Filling the Gaps

There’s some pleasure in not knowing for sure.
I think that for most people this is kind of uncomfortable, but I embrace this positively, rather than being an anxiety producer. Paradoxical, but here is another paradox for you: one of the most liberating ideas about art and thinking came from a man who lived under one of the most repressive regimes in history.

Sergei Eisenstein was a Soviet filmmaker. That fact matters less than what he did with his craft. The “Odessa Steps” sequence alone in Battleship Potemkin (1925) has been studied, dissected, and imitated countless times: a baby carriage bouncing down a staircase, soldiers marching in rhythm, a mother’s face frozen in horror. Check Brian De Palma's brilliant homage in The Untouchables (1987).

But Eisenstein’s real genius wasn’t just what he filmed. It was how he cut it together. His theory of montage is deceptively simple. Take two images. Place them next to each other. The human brain, hungry for meaning, will create a connection that exists in neither image alone. That third thing, the one that appears only in the collision, is the real content of cinema.

Eisenstein called this “linkage.” But what he actually created was space. A gap. A moment of active participation where the viewer becomes a co-creator. He doesn’t tell you what to think. He arranges the pieces and trusts you to complete the puzzle yourself. An invitation to think.

In the same period, Leni Riefenstahl was a dancer and an actress who, in the early 1930s, had Adolf Hitler’s admiration. She admired him back. In 1934, she was commissioned to film the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. The result was Triumph of the Will. Technically, the film is a marvel. Moving cranes, aerial shots, mass formations choreographed into living geometry. But be sure, there were no open gaps; she sealed them shut. The rhythm hypnotizes. The images overwhelm. You don’t leave the theater thinking. You leave saluting. The conclusion is built into the structure. No space for doubt. She, the director, has already decided for you.

Don’t think.

There are plenty of movie examples with both approaches.
Take 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar.

Kubrick gives you the monolith, the hallucination, the fetus floating above Earth. He gives you enough, but not all. The gap remains. You leave the theater still thinking, still arguing, uncomfortably still interpreting. He passed the ball.

Technically, Interstellar is also a marvel. But Nolan gives you an astronaut explaining a wormhole to another astronaut (wtf!). The explanation is obviously for us, the audience, because the film assumes we are too stupid to fill any gap, so it fills it before you notice it. No work required. No interpretation invited.

This is not about art versus propaganda. It’s about whether the director trusts the viewer or not. Eisenstein trusted you. Kubrick trusted you. Nolan doesn’t. He pushes his view as the only view. No generosity. No space for surprise. No room for your interpretation to compete with his. The conclusion is sealed.

The gap is closed.
Don’t think.

And that, more than any political system, is the real loss.

Thinking is an exercise.

It demands practice at every opportunity. That's how we get good at it—while listening to a song, reading a book, … watching the news.

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Fill the gaps …