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Sergei Eisenstein and Total Synchronization
Eisenstein and Prokofiev Collaborate
In the late 1930s, Sergei Eisenstein's approach to montage took a new turn. Where earlier he had seen music primarily as another instrument for dialectical montage collisions, he now felt that these tensions could result in a new type of synthesis.
Beginning with Alexander Nevsky (1938), Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev began an intense collaboration in which Prokofiev was commissioned to write the scores, Eisenstein listened to them, and editing was done around revised versions. The end result was an unprecedented level of frame-by-frame sound-and-image synchronization.
Richard Wagner was a key reference point and Eisenstein directed an important production of Die Walküre (1876) in Moscow in 1940.
Vertical Montage
Sergei Eisenstein claimed that he correlated not only the sequencing of shots but also positioning of figures and landscape elements so that they would match the structure of Prokofiev's score. Within Eisenstein's ever-expanding conception of montage, this type of "vertical montage" would strengthen the force of audiovisual synchronization.
He belatedly demonstrated his ideas in the lectures published posthumously in English as The Film Sense (1969) [1].
