Seymour Stern: American Film Critic, Guardian and Prophet

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Beginning in 1930, Stern assumed the co-editorship, with Lewis Jacobs, of Experimental Cinema, a magazine of the avant garde and the radical, which would serve as a forum "in which would be published and discussed the works of creators such as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovjenko, Pabst and Dreyer, among others."²⁸

In a fundamental article, Stern formulated the principles of the "New World Cinema" as he envisioned it: We are at a moment decisive for the history of the cinema; the old forms are disappearing. The capital problem is the problem of montage.

Montage is the culminating point of the director's work, but it is necessary to take the word 'montage' in the larger sense that it is the conceptual and structural organization of the movement-forms of the film; it is the montage which creates the dominating rhythm; the montage constitutes the essence of the cinema since the film is movement. ²⁹

Stern's intensive study of the Soviet cinema and the usage of montage therein led to the creation of his six categories of camera montage along with his theory of the Image idea.

David Platt, a later collaborator as co-editor with Stern in the magazine, expanded upon Stern's foundation and introduced the radical change concept, or the anarchistic cinematic hypothesis that was so strong an underlying point in Experimental Cinemas theoretic basis:

The cinema is the new religion. The nineteenth century attempted to eliminate mystery from the universe; the camera gives to the twentieth century the possibility of penetrating the mystery of reality. The Renaissance, though impatiently awaited, will come.³¹

Stern's quick tongue and subjective editorialization in defense of "art" took cinema criticism a quantum leap forward when he began a world-wide attack, through the pages of Experimental Cinema, on behalf of the eminent Soviet director, Sergei Eisenstein, and his film QUE VIVA MEXICO.

The film had been halted by the producer Upton Sinclair, and given over to Sol Lesser, later a producer of "Tarzan" movies, to edit into a final version.

In the spring of 1933, Stern wrote a "Manifesto On Eisenstein's Mexican Film," which literally was an open letter of protest to Sinclair over the situation.

In article after article, published in numerous periodicals, Stern contin- uously hammered on the theme and sought to rally legions to the defense of Eisenstein and the perogatives of the artist.

His biggest attack came in a major piece entitled "The Greatest Thing Done On This Side Of The Atlantic."³²