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We can clearly see how easily and imperceptibly one may slip from an essentially realistic composition towards one extreme, naturalistic, or the other, conventional and 'formalist.' It's just like declaiming verse. A little too much emphasis on the period of the rhythm, and the recitation turns into a lifeless mechanical drone. A touch too slack on rhythmic delivery, and the distinct cadence of verse disintegrates into the baffling formlessness of semi-prose. A little too much emphasis on the circle [formed by the characters], and the mise en scene starts to lean towards ballet and conventional theatre. A bit too careless with the geometric figure, and the clear, distinct, meaningful mise en scene is sucked into the swamp of formless naturalism. - Sergei Eisenstein Mise en jeu and Mise en geste was composed in January 1948, a few months before Sergei Eisenstein's death. Here he subordinates all aspects of mise en scene to some unifying idea inherent in the subject matter, transforming it from an incoherent jumble into a 'legible text.' There the subtext of a given scene-its hidden meaning-may be writ large. Unlike his previous writings on mise en scene, this essay treats separately mise en jeu (transposing the 'interplay of motives' into a sequence of actions); mise en geste (transposing character into gesture); and mise en cadre (recreating the effects of a poetic passage through shot composition).

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This four-part essay is one of the last pieces written by Eisenstein before his untimely death in February 1948. Sergey Levchin has performed a heroic task and his fine translation has rendered the Russian text as clearly and intelligibly as could possibly be done so that it reads (what higher praise could there be?!) as if it had been written in English in the original. He also has my sympathy for his achievement in coping with an essay that analyses the more complex novels of Dostoevsky and Balzac but also mentions Shakespeare, Gogol, Disney and Eisenstein's own films, particularly his final masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible.--Richard Taylor Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema

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Sergei Eisenstein was the director of many films, including Battleship Potemkin, one of cinema's great masterpieces. As a theorist of montage and film aesthetics, his writings display dazzling intellectual virtuosity, erudition and scope. Sergey Levchin is a literary and academic translator living in New York.

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