Isn't that interesting. You learn something new every day!
What *I* know about dialectics I learned in film history classes, and there is nothing very 'rational' about it; more than anything else it is frenzied. Its big, its bold, its fast, its exciting and its all about the dialectical CLASH! But yes, it is based on theory; theory that is brought to life on film. The best known film maker incorporating the principles of dialectics was Sergei Eisenstein. He manipulated his audience with the use of montage. The clash of the dialectic creates cinematic tension; " it was Eisenstein's hope to harness that frenzy for revolutionary purposes...". Of his films the best known was 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925) made about the failed 1905 uprising in pre-revolutionary Russia. The 'Odessa Steps' sequence is absolutely legendary and is probably the best known example of dialectical montage ever made. Every great action film depends on the principles of rhythmic montage that the Russian formalists forged.
In my film history class I learned there are three elements of a dialectic (thesis, antithesis and synthesis):
"Crucial to understanding what Eisenstein was striving for cinematically is his seminal 1931 essay “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form”. Just as the conflict of classes drove history – with the bourgeoisie as thesis clashing with the proletariat as antithesis to yield the triumphant progressive synthesis of the classless society – so too (famously, in Strike!) shot A of the workers' rebellion being put down is juxtaposed with shot B of cattle being slaughtered and the synthesis yields the symbolic meaning C, that the workers are cattle. This technical innovation (which Eisenstein dubbed “intellectual montage”) resulted from his studies of Kuleshov's famous experiments (which demonstrated that the meaning of any shot is contextual) and of Japanese ideograms (where two separate symbols can be juxtaposed to create a third meaning, e.g. child + mouth = scream, white bird + mouth = sing) (3). Less famously, in that same essay, Eisenstein distinguished between ten different types of dialectical conflict at the level of shot composition alone, many of which are utilised in the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin."