein tries to infiltrate Prokofiev’s mind and understand the mechanisms in his brain governing the process of creating a film score and then illustrating his conclusions on several real-life incidents with Prokofiev. In terms of their actual collaboration, Eisenstein only mentions that “as a rule”, him and Prokofiev engaged in long and earnest bargains about “which is to be first” - music before shooting or edited film before composing (156).

Evaluation & Analysis:

  “P-R-K-F-V” is a commonly studied and quoted primary source in the academic discourse on Eisenstein-Prokofiev professional relationship, especially because it is a relatively longer writing by Eisenstein on Prokofiev, if not his most extensive. Since it was written in 1946, long after Eisenstein has formulated his theory of sound cinema and tested it out in Nevsky and Ivan, it does not really offer any original or fresh ideas about the principles of audio-visual montage, nor does it tell us anything specific about the modus operandi of their collaboration. It is also quite inconsistent as Eisenstein jumps from one subject matter to another very frequently and his praise for Prokofiev is a bit too far-fetched.

Summary:

This lecture, entitled “Problems of Composition”, was delivered by Eisenstein to his class of student-directors on Christmas Day 1946. Although almost the entire presentation focuses on the composition of frames and shots in the process of filming an adaptation of a novel or poem, at the end of the lecture Eisenstein offers a very interesting insight into Prokofiev’s working methods as a composer of his film scores. He expresses high esteem for Prokofiev’s astonishing ability for “contrapuntal development of music which fuses organically and sensually with the visual images”, after Prokofiev saw the edited material just twice and knew only the number of seconds allotted to him. According to Eisenstein, Prokofiev was able to find “structural and rhythmical equivalents for the edited piece of film” and when working with an unedited material, Prokofiev was capable to “discover the potentialities of structural laws inherent in it” (181). He also reminds the students that although the director doesn’t have to possess a musical talent, he/she needs to have at least an ability to envision some organic congruence of the movement of the music with the movement of the visual contour.

Evaluation & Analysis:

    Upon first sight, this printed primary source (Eisenstein’s lecture preserved in a stenographic record) evidently contradicts Eisenstein’s other accounts about the collaboration between him and Prokofiev. Although Eisenstein repeatedly throws compliments at Prokofiev’s prodigious musical talent, here he carelessly degrades the role and function of his composer in the film-making process. The cooperation between the two, according to this presentation, limited Prokofiev’s role to a quasi Hollywood-style composer – a composer who gets the edited version of the film and/or chunks of unedited footage and then simply makes the score, without having any impact on the visual structure of the film. However, it is a known fact that Prokofiev had a significant say about the composition of shots in several scenes of Alexander Nevsky and it is therefore more than likely that this unfair “degradation” is totally unintentional one on Eisenstein’s part. The illustrations and examples he uses in this case are, nonetheless, very vivid re-creations of Prokofiev’s working techniques and enable us to understand how his music accomplishes to permeate Eisenstein’s montage structures in Alexander Nevsky and create an organic compound with the visual images.

Summary:

In Part IV of this book, Eisenstein discusses the form and content in the cinema, paying special attention to the “concrete methods of constructing relations between music and picture” (158). First, he reiterates the principle of contrapuntal use of sound in relation to the visual montage and argues that audio-visual composition should be united “vertically” (matching each musical phrase with each phase of the parallel picture strips – film shots), and combined “horizontally” (shot after shot on the film stripe – phrase after phrase of a developing theme in music). As he claims, it is not important whether the composer writes music for the “general idea” of a sequence, or for its final cut; or, if the director structures the visual cutting to music that has already been written and recorded. He points out that in Alexander Nevsky all possible variations were used and praises Prokofiev several times for handing him the exact musical equivalents to the visual images. What follows is an extraordinarily detailed analysis of a scene of suspense before the attack in “The Battle on the Ice” sequence. By using graphs, musical notes, film frames and diagrams of movement and pictorial composition, Eisenstein asserts that “exactly the same motion lies at the base of both the musical and plastic structures” (178). Ergo, for Eisenstein, the contrapuntal sound is created by vertical correspondences, which relate the music to the shots through an identical motion that lies at the base of the musical as well as the pictorial movement.

Evaluation & Analysis:

Clearly, the visual and sound unity and composition of Alexander Nevsky gives Eisenstein a great joy and satisfaction, otherwise he probably wouldn’t spend more than thirty pages on examining the interplay of audio and visual forms in a single scene. There is no doubt that him and Prokofiev paid great attention to the soundtrack - where their combined ingenuities aimed at capturing the inescapable harmonies between picture and sound – which, however, seems to give the movie a character of opera, rather than of a historical film. Eisenstein’s analysis is over-detailed and sometimes even painfully long – there are numerous unnecessary digressions from the topic and lots of technicalities, which make it difficult for a reader to follow Eisenstein’s thread of thought or even consider him patronizing.
    Eisenstein’s notion of the audio-visual relationship as a “vertical correspondence” on one hand, and a “horizontal contrapuntal” composition on the other is a two-edged sword. While the idea of verticality of visuals and music is almost absurd because seeing and hearing are two distinct sense modalities, ergo watching a film does not incorporate “seeing the music” while watching the visuals, nor “hearing the visuals” while listening to the music; the concept of counter-pointing the musical and visual signifiers on basis of dynamic/static juxtaposition can be a very powerful cinematic montage technique.
    Furthermore, this is an ex post facto or a posteriori analysis – formulated years after Alexander Nevsky was made, Eisenstein retroactively tries to manifest that this movie is an exemplification of his own set of theories on sound in cinema (“contrapuntal sound”, “vertical unity and horizontal combination”, “correspondence in movement”). Secondly, examining only one scene to demonstrate the validity of his theories also raises suspicions whether other scenes would also follow his theoretical formulae or whether it is only a hypocritical, self-serving mean.