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The Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was a contemporary of Mondrian's, and he had some boundary-breaking ideas about his own art. To Eisenstein, film was more an extension of language than of the visual arts, and he developed it as a dynamic conversation -- a counterpoint of the visual and aural.
Eisenstein's dynamism came from the interaction of the organic (emotional) and the rational (abstract). This dualism mirrors Mondrian's counterpoint of the natural and the abstract. To Eisenstein, "the spatial form of this dynamism of expression. The phrases of its tension: rhythm. This is true for every art form, and indeed, for every kind of expression." Conflict, in an Eisenstein work, came from the counterpoint of visual and aural; in Mondrian's art, it came from the counterpoint of adjacent colors and forms. In jazz, couterpoint comes from different instruments, or adjacent tones, or polyrhythms. In all these arts, the conflict produces dynamism. Each part of a composition is merely information; the overall emotional (to Mondrian: universal) effect comes from montage: conflict, counterpoint, rhythm and harmony. |