221. Eisenstein and Memory - Jessie Creel
From Sergei Eisensteins’s Strike (1925)
But montage can be quite useful for accessing themes in your own journey—like a visual meditation, where you take inventory of whatever sits just below the surface of the subconscious.
When I started therapy a decade ago, my first homework assignment was to make a list of all of my life’s major moments. I was expecting kudos from my therapist for my impeccable handwriting and my detailed sentence structures, but a harsh reality smacked me in the face. Her sole observation? I only included negative moments from my life. Shit.
It was in that reckoning that I began to study gratitude. I got into loving-kindness meditation and journaling, listing ten things I was grateful for each day. It didn’t come easy. I was in the throes of infertility, and at times finding positivity felt like a chore. But I was desperate to feel better, so I kept at it. In time, I realized that triumphs and tribulations are foils for each other, and I developed a montage of hard and soft memories that anchored me—that helped me understand the beauty and truth in the writer Joseph Campbell’s words: “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”
I’ve long known the power of montage. Back in film school we studied Sergei Eisenstein, who was famous for throwing together a string of images at a swift pace, knowing that the viewer would assemble them into a narrative, which allowed him to explore bigger themes and ideas and to move the story along more efficiently. You may have heard Jack Johnson’s famous lyric alluding to this: “Maybe Eisenstein should just relax. Slow down everyone. You’re moving too fast. Frames can’t catch you when you’re moving like that.”
But montage can be quite useful for accessing themes in your own journey—like a visual meditation, where you take inventory of whatever sits just below the surface of the subconscious. If you love what you’re seeing, you can identify similar moments as they happen and double down on them. If you don’t, at least you know what’s pulling you under, and you can begin looking for ways to climb out.
When I first began reflecting back, my sequences were gloomy, like that first effort at therapy: all flashbacks to failed pregnancies and agonizing doctors’ appointments. But good ones welled up too, including the blissful moment of holding my brand new baby. And with time and reflection, in the harder scenes, I see myself at my strongest. I knew what mattered to me, and I had the faith to continue on.
- Jessie Creel
