Few artists have tried harder than Sergei Eisenstein to understand what they were doing, how and why, as they fashioned early on the works that made them famous, and no one among them has ever affirmed later on – with such clarity and conviction – how and why they had at the time misconceived what they were doing, and what lessons they had learned about their art from having done so. Though some filmmakers understood afterwards what Eisenstein had achieved by rethinking what he had done, few commentators, unable to sense hands-on its impetus or consequences, have proven capable of acknowledging it.
Within this essay (Part I) I shall unpack what Eisenstein said early on of the mistake that he was making – before recognising it as such. I shall then in a second essay (Part II) reconstrue it definitively as he did later on – after the recognition.