Chapter 10
Eisenstein as theoretician Preliminary considerations
Edoardo G.Grossi
In Eisenstein we find a constant urge to operate in the interstices of different sciences, between linguistics and anthropology, between psychology and aesthetics, between the history of art and biology. This impulse might suggest a mistrust of the procedures of analysis but, on the contrary, it takes advantage of the relative weakness of the various paradigms to make the research more effective—and to obtain better results…
The roles of scientist and scholar, wise man and pragmatist, are superimposed and merged: each appears just when the others seem to be asserting themselves.1
These very interesting reflections by Francesco Casetti help explain how, by taking stock of Eisenstein as a theoretician of cinema and also as a theoretician of art, we can discern his complexity as well as the importance of his multifaceted æuvre.2
There are innumerable starting points from which to reconstruct the Eisensteinian mosaic. Chronologically, the first is the six volumes of the Selected Works, published in Moscow between 1964 and 1971 and running to more than three thousand pages. These obviously contain writings of uneven quality, drawn from the different periods of Eisenstein’s career. Alongside articles written for particular occasions, this edition includes such pillars of his thought as Direction, Non-Indifferent Nature, Colour, On Stereoscopic Cinema, Memoirs, as well as his reflections on montage dating from 1937–41, collected into the articles ‘Montage 1937’, ‘Montage 1938’ and ‘Vertical Montage I, II, III’.
In the first part of an earlier article, I attempted a preliminary synthesis of the main translations of Eisenstein’s writings, drawn from the Selected Works as published in France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States.3 Apart from the writings that comprise Direction, this synthesis demonstrated that the great interest which Eisenstein aroused as a theoretician has only rarely been accompanied by deeper analysis or critical interpretation. Against this rich international panorama, the Italian reader has since 1981 found himself in a privileged position thanks to the series edited by Pietro Montani and published by Marsilio Editori.4 This has given us a deeper sense of the immense work of theoretical research undertaken by Eisenstein over twenty years, which was by no means always closely linked to his better-known work as a director.
But, in spite of this great work, it seems that publication of the rest of Eisenstein’s research, including all the manuscripts and thousands of pages of notes from his courses at the Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, is still a long way from completion.5 To deal with the material held in the Eisenstein collection (fond 1923) of the Central State Archive for Literature and the Arts (TsGALI) would require a further six volumes, if not more.
This material includes the precious Diaries which Eisenstein kept without interruption from 1919 to 1948, amounting to seventy-three notebooks.6 There are also the general research projects which he intended to develop but did not complete, such as the Grundproblem (Fundamental Problem) and Method; specific treatises on ‘Zola and Cinema’, ‘El Greco and Cinema’, ‘Pushkin and Gogol’, ‘Pushkin and the Cinema’ and ‘Three Masters’ (Griffith, Chaplin and Disney).7 Among the projects and essays which remained in note or outline form are, for example, ‘Pathos and Ecstasy’, The Theory of Conflict’, ‘History of the Close-Up’, ‘On the Problem of Direction’ and other material which, as was his custom, would have been inserted into the other more substantial works mentioned above.8 Here we can also find his notes for a History of Soviet Cinema written in 1946–8 and, following on from this and from Method, the first draft of a study entitled In Praise of the Cinema Newsreel (paraphrasing Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly), in which he attempted to analyse the beginnings of television.9
It is also worth mentioning here, among the still unpublished material, the researches described by Marie Seton in her biography of Eisenstein. Given the general character of her account and bearing in mind that Seton usually tried to make Eisenstein’s work appear to follow from certain psychological or existential problems, critics have not attached too much importance to this source.10 However, reading between the lines, we can deduce some important aspects of Eisenstein’s thought, especially the ‘anthropological’ aspect of his research. We shall return to this later, but here are some of the most useful passages:
He talked more and more of his plan to create a synthesis of knowledge for the development of film as an expressive medium. He hoped to realise this monumental task in a series of books, which he regarded as more important than any film he might make. Each was devoted to a different subject and its relation and application to the art of cinematography. Already he had extensive notes for some ten volumes. The first volume, entitled Direction, he had commenced in Mexico, but though he had been working on it, the book remained unfinished at his death fourteen years later.
Another would be devoted to a study of psychology and film.11 In this book he intended to draw extensively upon Freud, although Eisenstein had come to the conclusion that Freud’s system had certain inherent limitations…
Another book was to be devoted to painting and what it could teach the cinematographer about the unity of form and content. The full realisation of the importance of composition in the enrichment of the film medium had come to Sergei Mikhailovich in Mexico, where composition had become one of his primary concerns. It was then he told me of his conviction that primary form—the triangle and the circle—revealed to man the ‘mystery’ of higher truths in symbolic form—the triangle: God, Man, and the Universe, and the circle: immortality.12 […]
In a fourth [book], he intended to examine the customs of people through the ages, analyse symbols and create a reservoir of research material for the film director. In connection with this book, he talked at length about the surviving customs of Greece and retraced the life of centuries to the age of myth, the age when it seemed to him there had existed a certain primal unity of all man’s activities.13 […]
There was one book which he thought he would never write, though the notes for it existed on many pages of his books and on sheaves of paper. It was to cover the meaning of religious experience, of ecstasy and man’s relation to his gods… For him there was a ‘mystery’, and the ‘mystery’ was finding the meaning of God and Christ.14 The names evolved, the forms and symbols changed from place to place and epoch by epoch; but the ‘mystery’ remained.15
When we read these extracts, we can understand how Eisenstein’s personality has become so much more complex and interesting since the publication of the six-volume Selected Works. The over-familiar image of the director of all those ‘classics’ of cinema history from The Battleship Potemkin to Ivan the Terrible has been gradually transformed into that of the author of equally celebrated critical and theoretical works.
In this prevailing trend of the last decade, it is the role of theoretician which has attracted most interest and is proving the indispensable way forward for almost all new Eisenstein research, whether on his films, his graphic output, his work in theatre or even on his writing.
Viktor Shklovsky, the founding father of Russian Formalism and author of an important biography of Eisenstein, had access only to the first four volumes of the Selected Works when he began to define this new image. With remarkable prescience, he wrote: ‘I think that Eisenstein is the greatest theoretician of the Soviet period. He was an inspired director.16 Although he conceived his work on film, he was in fact a great philosopher.’17 We could well adopt Shklovsky’s claim, despite its typically laconic and ‘compact’ style, as a starting point for our own reflection on the study of Eisenstein as theoretician.
In hailing Eisenstein as a great Soviet theoretician, Shklovsky provides a key (which is rich in its potential even today) for reading Eisenstein’s thought in its context, drawing out its full value in the context of twentieth-century Russian and Soviet culture. This emphasis is all the more important in view of the epithet ‘genius’ (accepted by both Shklovsky and Jakobson) and its corollary, ‘a unique and irreplaceable figure’, both of which encourage us to see Eisenstein as an isolated thinker. We have in mind here the studies by film critics, even the best of which, by Aumont and Andrew, take only a partial view of the links between Eisenstein and the main currents of twentieth-century thought.18
Eisenstein has most often been located within the great flowering of Russian art and its avant-garde,19 alongside Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, Tretyakov, Vertov and Rodchenko, etc.20 There can be no doubt that he does belong to this great artistic family and to the culture of the ‘historical avant-gardes’, at least in respect of questions of artistic creation and aesthetics. Within such a diffuse concept of contextualisation, there are a great many studies which seek to demonstrate the affinities and the differences that exist between Eisenstein and the other artists and movements of the avant-garde.21 But this can only be a part of a more global reading of Eisenstein’s work. In fact, amid the great number of problems he tackled during the 1930s and 1940s—and which recur in distinctive fashion in his films, from Que Viva Mexico! to Bezhin Meadow and Ivan the Terrible— the link with avant-garde culture gradually disappears.22 One of the many examples which could be cited is his detailed study on ‘the reasons for androgyny linked with the idea of bi-corporeality, which is born of the suppression of dual oppositions’. There were also the rituals which comprise ‘the exchange and inversion of roles’, especially by means of ‘disguise’ in all its forms.23 In these studies, where he made use of certain ethnographic findings taken from Frazer, Eisenstein could not help but refute the less credible generalisations by which the British anthropologist, in his book Aftermath, had himself tried to systematise convincingly the great mass of material contained in The Golden Bough. Having reconsidered the rituals involving ‘disguise’, Eisenstein criticised Frazer in the following terms:
In the interpretation of his collected evidence, Sir [James] Frazer speaks of the ritual of disguise as if it were a means of protection against… the evil eye or hostile forces. Even if this were true in some cases (which he refers to in another passage), as when a male warrior hides by donning a woman’s clothes to escape the vengeance of the soul of the man or animal he has killed, in cases where there is an exchange, where the two protagonists remain alive and exchange only their roles, this interpretation is not convincing.24
This example, like the subjects of those books which remained at the project stage, Method and Grundproblem, shows that we need to situate Eisenstein in a much wider context than that of the ‘historical avantgardes’, especially if we take into account all his theoretical speculation of the 1930s and 1940s.25 This contextualisation in fact requires him to be located in the vast and diverse company of the Russian and Soviet scholars and theorists who have been lumped together as the ‘Slav scientific tradi tion’, ‘which current has traversed the twentieth century between linguistics and culturology’.26
In an important study which traces the birth of Soviet semiotics and the theoretical paradigm that underpinned it, K.Eimermacher also sketches a general outline of this ‘great scientific tradition’ and unhesitatingly includes Eisenstein within it:
The Russian scientific tradition which was handed down from the 19th century (Potebnya, Baudouin de Courtenay, Veselovsky, etc) exercised a very direct influence on the linguistics and literary scientific work of the Moscow and Petersburg/Leningrad Schools, as well as on Russian Formalism (Bernstein, Bogatyryov, Durnovo, Jakobson, Yakubinsky, Yarkho, Larin, Polivanov, Propp, Reformatsky, Shcherba, Trubetskoy, Tynyanov, Ushakov, Vinogradov, Vinokur, Zhirmunsky). It produced, along with other external influences, several secondary orientations of a similar tendency in the science of religion and theory of art (Florensky), in the theory of literature and culture (Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov) and in aesthetics (Eisenstein).27
However it was above all the many studies produced by V.V.Ivanov, particularly in the 1970s, which established Eisenstein’s place more precisely within the ‘Slav tradition’, among those other Soviet thinkers of the 1930s and 1940s who had so much in common while, as Ivanov is careful to note, also each having their own particularity.28
[We can find many common elements] in the most fruitful studies of the history of culture produced in our country during the 30s and 40s by such writers as M.M.Bakhtin, V.Propp, O.M.Freydenberg, L.S. Vygotsky, S.M.Eisenstein and others, whose work has only begun to occupy its deserved place in recent years, after its publication and translation.29
The contextualisation of Eisenstein in recent years has owed much to work done in linguistics and semiotics. This is why, from the start, such contextualisation, and in particular Ivanov’s contribution, has come under fire from those who would deny any connection between Eisenstein’s work and highly specialised semiotic research. A brief examination of several such objections will reveal one of the essential problems involved in reading Eisenstein critically: the fact that his thought developed not only in relation to the theory of cinema but also in the much wider field of the theory of art.
In a short article which appeared in 1979, J.P.Courtois criticised Ivanov’s essays as an attempt to ‘subordinate’ the vigour of Eisenstein’s theoretical system to the domination of ‘early semiology’.30 In our view, bearing in mind that the overall evaluation of Ivanov’s vast research calls for a more structured criticism than mere accusations of ‘subordination’, it is quite possible to establish a relationship between Eisenstein’s theoretical elaboration and semiotic research, as Ivanov does, especially if we recall that for Soviet semioticians
the term ‘semiotic’ does not refer only to the abstract science of the universal properties of sign systems. It indicates instead a quite new scientific outlook which brings together what in other countries is studied in such separate disciplines as cultural (social, structural) anthropology, social psychology, historical ethnography, content analysis, poetics, art criticism, etc.31
This clarification by D.M.Segal gives us some inkling of the vast panorama which we will suggest here is a fundamental trait of Eisenstein’s theoretical work and one that aligns him with the ‘scientific’ bent of the great Soviet semioticians.
Indeed it could be argued that Ivanov’s theses and contextualisation of Eisenstein had the signal merit of considering his thought in its totality and of trying to find the first accurate interpretations, while certainly leaving scope for development and improvement on many points.32
At this point, it may be interesting to see in more detail how the approach outlined so far applies to specific aspects of Eisenstein’s theoretical research. We shall take as an example the relatively homogeneous reflections on Walt Disney, dating from the 1940s, which are among the most important of his studies to be published recently.33 These reflections show clearly with many examples how, even when tackling a subject which appears straightforwardly ‘cinematic’, he always sets himself more universal and elaborate questions about human artistic expression.
At the beginning of his work on Disney, Eisenstein states the theoretical goal of the essay:
We shall try to enumerate the peculiarities and characteristic features which distinguish Disney’s work. And we shall try to generalise these features. They will prove to be decisive features in any art form, but only in Disney are they presented in their very purest form.34
And several pages later he reveals the direction that his study will take: ‘through his whole system of devices, themes and subjects, Disney constantly gives us prescriptions for folkloric, mythological, prelogical thought.’35 This becomes clear as the essay develops into an extended study on themes found in Disney’s work and more general reflections on the comic and on metaphor. For both of these he draws upon research in criminology (Wulffen), on the history of religions (Potter), on legal psychiatry, folklore (Kagarov), anthropology (Tylor and Lévy-Bruhl), historical poetics (Veselovsky) and child psychology (Kerschensteiner and Werner).36
The range of subjects raised by Eisenstein in this remarkable essay provides a perfect example of the main characteristics of his theoretical research during the 1930s and above all the 1940s. It is from this period of Eisenstein’s maturity that the bulk of the research mentioned here dates, including the two great unfinished theoretical projects, Method and Grundproblem.37 V.V.Ivanov has been able to read and study all of Eisenstein’s unpublished work from these years and offers the following account of its concerns:
In Eisenstein it is impossible to separate artistic creation from the fundamental problem of aesthetics.38 And it was certainly not by chance that he tried to write two books about these two issues at the same time; so there are many ideas common to both Method and Grundproblem. The method of art (creation) is based upon the use of ‘sensory’ thought for its formal elements and draws upon strata of prelogical consciousness, which in art may mingle with ideas of modern logic.39
In analysing all the essays which would have comprised Method and Grundproblem, Ivanov leans towards such studies as ‘Rilke IF in which Eisenstein deals with regressive forms of thought—especially the ‘archaic nature of schizophrenic thought’ as described by the psychologist A.Storch —and Bali, in which, while exploring the symbolism of the universal tree, he dwells upon the importance attached in Balinese rites to ‘the sap (soul) of the tree in relation to the bark’.
In the Disney study and also in the essays related to Method and Grundproblem, as in several chapters of Non-Indifferent Nature and other writings of his maturity, Eisenstein is interested in the study of all forms of artistic and symbolic expression.40 He pays particular attention, in relation to the ‘fundamental problem’, to forms of universal archetype linked with what he often termed ‘the archaic strata of human psychology’ which persist to the present day.41 As G.P.Brunetta has noted, this particular cast of Eisenstein’s thought is present in all his writings, from the most speculative to the most analytical:
There is a constant orientation in his thought which leads it to seize analogies both superficial and profound (in relation to meaning and ideology) between literary, linguistic, musical and pictorial sign systems and strictly cinematic sign systems. The same principles of construction apply, he demonstrates, to certain novels, poetic and pictorial compositions and to certain films. These common elements correspond for Eisenstein to deep motivations whose origin is very ancient.42
The Disney essay provides a good example of this: in Disney’s art the animation of inanimate forms and the ‘animalisation’ of human characters are for Eisenstein obvious signs of animism and totemism.
This direct relationship between cinematic and aesthetic thought, with frequent recourse to anthropological hypotheses, is equally apparent in Eisenstein’s great 1937 treatise on montage, which has only recently been completely reconstructed by Naum Kleiman and published in translation for the first time.43 At the heart of this work, Eisenstein proposes that prior to all forms of social relationship must be placed the ceremony during which the ancestor and the chief of the tribe ‘were solemnly killed and eaten, according to a ritual which little by little was transformed into a symbol by the figure of Dionysos’.44 Surveying all the transpositions which Eisenstein made of such ideas, F.Casetti considers this among the ‘most enriching passages’ of the book, recalling as it does Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Freud’s Totem and Taboo.
What seems to me most important in the essays like On Disney, and in the major studies like Montage and Non-Indifferent Nature, is the fact that Eisenstein succeeded in achieving sufficient mastery to make connections between some of the most interesting problems of this century in historical poetics, in anthropology and ethnography, including the study of folklore, and in linguistics and psychology (including psychophysiology, neuropsychology and psychoanalysis).45 This breadth of view which distinguishes Eisenstein is also characteristic of the ‘Slav scientific tradition’: ‘narrow specification is alien to the best traditions of our scholarship. Recall how very broad were the cultural horizons in the research of Potebnya and especially of Veselovsky.’46
Our thoughts can pause at this point. On the one hand, solid grounds have been found for inserting Eisenstein into the context of the ‘Slav scientific tradition’. On the other, if we take precise note of the wide range of fields in which Eisenstein theorised, it will become clear which aspects of his theorisation remain to be further excavated and thus how further research into his thought should be developed. Only after such future studies will it be be possible to confirm Shklovsky’s verdict: ‘Eisenstein is the greatest theoretician of the Soviet period.’
Translated from the French by Ian Christie
