On the Composition of the Short Fiction Scenario

Book excerpt: While the World War raged, Sergei Eisenstein, perhaps the world's greatest filmmaker-theoretician, lectured at the State Institute of Cinematography at Moscow, on how to turn a short story into a filmscript. In this transcript of the couple of lectures, appearing in English for the first time in a translation by Alan Puchurch, Eisenstein analyses in painstaking detail two parallel scripts made out of the same story, and prefers one to the other. The script by Leonid Leonov that Eisenstein recommends was eventually made into a film by V Pudovkin and Mikhail Doller -- 'The Feast at Zhirmunka', an intensely dramatic account of an episode of spontaneous anti-fascist resistance. The short but invaluable text appears with an introduction by Jay Leyda, translator of Eisenstein's major theoretical works and a direct pupil of the master.