In these endnotes Eisenstein is usually referred to as E, while works cited frequently or by several authors are abbreviated in accordance with the list below. References to archival sources held in the Central State Archive of Literature and the Arts, Moscow (TsGALI) are given in the following standard form of three numbers: fond, followed by opis’ and then edinitsa khraneniya.
Barna Y.Barna, Eisenstein (London and Bloomington, Ind.: 1973).
Christie and Elliott I.Christie and D.Elliott (eds), Eisenstein at 90 (Oxford: 1988).
EAW J.Leyda and Z.Voynow, Eisenstein at Work (New York: 1983).
ESW 1 S.M.Eisenstein, Selected Works (ed. and trans. R.Taylor) Vol. 1: Writings 1922–34 (London and Bloomington, Ind.: 1988).
ESW 2 S.M.Eisenstein, Selected Works (ed. M.Glenny and R.Taylor, trans. M.Glenny) Vol. 2: Towards A Theory of Montage (London and Bloomington, Ind.: 1991).
FF R.Taylor and I.Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: 1988).
Film Form S.M.Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (ed. and trans. J.Leyda) (New York: 1949).
IFF R.Taylor and I.Christie (eds), Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London and New York: 1991).
IP S.M.Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniya v shesti tomakh (Selected Works in Six Volumes) (Moscow: 1964–71). The numeral indicates the volume number: e.g. IP 1.
Leyda J.Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: 1960).
Memories Immoral Memories: An Autobiography by S.M.Eisenstein (trans. H. Marshall) (Boston, Massachusetts: 1983 and London: 1985).
NIN S.M.Eisenstein, Non-Indifferent Nature (trans. H.Marshall) (New York: 1987).
Nizhny V.Nizhny, Lessons with Eisenstein (ed. and trans. I.Montagu and J.Leyda) (London: 1962).
Seton M.Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography (New York: 1960).
1 W.Blake, No. 67 of the Proverbs of Hell, from ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Poems and Prophecies (London: 1991), p. 47. These lines were transcribed by E and are preserved, along with many other fragments from English literature, in the Eisenstein archive, Moscow.
2 In the regular Sight and Sound international critics’ polls of ‘top ten’ films, Potemkin has come fourth in 1952, sixth in 1962 (when Ivan the Terrible also appeared in eighth place), third in 1972 and sixth in both 1982 and 1992. E however did not reach the directors’ top ten until 1992. Both Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible came joint second (with five other films) in a Soviet critics’ poll of 1987, Nedelya no. 44, 1987, p. 18; trans. R.Taylor, in J.Graffy and G. Hosking (eds), Culture and the Media in the USSR Today (London: 1989), pp. 73–7. Among recent film citations of the Odessa Steps are Zbigniew Rybczynski, Steps (1986) and Brian De Palma, The Untouchables (1987).
3 R.Roud (ed.), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (London: 1980), p. 329.
4 Roud echoes the charge of ‘a triumph of art over humanity’ made by Robert Warshow in 1955; see ‘Reviewing the Russian Movies’, in The Immediate Experience (New York: 1970), p. 271. Walter Benjamin saw film as responsible for the decay of art’s traditional ‘aura’, but perhaps underestimated how Soviet cinema created its own ‘revolutionary aura’—a seeming authenticity unique to E’s and some other canonic films of the 1920s. See ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in H.Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (London: 1970), pp. 223ff.
5 L.Anderson, review of ESW 1, Weekend Telegraph, 19 March 1988, p. viii.
6 A.Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (London: 1963), p. 95.
7 N.Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (London: 1975), p. 296.
8 For example, A.Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (London: 1989, rev. edn), pp. 67, 114. See also, M.Turovskaya, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry (London: 1989), pp. xix–xx.
9 See pp. 33–40 below. A conference on ‘Film of the Totalitarian Epoch 1933–45’, organised by Maya Turovskaya in Moscow, in July 1989, promted vigorous debate about E’s and other film-makers’ ‘complicity’.
10 Encouraged by the recent publication of a fuller text of E’s and Cherkasov’s interview with Stalin on 25 February 1947, Moscow News 32, 1988, pp. 8–9. See also, L.Kozlov, ‘The Artist and the Shadow of Ivan’, in R.Taylor and D.Spring (eds), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London: 1993).
11 See Carlo Pedretti’s introduction to M.Cianchi, Leonardo da Vinci’s Machines (Florence: 1988), pp. 5–7.
12 Among many admissions that practice did not follow theory, E wrote: ‘when I myself am creating, I recall Goethe’s remark, “grau ist die Theorie” [theory is grey], and I plunge headlong into creative spontaneity.’ ‘Poor Salieri!’, IP 3, pp. 33–4. Blunt concludes his study of Leonardo’s theory by observing that, especially in the drawings, ‘material collected by the minute study of natural phenomena seems to have been transmuted by the imagination by an almost magical process of which Leonardo gives no account in his writings’. A.Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450–1600 (Oxford: 1962), p. 38.
13 Letter to Maxim Strauch, 8–10 May 1931, trans. T.Taubes, October no. 14, Fall 1980, p. 56. A kibitka is a covered cart.
14 The 1935 All-Union Creative Conference of Workers in Soviet Cinema included a range of direct and oblique comments on E’s concern with theory. Trauberg called for more, not less, theory ‘of the right sort’, while Kuleshov defended himself by dismissing Yutkevich’s remarks on E’s erudition as envy. See FF pp. 349, 355. See also the ‘official’ post-war verdict of N.Lebedev: ‘as an artist Eisenstein was ruined by his theories …ginal in form and false in content, the theory of Eisenstein did not move art forward.’ Ocherk istorii sovetskogo kino (On the History of Soviet Cinema) (Moscow: 1947), pp. 161, 163.
15 The exhibition was organised by David Elliott and Ian Christie on behalf of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, the British Film Institute and the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR. It was shown in Oxford in July—August 1988, at the Hayward Gallery, London, in September—December, and at the Cornerhouse, Manchester, in January 1989.
16 ‘Looking at one’s own scholarly self was E’s title (in English) for one of his ironic self-portrait drawings, probably dating from around 1940.
17 The conference ‘Eisenstein at 90’, was held at Keble College, Oxford, in July 1988. One paper given at the conference does not appear here: Annette Michelson’s ‘Reading Eisenstein Reading Ulysses: Montage and the Claims of Subjectivity’.
19 Both The Strike and Vertov’s Kino-Glaz received gold medals at the Paris Exposition in October 1925, although it has been suggested that this was on the strength of their Constructivist posters rather than screenings. Gosfilmofond, the central Soviet archive for fiction (khudozhestvennye) films, was organised in 1948.
20 Dickinson recorded that ‘Strike…was never shown in Great Britain or America’, T.Dickinson and C.de la Roche, Soviet Cinema (London: 1948), p. 24. Strike appears to have been first seen in Britain at the National Film Theatre in January 1958 and did not enter UK distribution until 1962.
21 Thompson, p. 56. The sale of the negative for hard currency has been confirmed by Naum Kleiman.
22 Ivor Montagu, in ‘Notes on the Potemkin material at the National Film Archive’, a typescript dated 18 December 1972, discussed the provenance of four prints of Potemkin and three published scripts. He refers to a ‘quotation from Trotsky’s book 1905’ following the title ‘Act One’ in the print derived from material originally imported by the Film Society in 1928–9 . This was later replaced by a quotation from Lenin, which Montagu attributes to a 1930 Soviet sound version of which no further record is known.
23 Montagu confirms that E wanted the ship’s flag stencil-coloured red, which effect was recreated for the 1987 London Film Festival presentation and included in a subsequent BBC TV transmission (albeit of a different version).
24 I.Montagu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood (Berlin, GDR: 1968), p. 143. See also Tsivian, p. 80 below.
25 New York Times, 10 October 1963, quoted in H.Marshall, Masters of Soviet Cinema (London: 1983), pp. 199–200.
26 Kino, 20 December 1927, quoted in Leyda, pp. 238–9.
27 Kleiman has indicated that Sidney Bernstein, originally associated with the London Film Society, had helped Alexandrov copy material only to be found, by this time, in the BFI 16mm print.
28 E’s many visitors in Moscow during the editing of October included the artists Käthe Kollwitz and Diego Rivera, the American novelist Theodore Dreiser and the future New York MoMA curator Alfred Barr. He also started to read Ulysses in March 1929. His notes on Capital are dated from 12 October 1927 to 22 April 1928, and begin with the realisation that ‘October presents a new form of cinema, a collection of essays’. Capital was to be ‘a film treatise’. ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, edited by N.Kleiman, were first published in Iskusstvo kino, January 1973, pp. 57–67; English translation in October no. 2, Summer 1976, pp. 3–26. On the compression of material filmed for October, see Tsivian, pp. 84–7 below.
29 See, for example, A.Piotrovsky, ‘October Must Be Re-Edited!’ and T. Rotokov, ‘Why is October Difficult?’, FF pp. 216–17, 219–20; also V. Shklovsky, ‘Eisenstein’s October: Reasons for Failure’, Novyi Lef no. 3, 1928; trans. D.Matias, Screen vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 88–90.
31 M.Seton, Sergei M.Eisenstein: A Biography (New York: 1960), p. 104.
32 Barna, p. 129.
33 Leyda, p. 262.
34 Ibid.
35 S.Khan-Magomedov, Rodchenko: The Complete Work (Cambridge, Mass.: 1987), p. 189.
36 Seton, p. 105.
37 Two slightly different accounts of this colouring have been given. Barna writes of ‘inserting short lengths of film painted with abstract splashes of colour in the bull’s wedding sequence’ (p.). Montagu describes the effect of the sky at this point ‘suffused with coloured fireworks’ and goes on to describe an experiment on Hitchcock’s The Secret Agent inspired by the example of handpainting in The General Line, I.Montagu, Film World (Harmondsworth: 1964), p. 124.
38 In October 1928, E became director of a new Teaching and Research Workshop at the State Film School, GTK: see ESW 1, pp. 127–30. This period also saw the climax of the debate over sound and a series of major theoretical articles: ‘Beyond the Shot’, ‘The Dramaturgy of Film Form’ and ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, all written before E’s departure for the West; ESW 1, pp. 138–94.
39 V.Shklovsky, Eizenshtein (Moscow: 1973), pp. 165–6.
40 Information from Naum Kleiman, who notes that Burov’s design for The General Line influenced actual Sovkhov and kolkhoz architecture.
41 The documentary was directed by Stepanova; no further information available.
42 A copy of Kleiman’s reconstructed version is now held by BFI Distribution and is available in the UK on Hendring Video.
43 See M.Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: 1991), Ch. 3, ‘Chameleon and Catalyst: The Cinema as an Alternative Public Sphere’, pp. 90–125.
44 A restoration of New Babylon in the mid-1980s by the Munich Filmmuseum is instructive here: when one of the surviving co-directors, Leonid Trauberg, saw it he complained that what had been ‘restored’ was precisely the material he and Kozintsev had removed in finalising the film for release! Current archival practice is moving away from combining all extant material towards the possibility of reconstructing different versions of the same film, as in a restoration of Dupont’s Moulin Rouge (GB, 1928) currently under way at the National Film Archive in Britain.
45 ‘Step-printing’ involves printing every second frame twice to ‘stretch’ a film originally intended to run more slowly than 24 frames per second, thus enabling a modern sound-track to be added. This results, however, in an apparent running speed of about 16 fps, which is too slow for all but a minority of pre-1928 films.
46 The BFI has shown New Babylon at a mixture of 20 and 24 fps (with Trauberg’s approval) and October at 22 fps. See K.Brownlow, ‘Silent Films: What Was the Right Speed?’, Sight and Sound vol. 49, no. 3, Summer 1980, pp. 164–7.
47 Recalled by E in Memories, p. 88.
48 Screenings of Potemkin and October organised by the BFI in 1987 and 1988, with Meisel’s original music played by the Brabant Orchestra and Northern Sinfonia, both conducted by Alan Fearon, attracted large and appreciative audiences.
49 See texts in the BFI programme brochures for Potemkin and October; also a television documentary, The Meisel Mystery, produced in 1988 by Tyne-Tees Television.
50 T.Van Houten, ‘Rhythm, Rhythm…Rhythm’, Potemkin programme brochure (London: 1987), pp. 4–5.
51 See B.Eisenschitz, ‘The Music of Time: From Napoleon to New Babylon’, Afterimage 10, Autumn 1981, pp. 48–55; also BFI programme brochure for New Babylon, 1982.
52 See ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, ESW 1, p. 185.
53 In a letter to Moussinac dated 4 June 1929 : ‘It is my obsession to add sound to Old and New. Have to do that abroad.’ Quoted in EAW, p. 38. See also letters in the Montagu Collection on how this plan failed to materialise.
54 EAW, p. 38.
55 In his compilation Eisenstein’s Mexican Film: Episodes for Study (1955), Leyda groups certain shots, such as the variant angles on an ancient statue, and suggests how E might have combined these as he had previously done.
56 ‘There are…rumours that E’s personal copy of Bezhin Meadow was among the cans of film removed from his Potylikha apartment the morning after his death’ (EAW, p. 151). Apart from such rumours—and the touching belief that ‘everything’ was somehow preserved in Soviet archives (banned material was more often privately preserved)—there seems to be no concrete reason for hope, although continuing archival discoveries must mean that this cannot be ruled out.
58 Memories, p. 226.
59 Shklovsky, Eizenshtein, p. 325 (Ger. edn); trans, in EAW, p. 100.
60 EAW, p. 101.
61 Seton, p. 441; EAW, p. 125.
62 EAW, p. 135; see also Kozlov, ‘The Artist and the Shadow of Ivan’.
63 EAW, pp. 135–45.
64 Glumov’s Diary (c. 112 metres) was reconstructed in 1977 from material held by the Soviet Documentary Film Archive at Krasnogorsk. It formed a part of one edition of Kinopravda, the series edited by Vertov, who had been Proletkult’s supervisor for their first venture in film.
66 In his introduction to Eisenstein: Two Films (London: 1984), Leyda draws important and scrupulous distinctions between different kinds of published ‘scenario’, ‘script’ and ‘shot list’. Yet the ‘scripts’ of October and Nevsky that follow obscure almost as many issues as they illuminate, due to the absence of comparative and variant material.
67 Montagu, ‘Notes on Potemkin material’, p. 8.
68 An English translation of Ivan appeared in Life and Letters in 1945–6. Film Form was also fully prepared before E’s death, although not published until 1949.
69 According to N.Kleiman in a lecture at the National Film Theatre, London, September 1987.
70 The first volume of the Selected Works appeared in 1964, at the end of the Khrushchev Thaw’, and the sixth in 1971.
71 Kleiman NFT lecture; see also I.Christie, ‘Eisenstein at 90’, Sight and Sound vol. 57, no. 3, Summer 1988, p. 186.
72 ‘Today I started to write my “Portrait of the Author as a Very Old Man”’, dated 24 December 1946 and quoted in EAW, p. 151.
73 Marshall’s translation appeared in the USA in 1984 and in Britain in 1985. It is copyrighted 1983 and in his Acknowledgements Marshall says that it was in fact completed ten years earlier, ‘but, alas, an English publisher held it up for all those years’. Apart from ignoring the intervening progress of Russian scholarship, Marshall’s version randomly omits short passages of the 1964 Russian text throughout and, as in his adaptation of the Kleiman/Levina book on Potemkin, largely reproduces the original Soviet annotation without any acknowledgement or revision.
74 The French edition, under the general editorship of Jacques Aumont, appeared in six volumes between 1974 and 1985.
75 A translation of the revised Russian edition is due to be published by Seagull Books, Calcutta, and the BFI in 1993.
76 Occasional letters have been published in a variety of journals, including Iskusstvo kino, Cahiers du cinema and October, but the majority remain in archives and personal collections. The most extensive selection yet to appear in book form is in the second of Leyda’s Seagull series (see note 80 below). Diary material has been used by Ley da and, more recently, has appeared in the journal Kinovedcheskie zapiski.
77 See Ch. 4 below for sources of these texts.
78 Publication of the French edition was interrupted in the early 1980s, before a sixth volume appeared in 1985. The German edition, edited by Hans Joachim Schlegel, finished after only four volumes in 1983.
79 The Italian edition, edited by Pietro Montani, envisages eight volumes and follows approximately the pattern of major books that E envisaged, including Montage, Method and Direction. The British edition, edited by Richard Taylor, adopts a chronological approach for volumes one and three, with volume two collecting E’s writings from different periods on montage.
80 The Seagull series, all edited by Leyda, includes: On the Composition of the Short Fiction Scenario (1984); Eisenstein 2: A Premature Celebration of Eisenstein’s Centenary (1985); Eisenstein on Disney (1986); and The Psychology of Composition (1987), all published in Calcutta. The two collections edited by François Albera are: Cinématisme. Peinture et cinema (Brussels: 1980) and, with N. Kleiman, Eisenstein et le mouvement de l’art (Paris: 1986).
81 Review of ESW 1, The Economist, 2–8 April 1988, p. 82.
82 Introduction to Barna, p. 8.
83 An example of such misconstruction: reviewing the Seagull series and ESW 1, Lindsay Anderson remarked: ‘one cannot imagine this kind of stuff cutting much ice at the National Film School or at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute’, Sunday Telegraph, 27 August 1989.
84 ‘Du cinema en relief, in Albera and Kleiman, Eisenstein et le mouvement de l’art, pp. 97–158.
85 Ibid., p. 262.
87 Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), originally a leading ‘Formalist’ critic and patron of the Serapion Brotherhood of writers; later film critic, scenarist and memoirist. Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934), pioneer Soviet psychologist who posthumously exerted a wide influence on education and psycholinguistics. Yuri Tynyanov (1894–1943), critic, literary theorist, novelist and scenarist. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), literary theorist and philosopher whose concepts of ‘polyphony’ and ‘dialogism’ have been influential in recent decades. Alexander Luria (1902–77), eminent psychologist and neurophysiologist, whose studies of The Man With a Shattered World and The Mind of a Mnemonist helped popularise neurological concepts of consciousness, memory and perception. E planned two courses on the psychology of art at Luria’s request, in 1940 and 1947 (both in Leyda (ed.) The Psychology of Composition).
89 I.Christie, ‘Musica plastica: version! dell’ineffabile in Ejzenštejn’ (‘Plastic Music’: Versions of the Ineffable in Eisenstein), in P.Montani (ed.), Sergej Ejzenštejn: Oltre il cinema (Venice: 1991), pp. 399–407.
90 NIN, pp. 219, 221.
91 See F.Albera, Eisenstein et le constructivisme russe (Lausanne: 1990), especially Ch. III.8, ‘Le psycho-ingénieur, le psycho-constructeur et la commande sociale’, pp. 193–4.
92 A.Blunt, Artistic Theory, p. 37.
93 The chapter in E’s memoirs entitled ‘How I Learned to Draw’ begins: ‘Let me start with the fact that I never learned to draw. But this is how I draw and why’, Memories, p. 39.
94 See, for example, NIN, pp. 185–90 (on Steinberg), pp. 266–8 (on Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty) and pp. 330–1 (on Hamlet’s ‘Do you see yonder cloud’); also Leyda (ed.), Eisenstein on Disney.
95 Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969), Austria-born director, best known for his lush eroticism and series of films starring Marlene Dietrich. Grigori Roshal (1899–1983) started his career with the Moscow Jewish Habimah theatre, but entered cinema in 1925, directing mainly musical and biographical films until 1965. E’s ‘automatic’ drawings figured largely in the scandal of his departure from Mexico, when a batch of erotic works consigned to Upton Sinclair was opened by US Customs.
96 J.von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (London: 1966), p. 45; G. Roshal, ‘Risunki S.M. Eizenshteina’ (S.M.Eisenstein’s Drawings), Iz istorii kino 9 (Moscow: 1973), pp. 39–48.
97 See Yu.Pimenov (ed.) S.Eizenshtein: Risunki (Moscow: 1961) for reproductions of the childhood and other drawings; also N.Kleiman, ‘Eisenstein’s Graphic Work’, in Christie and Elliott, pp. 11–17.
98 E sold topical cartoons to the Petrogradskaya gazeta and Satirikon. He recalled the circumstances and emotions vividly in ‘First Drawings’, Memories, pp. 51–5.
99 Seton, pp. 29–30.
100 Seton claims that E later said he planned to seek out Freud in Vienna. However, he volunteered for the Red Army in February 1918 and by 1919 had started amateur theatre work.
102 D.Elliott, ‘Taking a Line For a Walk’, in Christie and Elliott, p. 20.
103 ‘How I learned to Draw’, in Memories, pp. 42–5; see also R.Taylor’s fuller translation in Christie and Elliott, pp. 50–7.
104 Kleiman, ‘Eisenstein’s Graphic Work’, p. 14.
105 On some of the theoretical ideas about acting and physical expression current at the turn of the century, see M.Yampolsky, ‘Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor’, IFF, pp. 30–3. The definition of ‘typage’ is quoted by Kleiman from E’s Direction.
106 Kleiman, ‘Eisenstein’s Graphic Work’, p. 14.
107 The ‘gods’ sequence of October evokes a common graphic technique of illustrating the ‘evolutionary gradient’, here in reverse.
108 The Glass House seems to have been an architecturally inspired project, possibly influenced by contact with Burov on The General Line, which E revived in Hollywood after seeing an illustration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Glass Tower’ project. See EAW, p. 44.
109 A small selection of E’s theatre designs is included in Pimenov, Risunki, pp. 121–8.
110 Memories, pp. 44–5.
111 Seton, p. 195. The portrait is reproduced in I.Karetnikova and L.Steinmetz, Mexico According to Eisenstein (Albuquerque: 1991), p. ii.
112 Many of the titles of these are E’s own and in English. Examples are reproduced in Seton, Pimenov, Risunki and Karetnikova and Steinmetz, Mexico According to Eisenstein.
113 Did E know the ‘pataphysician’ Alfred Jarry’s ‘The Crucifixion Considered As a Downhill Bicycle Race’, which seems a possible inspiration for the Veronica series? Jarry casts Veronica as a press photographer. (‘La Passion considérée comme course de côté’, Le Canard Sauvage, 11–17 April 1903; reprinted in Oeuvres completes (Paris: 1927), pp. 420–2.)
114 N.Leskov, ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’, in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Other Stories, trans. D.McDuff (Harmondsworth: 1987). In Leskov’s story (which also provided the libretto for Shostakovich’s censored 1934 opera, later retitled Katerina Izmailova), the adulterous wife involves her lover in killing her husband.
115 There are similarities to the ‘new classicism’ of Léger and Picasso, as well as to Cocteau’s playfully anachronistic drawings and designs.
116 On E’s conception of ecstasy, see H.Lövgren, ‘Trauma and Ecstasy: Aesthetic Compounds in Dr Eisenstein’s Laboratory’, in L.Kleberg and Lövgren (eds), Eisenstein Revisited (Stockholm: 1987), pp. 93–111; also J.Aumont, Montage Eisenstein (Paris: 1979), trans. L.Hildreth, C.Penley and A.Ross (Bloomington, Ind. and London: 1987), pp. 57–65.
117 Seton, pp. 234–5.
118 Part of Freud’s controversial diagnosis of Leonardo as homosexual rested on an interpretation of the latter’s childhood memory of a vulture striking him with its tail on the mouth (a phantasy of fellatio). However it transpires that the German translation of Leonardo used by Freud was defective: ‘nibbio’ is in fact the word for ‘kite’ instead of vulture. S.Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci) (Vienna: 1910); trans, as Leonardo (Harmondsworth: 1963).
119 Ibid., p. 134.
120 See, for instance, T.Rayns, ‘Submitting to Sodomy: Propositions and Rhetorical Questions about an English Film-Maker [Jarman]’, Afterimage no. 12, Autumn 1985, p. 60; J.Babuscio, ‘Before Glasnost: The Life and Times of Sergei Eisenstein’, Gay Times, September 1988, pp. 28–31; also N. Almendros, ‘Fortune and Men’s Eyes’, July-August 1991, pp. 58–61. A report in the Arts Diary of The European, 26–8 October 1990 , p. 13, attributed to Jeanne Vronskaya, claimed that an article in a forthcoming issue of Kinovedcheskie zapiski by Judit Glizer would reveal E to have had a longstanding relationship with the actor Cherkassov, as well as relationships with many actresses. The article, however, does not make these claims.
122 Seton, p. 216.
123 Memories, p. 45.
124 Ibid., p. 50.
125 See Ch. 4 below, pp. 71–5.
126 Ibid., p. 73.
127 Ibid.
128 Leyda (ed.), Eisenstein on Disney, p. 69.
129 Ibid., p. 44.
130 Ibid., p. 2.
131 Ibid., p. 3.
132 Lövgren, ‘Trauma and Ecstasy’, p. 108.
133 Seton, p. 87.
134 Leyda (ed.), Eisenstein on Disney, p. 70.
135 ‘Foreword’, Memories, pp. 1–7.
136 Reproduced in EAW, p. 110.
137 S.Eisenstein, ‘The Embodiment of a Myth’, in J.Leyda (ed. and trans.), Film Essays and a Lecture (Princeton, NJ: 1982), p. 85.
138 On the influence of Theosophy on Russian Symbolism, see R.C.Williams, Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-garde, 1905–1925 (London: 1978), pp. 94, 104–6. See also Tsivian on E’s Symbolist inheritance, pp. 79–104 below.
139 Autobiographical note, written in 1939; trans, as Notes of a Film Director (New York: 1970), p. 61.
140 NIN, pp. 265ff. See also Yampolsky, Ch. 11 below.
141 ‘EX-TASIS’ is reproduced in NIN, p. 155; ‘Les Dons’ were shown in ‘Eisenstein: His Life and Work’.
142 The international conference ‘Sergej Ejzenštejn. Oltre il Cinema: Le Figure, Le Forme, I1 Senso dell’immagine’, organised by Pietro Montani, was held in October 1990 in Venice, under the auspices of the Biennale di Venezia, Settore Cinema e Televisione (for details of published proceedings, see note 89).
143 While working on Ivan E wrote: ‘The most important thing is to have the vision. The next is to grasp and hold it.’ ‘Notes from a Director’s Laboratory’, in Film Form, p. 261. The educational project ‘Have the Vision’ was organised by Oxford MoMA with Pegasus Theatre and Oxford Independent Video in July—August 1988.
144 Edmund Wilson adapted the motto given to Peter the Great in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman on Petersburg as a ‘window through to Europe’ for his collection of essays on Russian culture, A Window on Russia (New York: 1972).
145 Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia (New York: 1928); quoted in Seton, p. 103.
146 Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein (Bloomington, Ind. and London: 1987), pp. 65–72. Aumont notes that Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks appeared in 1929 and the first Russian translation of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature in 1935: both would strongly influence E’s philosophy.
147 ‘The Psychology of Art’, written in 1940, was first published in Psikhologiya protsessov khudozhestvennogo tvorchestva, ed. N.Kleiman and T.Drozhzhina (Leningrad: 1980). The quotation here is from A.Upchurch (ed. and trans.), The Psychology of Composition (Calcutta: 1987), p. 15.
148 Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), pioneering Russian Modernist poet, proclaimed a powerful vision of future harmony and international union in his writings from 1916 onwards. See Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, ed. C.Douglas, trans. P.Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass, and London: 1987), part 4, ‘Visions of the Future’, pp. 320ff.
149 On the dispute between Lenin and the ‘god-builders’ Bogdanov, Lunacharsky et al., see Williams, Artists in Revolution, Ch. 2, ‘From Positivism to Collectivism: Lunacharsky and Proletarian Culture’, pp. 23–58.
150 The ascetic and mystic Nikolai Fedorov (1828–1903), exponent of ‘the philosophy of the common task’ was an important influence on many Russian artists and philosophers of the Silver Age. See N.F.Fedorov, What Was Man Created For?, trans. E.Koutaissoff and M.Minto (Lausanne: 1990). See also I.Christie, ‘Down to Earth: Aelita Relocated’, in IFF, pp. 96–8.
151 Pushkin’s historical drama Boris Godunov, set in Russia’s ‘time of troubles’ around 1600, has attracted many differing interpretations, as well as posing problems of staging long considered insuperable. See also Ch. 7 below.
152 In a letter to Blake’s biographer Alexander Gilchrist, quoted in Kathleen Raine’s introduction to Blake, Poems and Prophecies, p. xi.
1 ‘Strekoza i muravei’ (The Ant and the Grasshopper), Lyudi odnogo fil’ma (People of One Film), IP 5, pp. 480–93.
2 No further biographical information on Sukhotsky has so far come to light (Eds).
3 ‘The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form’, 1925, translated in ESW 1, p. 64.
4 E used this analogy on a number of occasions, notably in the article cited above, p. 62.
5 Vladimir M.Bekhterev (1857–1927), Russian neuropathologist and psychologist who developed a theory of reflexology.
6 Written in 1922 and translated in ESW 1, pp. 29–32.
7 For example, by Mira Meilakh in the third chapter of her Izobrazitel’naya stilistika pozdnikh fil’mov Eizenshteina (Figurative Stylistics in Eisenstein’s Late Films) (Leningrad: 1971).
8 The Russian word igra can be translated either as ‘acting’ or ‘play’.
9 E was given Tieck’s Puss in Boots as a project assignment in late 1921.
10 A chapter of the Memoirs is entitled ‘Mi Tu’, after the name of the Litvinov’s dog, which E interprets as ‘Me too’, Memories, pp. 223–4.
11 The reference is to Blok’s poem ‘The Scythians’.
12 Nikolai N.Evreinov (1879–1953) was a leading figure in Russian theatre before the Revolution, who directed and filmed a mass re-enactment of the October Revolution in Petrograd in 1920. He emigrated to France in 1925.
13 The Exploits of Elaine (1915) was an American adventure serial starring Pearl White which achieved worldwide popularity. Earlier, Louis Feuillade’s fivepart Fantômas (1913), based on the monthly mystery novels by Souvestre and Allain, had scored a great success throughout Europe and especially in Russia.
14 See Eisenstein, ‘On the Detective Story’, in The Psychology of Composition (Calcutta: 1987), which Alan Upchurch, as editor and translator, has provided with Fantômas illustrations, and the visual comparison between Juve contre Fantômas and The Strike.
15 It begins differently in the version published in Montagu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood (Berlin, GDR: 1968).
16 Chapayev (1934) was directed by Sergei and Georgy Vasiliev, who had studied with E at GTK. In it the White forces’ ‘psychological attack’ against the Red partisans was conducted with parade-ground precision, recalling the troops’ implacable descent of the Odessa Steps.
17 E undertook the production of Wagner’s Die Walküre after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. The première at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, took place on 21 November 1940.
19 The Herbert Marshall translation (NIN) is of an early compilation of this text, made for the Selected Works (IP).
20 These have not yet been published. However in October 1991, the USSR Film-makers’ Union, as the body responsible for Eisenstein’s legacy, enabled I.A.Aksenov’s book Sergei Eizenshtein: portret khudozhnika (Sergei Eisenstein: Portrait of the Artist) to appear. It has been withdrawn from publication in 1935.
21 A draft constitution for an international Eisenstein Society, discussed at Oxford in 1988, was adopted by participants at the 1990 Venice conference. Its secretariat rests provisionally with François Albera at the University of Lausanne.
1 See the bibliography of Leyda’s published writings compiled by John Hagan in October 11, Winter 1979, pp. 154–65. See also Annette Michelson’s introduction to the same issue, which comments further on the historical significance of Leyda’s work.
2 This paper results from research for a comprehensive exhibition of Leyda’s photographic work held from 29 January to 27 February 1988, at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where Leyda taught from 1973 until his death. See the authors’ catalogue for the exhibition: Jay Leyda: A Life’s Work (New York: 1988).
3 For a useful historiographical overview, see: I.Christie’s introduction to FF, pp. 1–17.
4 EAW includes a valuable summary of Leyda’s Bezhin Meadow experience and reproduces a number of his production stills as illustrations.
5 Jay Leyda/Si-Lan Chen Papers, Tamiment Institute Library, New York University.
6 Leyda’s short stories and poems were published in magazines such as Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms no. 8, Spring 1930, pp. 3–4; Pagany: A Native Quarterly no. 3, July-September 1932, pp. 104–5, and no. 4, October 1932-March 1933, pp. 99–100.
7 Leyda’s portraits (unattributed) may be found in Arts Weekly: The News Magazine of the Arts, 11 March-7 May, 1932.
8 J.Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: 1977).
9 W.Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton: 1981), pp. 3–64; R. Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States. 1930–1942 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: 1982), pp. 29–70.
10 Much of the biographical information in this essay derives from several interviews with Leyda conducted by the authors in 1986–7.
11 Jay Leyda Collection, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
12 Leyda Collection.
13 Leyda/Chen Papers.
14 Leyda edited a special Soviet issue, New Theatre no. 2, January 1935, as well as ‘Soviet Theatre Speaks for Itself, in Theatre Arts Monthly no. 20, September 1936. Both issues contained articles by E.
15 Alexander, Film on the Left, pp. 50–2; Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, pp. 56–8.
16 Leyda/Chen Papers.
17 Leyda/Chen Papers; letter from Ivens to Elena Pinto Simon, May 1988.
18 Letter from Leyda to E, January 1935, Leyda/Chen Papers.
19 See B.Amengual, Que Viva Eisenstein! (Paris: 1980), pp. 290–306. The circumstances surrounding the making and banning of Bezhin Meadow are the subject of the authors’ From the Storehouse of Creation (Princeton: forthcoming).
20 See B.Shumyatsky, “The Film Bezhin Meadow”, Pravda, 19 March 1937; translated in FF, pp. 378–81. See also E’s self-criticism, ‘The Mistakes of Bezhin Meadow’, reprinted in Seton, pp. 372–7.
21 Leyda, pp. 327–34.
22 J.Leyda, ‘Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow’, Sight and Sound vol. 28, no. 2, Spring 1959, pp. 74–7.
23 Leyda/Chen Papers.
24 Bezhin Meadow took its title from and was based partly on Turgenev’s story ‘Bezhin Lea’, one of the Sketches from a Hunter’s Album collected in 1852. The story opens with a detailed description of the sky and light on a summer’s day.
25 Leyda acted as an intermediary between Alfred Barr and Rodchenko, helping Barr to acquire material for the Museum of Modern Art. See letter from Barr to Leyda, 14 January 1936, Leyda/Chen Papers.
26 Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery, Appendix.
27 Leyda’s diary is used in the following: ‘Eisenstein Directs the Russian Child’, World Film News and Television Progress no. 1, April 1936, p. 27; ‘Eisenstein’s First Sound Film’, unpublished MS (1936), Leyda Collection, NYU; Seton, pp. 354–7; Leyda, ‘Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow; Leyda, Kino, pp. 327–34; EAW, pp. 84–95.
28 H.Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism (New York: 1984); I.Howe and L.Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (New York: 1974).
29 A.W.Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: 1987), pp. 101–255.
30 Reprinted as ‘Soviet Cinema, 1930–1940, A History’, in D.Macdonald, On Movies (New York: 1981), pp. 192–248.
31 Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, pp. 193–235.
32 Letter from Leyda to Macdonald appeared in Partisan Review, no. 5, August —September 1938, p. 71.
33 S.Stern, ‘Film Library Notes Build “CP Liberators” Myth’, New Leader, 23 March 1940.
1 This chapter stems from ongoing research on a larger project dealing with European avant-garde cinema styles of the 1918–33 period; thus it presents only some preliminary conclusions on this topic.
2 A contemporary Soviet trade paper, Kinogazeta, published figures showing that —contrary to the myth—Potemkin was actually slightly more popular than the Douglas Fairbanks film, Robin Hood, at least in Moscow. See ‘The Box-Office Decides’, in H.Marshall (ed.), The Battleship Potemkin (New York: 1978), p. 101.
3 ‘Was die L.B.B.erzählt’ (What L.B.B. Recounts), Lichtbildbühne vol. 15, no. 3, 29 July 1922, p. 21.
4 Ad, Wiking, Lichtbildbühne vol. 16, no. 3, 20 January 1922, p. 34; H. Fr., ‘Der erste Russenfilm’ (The First Russian Film), Lichtbildbühne vol. 16, no. 10, 10 March 1923, p. 17.
5 ‘Ein neuer russicher Kunstlerfilm’ (A New Russian Art Film), Lichtbildbühne vol. 19, no. 32, 8 February 1926, p. 3; ‘Aelita (Der Flug zum Mars)’ (Aelita (The Flight to Mars)), Lichtbildbühne vol. 19, no. 49, 29 February 1926, p. 14; ‘Der provinzielle Postmeister’ (The Provincial Postmaster (see below n. 15)), Lichtbildbühne vol. 19, no. 85, 10 April 1926, p. 12.
6 Marshall, Potemkin, pp. 119–21.
7 ‘Panzerkreuzer Potemkin’ (The Battleship Potemkin), Lichtbildbühne vol. 19, no. 118, 19 May 1926, p. 3.
8 J.Tarvel, ‘Un film révolutionnaire a révolutionné Berlin’, Comædia no. 4904, 31 May 1926, p. 1.
9 Jahrbuch der Filmindustrie vol. 2, 1923–5 (Berlin: 1926), n. p.; A.Jason, ‘Zahlen sehen uns an’ (The Figures Show Us), 25 Jahre Kinematograph (Berlin: 1931), p. 69.
10 ‘Provinzerfolge des Potemkin’ (Potemkin’s Provincial Success), Lichtbildbühne vol. 19, no. 129, 1 June 1926, p. 3.
11 H.Fraenkel, ‘Latest from Germany’, The Bioscope no. 1030, 8 July 1926, p. 50.
12 J.Tarvel, ‘Le film de l’année’ (The Film of the Year), Comædia no. 5346, 26 August 1927, p. 3.
13 Advertisement by Prometheus, Lichtbildbühne vol. 19, no. 211, 4 September 1926, p. 1.
14 ‘Panzerkreuzer Potemkin und seine Einnahmen’ (The Battleship Potemkin and Its Receipts), Lichtbildbühne vol. 19, no. 157, 3 July 1926, p. 7. See also Marshall, Potemkin p. 104.
15 The Station Master’s enormous success abroad (where it was generally known as The Postmaster) may have been due partly to the fact that it was also one of the least objectionable Soviet films to foreign censors; it was frequently passed in countries that banned virtually all other Soviet films. It may also have gained prestige from being a Pushkin adaptation.
16 ‘Russlands Aussenhandel’ (Russia’s Foreign Trade), Lichtbildbühne vol. 20, no. 253, 22 October 1927, p. 14; ‘Die Verbreitung des Sowjet-Films’ (The Distribution of Soviet Film), Lichtbildbühne vol. 21, no. 115, 12 May 1928, p. 22.
17 A study of Soviet production published in Lichtbildbühne in late 1926 suggests a similar figure; it says that Sovkino’s gross income from 1 March 1925 to 1 March 1926 was ten million roubles, of which about one million was profit. See ‘Sieg der Qualität’ (Victory for Quality), Lichtbildbühne vol. 19, no. 265, 6 November 1926, p. 36.
18 ‘Soviet Russia is Primitive in Theatres’, Variety vol. 90, no. 13, 11 April 1928, p. 20.
19 ‘Sieg der Qualität’, p. 36.
20 ‘Russischer Optimismus’ (Russian Optimism), Lichtbildbühne vol. 20, no. 15, 18 January 1927, n. p.
21 A.Ivanowsky, ‘La production en Russie soviétique’, Comædia no. 5127, 14 January 1927, p. 3.
22 ‘Die Russische Filmproduktion’, Lichtbildbühne vol. 20, no. 160, 6 July 1927, n.p.
23 H.Fraenkel, ‘First Parufamet Production’, The Bioscope no. 1065, 10 March 1927, p. 36; ‘Russian Films Flood Germany’, Variety vol. 86, no. 10, 23 March 1927, p. 8; ‘Campaign Against Russian Films’, New York Times, 6 March 1927, sec. 2, p. 9.
24 Advertisement by Prometheus, Film-Kurier vol. 10, no. 102, 30 April 1928, n.p.
25 ‘Die Todesbarke’ (The Bay of Death), Lichtbildbühne vol. 20, no. 94, 20 April 1927, n. p.
26 Letter [from Lt. Col. Frederick L. Herron?], Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (New York City) to William R.Castle, Jr (Chief of Western European Division, Dept. of State), dated 28 June 1926 (MPPDA files, NYC). My thanks to Richard Maltby and Ruth Vasey for this reference.
27 ‘Excellent Idea of Foreign Legion in “Beau Geste”—A Russian Film’, New York Times, 5 September 1926, p. 1.
28 V.Petrić, ‘Soviet Revolutionary Films in America (1926–35)’, (unpublished Ph.D.dissertation, New York University, 1973), vol. 1, p. 37;’ “Potemkin” Set Dec. 4’, Moving Picture World vol. 83, no. 5, 29 November 1926, p. 1.
29 S.Smith, ‘“Potemkin”…the Unique Mob Picture’, Moving Picture World vol. 83, no. 77, 11 December 1926, p. 420.
30 ‘“Potemkin”’s New Manager’, Variety vol. 85, no. 12, 5 January 1927, p. 12. This brief article is quoted here in its entirety.
31 ‘Emissary Sees Market For Our Films in Russia’, New York Times, 19 December 1926, sec. 7, p. 7.
32 Petrić, ‘Soviet Revolutionary Films in America’, pp. 511, 513; ‘Foreign Films in the United States’, Film Daily Year Book no. 10, 1928, pp. 511–12.
33 ‘Technical Assistance Contract for the Soviet Cinema Industry’, Economic Review of the Soviet Union vol. 5, no. 16–17, 1 September 1930, p. 359.
34 S.Gould, ‘The Little Theatre Movement in the Cinema’, National Board of Review Magazine vol. 1, no. 5, September-October 1926, p. 4.
35 ‘“Potemkin” in Washington; Jazz Week, $17,500’, Variety vol. 86, no. 13, 13 August 1927, p. 8.
36 ‘Red Hot Loop; Too Hot For Biz; “Glory” Did Best—Broke Record’, Variety vol. 88, no. 10, 21 September 1927, p. 8.
37 ‘New and Old Films Whoop Up Broadway During Slow Week’, Variety vol. 88, no. 11, 28 September 1927, p. 7.
38 ‘Heat and Holiday Jammed Up B’Way Film Houses—Six Specials Remain’, Variety vol. 91, no. 13, 11 July 1928, p. 9; ‘Silent “Racket” Beats Sounded “Warming Up” on Day and Date; “Street Angel” $366,000 in 3 Wks’, Variety vol. 92, no. 4, 8 August 1928, p. 9.
39 R.Van Dyke, ‘Paragraphs Pertaining to Players and Pictures’, Cinema Art no. 7, July 1927, p. 42.
40 C.Stafford, ‘Paragraphs Pertaining to Players and Pictures’, Cinema Art no. 7, November 1927, p. 39.
41 ‘Ten Days That Shook the World’, Variety vol. 93, no. 4, 7 November 1928, p. 24.
42 ‘Russian’s Reception’, Variety vol. 93, no. 7, 28 November 1928, p. 19.
43 ‘15 B’way Film Houses Did $1,100,000 During Two-Week Holiday Period’, Variety vol. 93, no. 13, 9 January 1929, p. 7.
44 ‘“Potemkin” Surprise, $10,000 in Balto.’, Variety vol. 87, no. 6, 25 May 1927, p. 6.
45 ‘Kino von heute!’ (Today’s Cinema!), Film-Kurier vol. 10, no. 81, 3 April 1928, n.p.
46 See, for example, ‘Mitteilungen des Volksverbandes für Filmkunst’ (Reports of the People’s League for Film Art), Film und Volk vol. 2, no. 6, July 1929, p. 16.
47 ‘Die Haager Ausstellung’ (The Hague Exhibition), Lichtildbühne vol. 21, no. 107, 3 May 1928, p. 4.
48 ‘Russian Classics in 16mm’, Cinema Quarterly vol. 2, no. 4, Summer 1934, p. 262; also KINO News, Winter 1935, n. p.
49 ‘Comment’, Film Art vol. 1, no. 3, Spring 1934, p. 34; ‘Comment’, Film Art vol. 2, no. 6, Autumn 1935, p. 90.
50 R.Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930-1942 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: 1982.), p. 45
1 Seton, pp. 128–30.
2 ESW 1, pp. 113–14; FF, pp. 234–5.
3 ESW 1, pp. 115–22, 138–50 and 181–94 respectively.
4 See pp. 184–8.
5 ESW 1, pp. 68–9 and 172.
6 ESW 1, pp. 179–80 and 193.
7 ESW 1, pp. 185–94.
8 ESW 2, pp. 371–99.
1 First published as ‘Nachahmung als Beherrschung’, Film und Fernsehen (Berlin, GDR: 1988) vol. 1, pp. 34-7.
2 In the first draft: ‘According to Aristotle, the essence of art.’
3 A mask of Uzume was one of the images in the sequence of different deities in October. In fact Uzume was not herself the sun goddess but the goddess whose dancing initially lured the sun goddess Amaterasu out of her dark cave.
4 This is in fact the second commandment, after ‘Thou shall have no other gods before me’. The full version in Exodus, 20, vv. 4-5 is: ‘4. Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth: 5. Thou shall not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.’
5 In the first draft this paragraph read:
Imitation is not the last word. We can imilate form or principle. In art we have until now imitated form. We are the cannibals. In cannibalism we have to deal with the lileral meaning of words: “Man is what he eals.” [see n. 6 below] He eals his own likeness in order to live. That is how it has remained with the animal—the pig.
6 There is a play on words in the original German: ‘Der Mensch ist, was er isst.’
7 In the first draft this paragraph read: ‘Saturn consumes his own children and that is a symbol of elernily and immortality.’
8 Eugen Steinach (1861-1944), Austrian physiologist and biologist, aulhor of Verjüngung durch experimented Neubelebung der älternden Pubertätsdrüse (Rejuvenation through the Experimenlal Revivification of the Ageing Pubertal Gland) (Berlin: 1920). Voronlsov was a Russian doctor of medicine living in Paris who conducled similar experiments in rejuvenalion.
9 Gilles de Retz (1400–40), French alchemist who killed around three hundred children in his search for gold and the elixir of life and was eventually hanged. He served as the model for Duke Bluebeard.
10 In the first draft: ‘The whole progress of science follows the path from cannibalism, from mythic symbolism and story-telling to the principle of analysis.’
11 Liane Haid (1897–?), Austrian stage and screen actress.
12 The Swiss Charles Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (1887–1966), and the Germans Walter Gropius (1887–1969) and Bruno Taut (1880–1938) were among the leading European architects of the early twentieth century.
13 The reference is to Eduard Fuchs, Das erotische Element In der Karikatur: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit (The Erotic Element in Caricature: An Essay on the History of Public Morality) (Berlin: 1904).
14 Madame Dubarry (1919, dir. Ernst Lubitsch) and Lady Hamilton (1922, dir. Richard Oswald) were popular German films. Tom Mix (1880–1940) starred in a number of early Hollywood westerns.
15 A reference to the allusions in ‘The Montage of Attractions’, written in 1923 and translated in ESW 1, pp. 33–8.
16 In the first draft:
Fiction film. With the actor as the object of imitation. Interpretation. Human fate. The importance, not of precedents, but of emotional ideological results. Man as means. That can however also be different. Man. Mass. Universe. The bridge is the imitation of rounded form. We touch it with our hands. Or with our eyes. We repeat form.
17 This particular book, in the planning stage in 1929, never came to fruition.
18 The German term Sachlichkeit could here refer to the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity movement of the 1920s.
19 Bartolomeo (also known as Varfolomei) Rastelli (1700–71) was the leading Baroque architect in eighteenth-century Russia. Among his most important buildings were the Winter Palace in St Petersburg and the palace at Tsarskoe Selo.
20 The ‘film of fact’ refers to Dziga Vertov’s (1896–1954) characterisation of his own approach to cinema. ‘“Factual” play’ is Vertov’s description of E’s approach, while ‘play with facts’ is E’s own characterisation of his own work, a ‘montage of visible events’.
1 First published as ‘Neskol’ko lichnykh voobrazhenii o tabu’ in ‘Eizenshteinovskie chteniya’ (Eisenstein readings), Kinovedcheskie zapiski no. 6 (Moscow: 1990), pp. 130–2.
1 A.Piotrovskii, ‘Oktyabr’ dolzhen byt’ peremontirovan!’ (October Must Be Re-Edited!), Zhizn’ iskusstva no. 13, 27 March 1928, p. 12; translated in FF, p. 216.
2 IP 6, pp. 65–86.
3 Ibid., p. 85.
4 IP 4, p. 726.
5 M.C.Ropars-Wuilleumier, ‘La Fonction de la métaphore dans Octobre d’Eisenstein’, (The Function of Metaphor in Eisenstein’s October) Littérature no. 11, 1973, p. 115.
6 A.Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Collected Works in Six Volumes) (Leningrad: 1980-), vol. 3, p. 53.
7 Myriam Tsikounas has pointed out that Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in October forms a discursive symmetry to the sequence of the falling monument. See p.
8 The metaphor tempted a later critic to explain it psychoanalytically: D. Fernandez, Eisenstein (Paris: 1975), p. 168. There is no way to avoid psychoanalytical vocabulary when analysing E’s films but it is doubtful whether it gives one real access to E’s subconscious mind. E was well read in Freud and his followers and, if some of his sequences seem to demand a psychoanalytical reading, it is often because E wanted them to do so. He was also fond of providing details of his own life with a Freudian subtext, which has misled some simple-minded biographers. E’s psychoanalysis is not so much a manifestation of the subconscious as a method of textual construction.
9 Blok, Sobranie sochinennii v shesti tomakh, p. 13.
10 IP 1, p. 309; translated in Memories, p. 77.
11 IP 1, p. 382; Memories, p. 130.
12 If we ignore as general a matrix as, for example, Gogol’s The Overcoat, the symbol of empty clothes is quite new to Russian literature. In Blok’s case it may be said to have a cinematic origin. The famous gag in early film (when one person literally beats another out of his clothes so that that person disappears and the clothes remain) was used by Chaplin (The Tramp) and André Deed (Le Roi de boxe and elsewhere). The gag first appeared in Méliès’s La Boîte a malice and was extensively used in his films around the time when Blok wrote his play. Méliés grew tired of it in 1908 after Le Conseil du Pipelet ou le tour a la foire. Blok was a film addict and his overtly farcical The Fairground Booth would be the appropriate play for cinematic borrowings. If this is the case, the motif of empty suits would have made a complete circle from film to stage and back again to E’s October.
13 Directional mismatches in this sequence are not meant to form the stylistically functional ‘conflict’ cuts that are characteristic of E’s editing from The Strike to The General Line. As for eye-line mismatches, it is interesting to note that in the latest (sonorised) version of October, re-edited in 1967 by Alexandrov, we can trace an effort to ‘correct’ these by regluing them base to emulsion. This ruse is betrayed by an inscription on a sailor’s hat, which is reversed by the procedure.
14 The objection may be made that location shooting in the Winter Palace might have obstructed access to the camera angles required by continuity editing. It is not generally known that many of the interior scenes in October were not shot on location. Special sets, including those for the Tsarina’s bedchamber, her prayer-room, wine cellars, the trunk-room and others, were built in a Leningrad film studio and real objects from the Winter Palace museum were brought to the studio to furnish the sets. See Kino (Leningrad), 28 June 1927.
15 B.Tomashevsky, ‘Foolish Wives’, Zhizn’ iskusstva no. 10, 1924, p. 16.
16 Yu.Krasovskii, ‘Kak sozdavalsya fil’m Oktyabr’’ (How the Film October Was Made), in lz istorii kino 6 (Moscow: 1965), p. 47.
17 F.Albera, ‘Stuttgart: Dramatique de la forme cinématographique: S.M. Eisenstein et le constructivisme russe’ (Stuttgart: The Drama of Cinematographic Form. S.M.Eisenstein and Russian Constructivism) (unpublished doctoral thesis); and F.Albera, Eisenstein et le constructivisme russe (Lausanne: 1990). See also Ch. 13 below.
18 The decapitation/castration metaphor was already latent in the morbid ‘widow’ name for the guillotine used in the days of the French Revolution. E was fascinated by this name and by the mechanism itself. A passage in his memoirs referring to the period of Kerensky’s rule in 1917 helps one also understand the opening sequence of October with its ‘executed’ monument:
Kerensky was thundering against those who wanted to see a guillotine on Znamensky Square. (A policy that I considered a direct attack against me.) How many times, walking past the memorial to Alexander III, had I mentally measured ‘the Widow’—the machine of Dr Guillotin—for its granite base? I wanted dreadfully to be a part of history! And what history could there be without the guillotine?
(IP 1, p. 273; Memories, p. 51)
19 Novyi Lef no. 4, 1928, p. 31; translated in FF, p. 230.
20 ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’ in Film Form, p. 56; translated as ‘The Dramaturgy of Film Form’ in ESW 1, p. 174.
21 G.K.Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (Harmondsworth: 1976), pp. 64–5.
22 A.Bely, Petersburg (Leningrad: 1981), p. 501.
23 D.Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: 1985), p. 239.
24 S.Tret’yakov, ‘Oktyabr’ minus Bronenosets Potemkin’ (October Minus The Battleship Potemkin), Sovetskoe kino no. 2–3, 1928, p. 17; reprinted in Iskusstvo kino no. 11, November 1987, pp. 103–6.
25 Novyi Lef no. 4, 1928, p. 33; FF, p. 230.
26 IP 6, p. 428.
27 A.Suslov, Zimnii dvorets 1754–1927: Istoricheskii ocherk (The Winter Palace, 1754–1927: A Historical Essay) (Leningrad: 1928), p. 62.
28 N.Burch, ‘Film’s Institutional Mode of Representation and the Soviet Response’, October no. 11, 1979, p. 90.
29 B.Arvatov, ‘Teatral’naya parfyumeriya i levoe neprilichie’ (Theatrical Perfumery and Left-Wing Indecency), Zrelishcha no. 31–2, 1923, p. 7. Meyerhold’s production dated from 1923 but Terentiev’s was staged in April 1927 and caused a public scandal. It would therefore have been freshest in Eisenstein’s mind during the making of October.
30 L.Reisner, ‘V Zimnem dvortse’ (In the Winter Palace), Novaya zhizn’, 11 November 1917.
31 A.Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Collected Works), (Moscow: 1937–9), vol. 2, poem 227.
32 S.Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, in October: The First Decade, 1976–1986 (Cambridge, Mass, and London: 1987), p. 128.
33 Ibid., p. 127.
34 Bely, Petersburg, p. 118. This passage has, perhaps not surprisingly, been glossed over in the published English translation by R.A.Maguire and J.E. Malmstad, Petersburg (Harmondsworth, 1983), where it should appear on p. 79.
35 Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a film of Capital’ p. 129.
36 The typescript is in the Eisenstein Museum in Moscow.
37 A Susan Sontag Reader (New York, 1982), p. 417.
38 S.Eizenshtein, ‘Vse my rabotaem na odnu i tu zhe auditoriyu’ (We Are All Working on the Same Audience) (ed. N.Kleiman and Yu.Tsivian), Iskusstvo kino no. 1, January 1988, p. 78.
39 This typescript is held in the Janis Rainis Museum of Art and Literature in Riga (EizR51 inv. No. 180123). / / are Eisenstein’s bracket signs; ( ) are mine.
40 This probably refers to the passage in the Winter Palace known as the Dark Corridor, rather than to just any dark corridor.
41 The typescript is defective at this point.
42 There are no script lines numbered 432–3.
43 Probably a reference to one of the Beauvais tapestries in the Winter Palace.
44 The cuff is here a metonym for Lenin. Earlier in the script the appearance of Lenin’s cuff among the bayonets was evidently meant to signify the leading role of the intelligentsia in the Revolution. The omission of the shot from the final version of the film was probably due to the introduction of a more official political doctrine that avoided subjecting Lenin to any sociological analysis.
45 There is a similar line in another version of the script:
A gloomy person gets into his car and raises his collar/THE CHAIRMAN OF THE R. S. D. L. P.—CHKHEIDZE /
1 Film Form, pp. 7, 8.
2 Lef no. 3, 1923, pp. 70–5; translated in ESW 1, pp. 33–8.
3 Can You Hear Me, Moscow? and Gas Masks are published in S.M.Tretyakov, Slyshish’, Moskva?! (Moscow: 1966).
4 IP 1, p. 34.
5 Ibid.
6 From Rabochaya gazeta, 22 April 1923; quoted in Seton, pp. 62–3.
7 Film Form, p. 17.
8 Tretyakov, Slyshish', Moskva?! p. 10.
9 Ibid., p. 12.
10 Stumm is the German word for ‘dumb’.
11 Ibid., p. 26.
12 Leyda, pp. 273, 293, 310.
13 S.Tretyakov, ‘Tekst i rechmontazh’ (Text and Speech Montage), Zrelishcha, no date; Central State Archive of Literature and Art (TsGALI), Moscow, 963/1/335, pp. 34–5.
14 Ibid.
16 H.Witt, Brecht As They Knew Him (London: 1974), p. 72.
17 B.Brecht, ‘Is The People Infallible?’, in Poems (London: 1976), p. 331.
18 J.Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre (London: 1973), p. 65.
19 Ibid., pp. 91–9.
20 Bernhard Reich, quoted in J.Fuegi, Bertolt Brecht: Chaos According to Plan (Cambridge: 1987), p. 22.
21 Ibid., p. 29.
22 K.Volker, Brecht (London: 1979), p. 72.
23 Witt, Brecht As They Knew Him, p. 41.
24 Asja Lacis, quoted in W.Benjamin, Moscow Diary, (Cambridge, Mass.: 1986), p. 145.
25 Barna, p. 109.
26 J.Willett, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (London: 1959), p. 126.
27 L.Kleberg and H.Lövgren (eds), Eisenstein Revisited (Stockholm: 1987), p. 63.
1 The sheet is reproduced in EAW, p. 105.
2 See N.Kleiman,‘…Nachnem s Pushkina’, Iskusstvo kino no. 2, 1987, p. 65.
3 Primary sources for my discussion are the first published reconstruction ‘The Colour Elaboration of the Film The Love of a Poet’, IP 3, pp. 492–9; ‘S. Eizenshtein’s Shooting Script of a Scene from Boris Godunov’, Iskusstvo kino no. 3, 1959, pp. 111–30; ‘Pushkin’s Colour Biography’, which is a later, more complete and annotated reconstruction of E’s handwritten notes, published in Voprosy literatury no. 10, 1971, pp. 186–92; and E’s unposted letter to Yuri Tynyanov, in G. Pomerantseva (ed.), Yuri Tynyanov, Pisatel i uchenyi (Moscow: 1966), pp. 176–81. A complete presentation of the material relating to E’s Pushkin project was promised (IP 3, p. 650) for the sixth volume of the selected works but did not appear in it.
4 I.Veissfeld [Vaisfeld], ‘Mon dernier entretien avec Eisenstein’, Cahiers du cinema no. 208, January 1968, p. 21.
5 ‘Problema sovetskogo istoricheskogo filma’, IP 5, pp. 110–29.
6 R.Jakobson, Pushkin and his Sculptural Myth (The Hague/Paris: 1975), pp. 1–45.
7 Ibid., p. 5.
8 IP 3 p. 492.
9 Pomerantseva, p. 177.
10 IP, ibid.
11 A.Bely, Masterstvo Gogolya (Moscow: 1934).
12 Another writer with an interesting perspective on Pushkin and colour at this time was Marina Tsvetaeva. Her My Pushkin, published abroad in 1937, develops the symbolism of black and white in a way that is sometimes strikingly similar to E’s (cf. Voprosy literatury no. 10, 1971, pp. 187–8). There is however no evidence that E ever came into contact with Tsvetaeva’s essay.
13 Pomerantseva, p. 177.
14 Voprosy literatury, p. 188.
15 Ibid., p. 189.
16 Ibid.
17 Cf.Pomerantseva, p. 177.
18 IP 3 p. 493.
19 Voprosy literatury, p. 190.
20 Iskusstvo kino no. 3, 1959, p. 130.
21 Voprosy literatury, ibid.
22 Quoted in Voprosy literatury, p. 187.
23 Ibid., p. 191.
24 IP 3 pp. 494–5; EAW, p. 121.
25 IP 3 p. 499.
26 Pomerantseva, p. 178.
27 Y.Tynyanov, Pushkin i ego sovremenniki (Moscow: 1969), pp. 209–33; the essay was first published in 1939.
28 For a more sober evaluation of this relationship, see Y.Lotman, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (Leningrad: 1983), p. 28.
29 Pomerantseva, p. 178. E then relates his observations of Chaplin’s escapades in Hollywood, particularly his infatuation with Marion Davies, who ‘belonged to the newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst’. E claims that Hearst represented the same kind of ‘father figure’ as Karamzin did in relation to Pushkin, and implies that such triangular relationships as Hearst/Davies/Chaplin and Karamzin/Karamzina/Pushkin exemplify a psychological schema prevalent in Pushkin’s work.
30 Veissfeld, pp. 19–21.
31 Pomerantseva, p. 179.
32 Veissfeld, p. 19.
33 Tynyanov, p. 232.
34 We may also wonder if the same prudishness played a part in E’s curious omission of several lines from Boris’ monologue in the script. The ‘cut’, as E calls it, eliminates the following lines:
…Is this not
What happens when we’re young?
We fall in love and thirst for
Love’s pleasure, but as soon as we’ve appeased
The hunger of the heart with momentary possession
We cool, grow bored, and languish…
(C.Emerson, trans. Boris Godunov (Bloomington: 1987), p. 113)
This expression of ‘post-coital depression’ would seem an adequate illustration of the disillusion suffered by the Pushkin of the ‘nameless love’ thesis. E nevertheless eliminates the lines and explains why:
Not remembering the existence of these lines, I had earlier planned to make the length of the path through the empty cathedral correspond to the space between ‘my’ and ‘in vain’. In such a path the melody of these lines is to be found, but I removed the words since they fall outside the direct acting treatment of the scene (if you like—a certain primitivisation is unavoidable in film).
(Iskusstvo kino, no. 3, 1959, p. 115)
E thus first forgets and then eliminates these lines in order to replace them with the actor’s movement! Although it could be argued that the lines are inappropriate for the sacred setting E gives the monologue, the director’s forgetting just these lines smacks of suppression, of an effort to adjust the image of Boris and, indirectly, of Pushkin to fit the romantic idea of the ‘nameless love’.
35 Jakobson, p. 15.
36 Quoted in Jakobson, p. 14.
37 Ibid., p. 11.
38 Ibid., pp. 4–6.
39 H.Marshall, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies (London: 1983), pp. 228–9.
40 Iskusstvo kino no. 2, 1987, p. 74.
2 See, for instance, IP 3, p. 139 and IP 5, p. 405.
3 Aksenov’s 1935 book on E has recently been published. See Ch. 1 n. 20 above.
4 In EAW, pp. 7–9.
5 Barna, p. 143.
6 IP l, pp. 193–4.
7 IP 4, p. 610.
8 IP 6, p. 548.
9 Y.Tynyanov, Sbornik (Moscow: 1966), pp. 177–8.
10 IP 6, p. 16.
11 IP 4, p. 240.
12 IP 4, p. 234.
13 IP 4, pp. 260f.
14 IP 4, p. 231.
15 IP 4, p. 259.
17 From E’s notes, out of which Naum Kleiman is reconstructing Method.
18 IP 3, p. 137.
19 In the same unpublished note from 1943 on Romeo and Juliet.
20 IP 3, p. 139.
21 Published in 1935.
23 Kindly supplied by Naum Kleiman.
1 Although mise-en-scène is generally rendered as ‘direction’ elsewhere in this book, it has been retained here since its etymology and associations are central to Khopkar’s purpose [Eds].
2 Ritwik Ghatak (1925–75), radical Bengali film director.
3 Nizhny, p. 168.
4 Leyda noted: ‘The only fault that I can find with Nizhny’s usually wise transformations of stenogram into book is that E sounds here more like a lecturer than he did actually.’ See also, p. 141.
5 IP 2, p. 338 (all translations by the author, unless otherwise stated).
6 Film Form, pp. 144–5.
7 Ibid., p. 3.
8 See M.Yampolsky, ‘Kuleshov and the New Anthropology of the Actor’, in R.Taylor and I.Christie (eds), Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London and New York: 1991), pp. 31–50.
9 ‘Art of the Cinema’, in R.Levaco (ed. and trans.), Kuleshov on Film (Berkeley, Calif.: 1974), p. 55.
10 Ibid., p. 56.
11 V.E.Meyerkhol’d, ‘Odinochestvo Stanislavskogo’ (The Solitude of Stanislavsky), Vestnik teatra no. 89–90, 1921, pp. 2–3; translated in E.Braun (ed. and trans.), Meyerhold on Theatre (London and New York: 1977), p. 179.
12 IP 2, p. 458.
13 IP 4, p. 751.
14 Ibid.
15 ‘Uber die Schwebetendenz’ (The Floating Tendency), Sovetskoe Iskusstvo no. 11, 1985.
16 ‘Kupal’shchitsy Degasa’ (Degas’s Les Baigneuses), unpublished notes from E’s diaries kindly made available to the author by Naum Kleiman.
17 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in W.Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. H. Arendt and trans. H.Zorn) (New York: 1968), p. 257.
18 L.K.Kozlov and N.I.Kleiman (eds), Iz tvorcheskogo naslediya S.M. Eizenshteina, Materialy i soobshcheniya (From S.M.Eisenstein’s Creative Legacy: Materials and Information) (Moscow: 1985), pp. 6–36; trans, in ESW 1, pp. 39–58.
19 The Psychology of Composition (Calcutta: 1987) p. 10.
20 EAW, p. 128.
21 ‘Uber die Schwebetendenz’; ‘Kupal’shchitsy Degasa’.
22 ‘Uber die Schwebetendenz’.
23 S.Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) (trans. J.Strachey) (Harmondsworth: 1976), pp. 516–17.
24 Ibid., p. 518.
25 Schriften vol. 4, p. 257.
26 S.M.Eisenstein, Cinématisme: Peinture et cinema (ed. F.Albera) (Brussels: 1980), p. 249.
27 EAW, p. 131.
28 See A.Bird, A History of Russian Painting (Oxford: 1987), p. 19:
From the end of the fourteenth century…we find in the Muscovite state a whole screen of icons extending high above the sanctuary doors and offering a kind of simple encyclopedia of Christian belief.… The iconostasis became a vital bridge between heaven and earth. [Eds]
29 IP 4, pp. 717–38; also in Le Mouvement de l’art (ed. F.Albera and N.Kleiman) (Paris: 1986), pp. 171–206.
30 Naum Kleiman and Valentina Korshunova, the editors of the Germanlanguage edition of E’s memoirs, which is to date the most complete published version, suggest in their introduction the following derivation for the title:
On 18 May 1946, when he was copying out a quotation from Uncle Tom’s Cabin for his textbook on Direction, he found in passing a title for his ‘life story’—‘Yo’.
‘Yo’ is the Spanish for ‘I’. Perhaps the Spanish language gave an ironic distance to the book title and deprived it of its absolute egocentricity. There are certainly also underlying resonances of Eisenstein’s longing for Mexico, where he had learnt a little Spanish. There was of course also an element of reminiscence: it must have made him think of Mayakovsky, of his poem ‘I’ and of his autobiographical sketch ‘I Myself.
(S.M.Eisenstein, YO! Ich selbst: Memoiren (I Myself: Memoirs) (ed. N.Kleiman and W.Korschunowa) (Berlin, GDR and Vienna: 1984), vol. 1, p. 21)
31 Here I am indebted to Naum Kleiman for explaining the relationship between E’s various proposed books. The notes to IP 4, pp. 741–9 and the introduction to YO! Ich selbst, vol. 1, pp. 15–25, also discuss these.
1 F.Casetti, ‘L’immagine del montaggio’ (Imagination and montage), in S.M. Eisenstein, Teoria generate del montaggio (Venice: 1985), p. xxv.
2 J.Aumont describes the necessity of reading the work and understanding E’s character as ‘structured on several levels’—an operation necessary to give ‘force’ and ‘homogeneity’ to research—even if it is often difficult to fix clear and precise boundaries between E’s different ‘practices’. See J.Aumont, Montage Eisenstein (Paris: 1979), trans. L.Hildreth, C.Penley and A.Ross (Bloomington, Ind. and London: 1987) pp. 9–12.
3 E.G.Grossi, ‘Eisenstein e il progetto di Regissura’, in Studi Urbinati B 3 vol. 58, pp. 219–26.
4 La natura non indifferente (1981); Il colore (1982); Teoria generate del montaggio (1985); La regia (1989); Memorie (1990).
5 The most recent attempt to list all E’s published writings is a bibliography of over 500 items compiled by B. Amengual and J. Aumont, appended to Amengual, Que Viva Eisenstein! (Lausanne: 1980), pp. 650–90. See also ‘A Bibliography of Eisenstein’s Writings’ in Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, pp. 223–35.
6 Yu.Krasovskii, ‘Kinematograficheskie material! v TsGALI’ (Cinema Materials in TsGALI), Iz istorii kino vol. 9 (Moscow: 1974), p. 177.
7 Voprosy literatury no. 1, 1968, pp. 98–103. See also the important collection of E’s writings, ed. with a commentary by F.Albera, Cinématisme, Peinture et cinema, pp. 15–144.
8 See N. Kleiman, ‘Conversazione con P.M.De Santi’, in the catalogue Eisenstein/disegni (Pesaro: 1981), p. 12. The first chapter of On the Problem of Direction, entitled ‘Mise en jeu i mise en geste’, was published in IP 4, pp. 717–38 (Italian translation in Bianco e Nero no. 7–8, 1971, pp. 90–108).
9 Information on ‘In Praise of the Cinema Newsreel’ supplied by Naum Kleiman in 1982.
10 Seton’s interpretation of E’s interest in Lewis Carroll and especially Alice in Wonderland is typical:
the fascination of Carroll’s work was for more personal reasons than his wonderful anatomical chart of the absurd, which had such great appeal for Eisenstein. In Carroll’s use of psycho-physiological symbols—Alice’s shrinkage in size and becoming awkwardly large—Sergei Mikhailovich found literary expression of the painfully acute psychic feelings which he experienced.
(Seton, p. 292)
11 Some indication of themes that E intended to pursue in this book may be found in these articles: J.Aumont, ‘Eisenstein avec Freud’ (E with Freud), Cahiers du cinema no. 226–7, 1971, pp. 68–74; V.V.Ivanov, ‘Eisenstein et la linguistique structurale moderne’ (E and Modern Structural Linguistics), Cahiers du cinema no. 220–1, 1970, pp. 47–50; M.Vannucchi, ‘Ideogramma, monologo e linguaggio interiore’ (Ideogram, monologue and inner language), in Il cinema di Eisenstein (Rimini, Florence: 1975), pp. 189–237.
12 Seton, pp. 298–9.
13 Seton, p. 300. Some of V.V.Ivanov’s articles on E clarify issues raised by Seton. E’s speculation on ‘the primary unity of all human activity’ is dealt with by Ivanov in ‘Doctor Faustus: “II problema fondamentale” nella teoria dell’arte di S.M.Eisenstein’ (Dr Faustus: ‘The fundamental problem’ of the theory of art in E), in Strumenti critici no. 42–3, 1980, p. 472:
Starting from the study of exchange as a ‘full social fact’, ethnologists have concluded that there existed in antiquity an undifferentiated society, in which the exchange of social values and materials, reciprocal ritual relations and all the activities which are associated with the concept of art in modern society, were practically indistinguishable.
Eisenstein reconstructed a sketch of this primordial society. The idea of an unstructured chorus in [his production of] the Valkyrie, which also appears in other works from the early period, is linked with the image of a unitary primitive society, in accordance with the principles of modern ethnology.
14 Again Ivanov usefully clarifies:
[Some of E’s research] dealt with the geometry of Mexican ritual: the places where Mexican Catholics genuflect toward saints are sites of ancient pagan rituals. These observations on the survival of pre-Columbian religion in modern Catholic practice anticipated by thirty years the most recent studies.
(‘Doctor Faustus’, p. 473)
15 Seton, p. 301.
16 It is important to note that in 1967, at the very time Shklovsky was writing this, Roman Jakobson had also reached much the same conclusion on E: ‘[in E’s writings] there are ideas and passages which prove that Eisenstein was not only a genius as a film-maker but that he was also a great scientist, a theoretician and historian of cinema and of art.’ A.Aprà and L.Faccini, ‘Conversazione sul cinema con Roman Jakobson’ (Conversation on Cinema with Roman Jakobson), in Cinema e Film no. 2, 1967, p. 158.
17 V.Shklovsky, ‘Sur “La théorie de la prose”’ (On ‘The Theory of Prose’), in Rassegna Sovietica no. 1, 1971, p. 110.
18 J.Aumont, Montage Eisenstein’, D.Andrew, The Major Film Theories (New York: 1976), pp. 42–75.
19 The bibliography is very large and we can only cite here the main works: A.M. Ripellino, Majakovskij e il teatro russo d’avanguardia (Turin: 1959); Eisenstein Künstler der Revolution (Berlin: 1960); Cahiers du cinema no. 220–1, 1970, special issue, ‘Russie: années vingt’ (including a useful bibliography and chronology, pp. 114–9), also no. 226–7, 1971, special issue ‘S.M.Eisenstein’; Il cinema di Eisenstein (Rimini, Florence: 1975). Crowning these and many other studies is B.Amengual, Que Viva Eisenstein! (see note 5).
20 The link between Meyerhold and other areas of E’s research is undoubtedly the most important of all those mentioned so far. In addition to E’s reflections on theatre of the period 1920–4, there are numerous passages in Direction, such as the consideration of otkaz [refusal] and the repeated theorisation of ‘expressive movement’. These are discussed in: Grossi, ‘Il concetto di efficienza nella riflessione di Eisenstein sul teatro’ (The concept of efficiency in E’s reflection on theatre), written for a seminar directed by J.Aumont, 1984–5 (unpublished).
21 See for example M.Le Bot, ‘Serge Eisenstein, théoricien de l’art moderne’ (S.E as theorist of modern art), in Contre-champ no. 2, 1962, pp. 13–16, also no. 5, 1963, pp. 53–64; F.Albera, ‘Eisenstein et 1’avant-garde russe’ (E and the Russian avant-garde), in Notes sur I’esthétique d’Eisenstein (Lyon: 1973), pp. 21–77; A. Michelson, ‘Scène de l’action, espace du mouvement: la crise de la representation cinématographique’ (Scene of Action, Space of Movement: the Crisis of Cinematic Representation), in Une histoire du cinema (Paris: 1976), pp. 38–44.
22 See M.Tafuri, ‘Piranesi, Eisenstein e la dialettica dell’avanguardia’ (Piranesi, E and the dialectic of the avant-garde), in Rassegna Sovietica no. 1– 2, 1972, pp. 175–84.
23 The reconstruction and interpretation of these studies by E were reported by V.V.Ivanov in two notable essays: ‘Significato delle idee di M.M.Bachtin sul segno, l’atto di parole e il dialogo per la semiotica contemporanea’ (The Significance for Contemporary Semiotics of M.M Bakhtin’s Ideas on the Sign, the Speech Act and Dialogue), in: Michail Bachtin: Semiotica, teoria della letteratura e marxismo (Bari: 1977), pp. 67–104; ‘The Semiotic Theory of Carnival as the Inversion of Bipolar Opposites’, in Carnival! (Berlin: 1984), p. 11–35. Ivanov shows in these articles how the themes recur in Que Viva Mexico! and Ivan the Terrible.
24 This passage, from an unpublished chapter of Method, is quoted by Ivanov in ‘The Semiotic Theory of Carnival’, p. 13.
25 See I.Ambrogio, Formalismo e avanguardia in Russia (Formalism and the avant-garde in Russia) (Rome: 1968) and E. Ferrario, Teorie della letteratura in Russia 1900–1934 (The Theory of Literature in Russia 1900–34) (Rome: 1977). Both of these trace connections between the Soviet avant-garde and the Slav scientific tradition, although Ferrario’s date boundary halts him on the threshhold of E’s maturity (pp. 257–68).
26 Quotations from C.Prevignano, in La semiotica nei paesi slavi (Slavic Semiotics) (Milan: 1979), pp. 23–99. Prevignano made a detailed analysis of ‘the corpus of images, models and research procedures which came into existence between the 1910s and 30s, and was then taken up and elaborated by further Slav contribution to semiotics in the 60s and 70s’. Today there is general recognition of the Slav semiotic ‘tradition’ and in a special issue of Strumenti critici no. 42–3, 1980, entitled ‘La cultura nella tradizione russa del XIX e XX secolo’ (Culture in Russian tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), D’Arco Silvio Avalle proposes a division of the Russian history of semiotics into three main periods: the generation ‘1960–70’, that of ‘1910–40’, and a generation of the second half of the nineteenth century whose main representatives were the great ‘philologists’, Veselovsky and Potebnya. Other surveys include E.M.Meletinsky and D.M.Segal, ‘Structuralisme et sémiotique en URSS’ (Structuralism and Semiotics in the USSR), in Diogène no. 73, 1971, pp. 94– 117; Yu M. Lotman and B.A.Uspenskii, ‘Introduction’, in Richerche semiotiche (Turin: 1973), pp. xi-xxvii; E.M. Meletinksy et al., ‘Russian Folklore and the Problems of Structural Method’, ibid., pp. 401–32; and A. Shukman, ‘Soviet Semiotics and Literary Criticism’, in New Literary History vol. 9, no. 2, 1978, pp. 189–97.
27 K.Eimermacher, ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte einer deskriptiven Semiotik in der Sowjetunion’ (On the origins of descriptive semiotics in the Soviet Union), in Zeitschrift für Semiotik vol. IV, no. 1–2, 1982, p. 2.
28 Direct references to E and his theoretical work appear frequently in the writings of V.V.Ivanov. The most important texts are: ‘Eisenstein et la linguistique structurale moderne’ (E and modern structural linguistics); ‘Doctor Faustus’; and the book Ocherki po istorii semiotiki v SSSR (Essays on the History of Semiotics in the USSR) (Moscow: 1976). Of secondary importance are ‘Significato delle idee di M.M.Bachtin’; ‘Growth of the Theoretical Framework of Modern Poetics’, in Current Trends in Linguistics vol. 12, no. 2 (Paris and The Hague: 1974), pp. 835–61; and ‘The Semiotic Theory of Carnival’.
29 V.V.Ivanov, ‘L’approcio dinamico allo studio dell’evoluzione della lingua, del testo e della cultura’ (The dynamic approach to the study of the evolution of language, mind and culture), in Rassegna Sovietica no. 6, 1983, p. 17.
30 J.P.Courtois, ‘Sur Montage Eisenstein’, Ça cinema no. 18, 1979, p. 72.
31 D.M Segal, ‘La ricercha sovietiche nel campo della semiotica degli ultimi anni’ (The Soviet contribution to the field of semiotics in recent years), in Ricerche semiotiche, p. 452.
32 Studies by P.Montani published in parallel with the Selected Works in Italian have defined the relationship between E and semiotics, following the theses outlined by E.Garroni in Ricognizione della semiotica (Appreciation of Semiotics) (Rome: 1977).
33 First published in E.Bruno and E.Ghezzi, Walt Disney (Venice: 1985), pp. 25–58; English translation Eisenstein on Disney (see Introduction, note 80).
34 Ibid., p. 6.
35 Ibid., p. 23.
36 In ‘The Growth of the Theoretical Framework’, Ivanov links Veselovsky, E and Propp:
Eisenstein’s conception belongs to the diachronic tendency which was characteristic of the most interesting Russian humanist scholarship in the first half of this century. Veselovsky, who tried to build a vast edifice of historical poetics and who influenced Propp’s morphological research, can be considered its precursor.
(p. 852)
37 My essay ‘Eisenstein e il progetto di Regissura’ dwells upon the main concerns of E’s thought between 1927 and 1929, and in particular the studies that lead up to Direction, the work of E’s maturity.
38 To complete Ivanov’s reference, let us recall N.Kleiman’s definition of the Grundproblem’. ‘One can give a simple and brief definition of this problem as that of the correlation between the logico-rational and the sensory in art, in the creative act, in the structure of a work and in the process of its perception.’
39 Ivanov, ‘Doctor Faustus’, p. 462.
40 ‘The power of the symbol is always a living power, because it belongs to the essence of palpable human reaction.’ This was E’s explanation in an interview with Bruno Frei, published in Die Weltbühne no. 32, 1928, partly republished in H.J.Schlegel (ed.), Schriften 3: Oktober (Munich: 1975), p. 260.
41 In his introduction to La natura non indifferente, Montani clarifies the significance of the ‘dual unity’ between logical and sensory thought which, for E, underpinned the authentic work of art. He argues that E’s idea of ‘sensory thought’ in its ‘ethnological and positivist formulation’ can lead to ‘regressive confusion’ and that E succumbed to this more than once.
42 G.P.Brunetta, Letteratura e cinema (Bologna: 1976), p. 40.
43 Teoria generate del montaggio; translated in ESW 2, pp. 11–58.
44 See the chapter ‘La nascità del montaggio: Dionisio’ (The birth of montage: Dionysus) in Teoria generate del montaggio, pp. 226–31. E synthesised the theory that underlies this reasoning as follows: ‘The real cult action is progressively transformed into a ritual symbol in order to become later an art image.’
45 Part of Eisenstein’s work on language in the 20s and 30s was bound up with Vygotsky’s research on the psychology of language and Luria’s on neurophysiology, as well as Marr’s hypotheses on gestural language…. At the Moscow Neurophysiological Clinic which Eisenstein often visited, experiments were carried out on the language of aphasics and on the handling of tools which led to bold hypotheses on the relation between verbal and gestural language. (Eisenstein was equally interested in the gestural composition of words: he studied the head movements which accompany the articulation of certain prefixes). (F.Giusti, Strumenti critici no. 42–3, 1980, pp. 600–1)
46 M.M.Bakhtin, ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff, Novy Mir no. 11, 1970; translated in Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (ed. C.Emerson, Michael Holquist, trans. V.McGee) (Austin: 1986), p. 2.
1 ‘Nachahmung als Beherrschung’, first published in Film and Fernsehen no. 1, 1988, pp. 34–7. The first English translation appears in the present volume (Ch. 4) and all quotations here are from that version.
2 The numerous examples of magic cannibalism cited in E’s speech were taken from the following books: E.B.Tylor, Pervobytnaya kul’tura (Primitive Culture) (Moscow: 1939), pp. 229ff. (Eisenstein, of course, used an earlier edition); A.Lang, Custom and Myth (London, New York, Bombay: 1898), pp. 53–4.
3 W.Benjamin, ‘Problème de sociologie du langage’, in Essais II: 1935–1940 (Paris: 1983), p. 33.
4 The Russian word obobshchenie or ‘generalisation’ means to draw out the general significance of something in its context.
5 The emphasis is E’s. E.Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie (Paris: 1912), p. 179.
6 Lang, Custom and Myth, p. 303.
7 F.Gushing, ‘Manual Concepts’, American Anthropologist no. 5, 1892. E referred to Gushing in his unpublished work ‘The Three Whales’ (Tri kita) (TsGALl, 1923/2/239) and also in the memoirs: IP 1, p. 484; translated in Memories, p. 212.
8 L.Lévy-Bruhl, Pervobytnoe myshlenie (Primitive Mentality) (Moscow: 1930), p. 106.
9 J.Lindsay, A Short History of Culture (Leningrad: 1939), p. 49.
10 ‘The Three Whales’.
11 Ibid.
12 ‘Montage 1937’ (Montazh 1937), IP 2, p. 241.
13 Ibid., pp. 351, 342.
14 ‘Odd and Even’ (Chët-nechët), first published in Vostok-Zapad (East—West) (Moscow: 1988), p. 235.
15 ‘The Three Whales’.
16 Ibid. The Russian word cherta can mean both ‘line’ and ‘facet’ or ‘feature’.
17 Quoted in N.Kleiman and M.Nesteva, ‘Vydayushchüsya khudozhnikgumanist’ (An Outstanding Humanist Artist), Sovetskaya muzyka no. 9, 1979, p. 72.
18 The Psychology of Composition (see Introduction, note 80), p. 54.
19 Note dated 30 September 1941, TsGALl, 1923/1/1041.
20 ‘The Three Whales’. Elsewhere he wrote:
Here there seems to be a contradiction: the highest form of integral perception—the generalised image—appears as a plastic sign to correspond to the most primitive type. But this contradictiodn is only an apparent one. In essence we have in this instance precisely that ‘supposed return to the old’ that Lenin mentions in relation to the dialectic of phenomena. The fact is that generalisation is really integral, that is it is at the same time both a complex (unmediated) and a differentiated (mediated) representation of a phenomenon (and a notion about the phenomenon).
(‘Montage 1937’, IP 2, pp. 386–7)
E’s dialectic constantly led to explanations like this in order to expose in the generalisation both the higher and the lower at the same time.
21 ‘The Three Whales’.
22 W.Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy) (Leipzig and Weimar: 1981), p. 17 (E of course used an earlier edition). He also referred to Worringer in the unpublished ‘Searches for a Father’ (Poiski ottsa) (TsGALl, 1923/1/234). E’s search for abstraction followed closely the whole line of abstraction in aesthetics from Riegl, Hildebrand and Wölflin to Klee and Kandinsky.
23 ‘The Three Whales’.
24 Ibid.
25 Lévy-Bruhl, Pervobytnoe myshlenie, p. 106.
26 ‘On the Detective Story’ (O detektive), first published in Priklyuchencheskii fil’m (The Adventure Film) (Moscow: 1980), pp. 142–4; translated in The Psychology of Composition, pp. 57–84.
27 ‘Natasha’, TsGALI, 1923/2/238.
28 ‘On the Detective Story’, p. 144.
29 ‘The True Paths of Invention’ (Istinnye puti izobreteniya), IP 1, p. 177.
30 ‘The History of the Close-Up’ (Istoriya krupnogo plana), IP 1, p. 507.
31 Untitled fragment, IP 1, p. 509.
32 Ibid.
33 ‘Museums at Night’ (Muzei noch’yu), IP 1, p. 433. Memories, p. 173.
34 IP 1, p. 441; Memories, p. 180.
35 E, while admitting that Swedenborg ‘like all mystics has a certain knowledge’, thought his principal error was too materialistic an understanding of image or, metaphorically expressed, too limited an exclusion of day vision. According to E, with mystics the ‘sprouting of sensation becomes and develops not into consciousness (in our sense) but into a metaphysical ideogram: image understood materialistically’ (TsGALI, 1923/2/233). Thus E indirectly admitted his own link with mysticism, but claimed to have overcome it through a higher level of abstraction.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, pp. 17–18.
39 Direction: The Art of Mise-en-Scène (Rezhissura: Iskusstvo mizanstseny), IP 4, p. 125. In ‘On the Detective Story’, p. 148, he stated:
Step by step, a shift is produced in the reader towards reading phenomena in terms of the objects or representations which accompany their shape or appearance, but not their content or meaning; i.e. a reorganisation towards the so-called ‘physiognomical’—directly sensuous perception.
(Upchurch trans., p. 71)
40 From the ‘Superobjectivity’ section of ‘Pathos’ in Non-Indifferent Nature (Neravnodushnaya priroda), IP 3, p. 204; trans. NIN, p. 170.
41 Ibid.
42 ‘Beyond the Shot’ (Za kadrom), IP 2, p. 285, trans, in ESW 1, p. 140.
43 Unpublished notes dated 17 August 1940 and entitled ‘Expressive Movement’ (Vyrazitel’noe dvizhenie), TsGALI, 1923/1/236.
44 ‘The Kangaroo’ section of ‘Pathos’ in Non-Indifferent Nature: IP 3, pp. 225–6; NIN, p. 191.
45 ‘Montage 1937’, IP 2, p. 354, fig. 9; ESW 2, p. 31, fig. 2.9.
46 Ibid., p. 389; ESW 2, p. 100.
47 Ibid., pp. 389–90; ESW 2, pp. 99–103.
48 The Psychology of Composition, p. 279.
49 Ibid., p. 280.
50 A.Besant and C.W.Leadbeater, Les formes-pensées (Thought Forms) (Paris: 1905), p. 3.
51 M.Voloshin, Liki tvorchestva (Images of Creativity) (Leningrad: 1988), p. 211. Voloshin also appreciated the importance of evolutionism, distinguishing three periods in the development of art: (1) the conventional symbolism of the sign; (2) strict realism; (3) generalised stylisation (ibid., p. 216). This schema corresponded in its essentials to those of Worringer and E.
52 ‘Beneath the hills of these valleys you can distinguish the features of swollen ribs, the long ridges reveal the backbones concealed beneath them and featureless and predatory skulls rise from the sea’ (ibid., p. 316). In this context the predilection that Voloshin (like the representatives of Western European Modernism) felt for Gothic architecture, with the ‘skeletal’ structure of its cathedrals, acquires special significance. See: ‘“Dukh gotiki”—neosushchestvlennyi zamysel M.A.Voloshina’ (‘The Spirit of the Gothic’: Voloshin’s Unrealised Project) in Russkaya literatura i zarubezhnoe iskusstvo (Russian Literature and Foreign Art) (Leningrad: 1986), pp. 317–6. Cf. Mandelstam’s lines: ‘What is more considered than the stronghold of Notre Dame. I have studied your monstrous ribs.’ O.Mandelstam, Nôtre Dame, in Kamen’ (The Stone, 1913); Collected Works (Washington, DC: 1964), vol. 1, p. 24.
53 A.Bely, Petersburg (Leningrad: 1981), p. 239. On the other hand, bones and a skeleton have often become the key metaphor for an aesthetics that cultivates an orientation towards line, beginning with Hogarth, whom Eisenstein esteemed so highly. See Ch. 10, ‘O kompozitsii so zmeevidnoi liniei’ (On Composition with a Serpentine Line) in: U.Khogart: Analiz krasoty (W. Hogarth: The Analysis of Beauty) (Leningrad: 1987), pp. 149–50.
54 Bely, Petersburg, pp. 235–9. We should note the particular attention that Eisenstein paid to Bely’s work.
55 ‘On Bones’ (Na kostyakh), IP 1, p. 300; Memories, p. 72.
56 ‘How I Learned to Draw’ (Kak ya uchilsya risovat’), IP 1, p. 267; partially translated in Memories, p. 46. Also translated by R.Taylor in Christie and Elliot, p. 58.
57 The quotation from p. 99 of Chiang Yee’s book comes in ‘Montage 1937', IP 2, p. 350; ESW 2, p. 28. In ‘On Bones’ (see n. 55 above) E refers to the book Bruges-la-morte by Georges Rodenbach (Paris: no date): IP 1, p. 296 (Marshall misses the reference, p. 69). This book was almost entirely devoted to the theme of the similarity between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. It is significant that Rodenbach, in analysing the mechanisms of similarity, remarks: ‘The similarities are always confined to the lines and to the totality. If you delve into the details, everything is different’ (Bruges-la-morte, p. 128). [Rodenbach’s book also served as the basis for E. Bauer’s film Grezy (Daydreams) in 1915; see Y.Tsivian et al., Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908–1919 (Pordenone and London: 1989), p. 256.— Ed. note]
58 ‘Montage 1937’, IP 2, p. 351; ESW 2, p. 28.
59 ‘The History of the Close-Up’, IP 1, p. 506.
60 Unpublished note dated 19 February 1937, TsGALI, 1923/2/233.
61 TsGALI, 1923/2/232 (unpublished).
62 ‘Foreword’, IP 1, p. 210; Memories, p. 1.
63 ‘On Folklore’ (O fol’klore), TsGALI, 1923/2/1082 (unpublished).
64 Cf. the sensation of ‘being outside oneself in Bely’s Petersburg:
You feel as if some kind of bandage has fallen away taking your feelings with it…as if you are being torn to pieces and your limbs are being pulled in opposite directions: your heart is being dragged from the front and your back from behind.… I felt in a quite corporeal and physiological sense that I was outside myself.
(Bely, Petersburg, pp. 258–9)
65 ‘On Folklore’.
66 Translator’s note: I am extremely grateful to Natasha Ward, who did the simultaneous translation for the original conference presentation of this paper, for her inspiration of some of the more felicitous passages in this version.
1 Most Soviet film-makers in the 1920s entered the debate about ‘types’ but, unlike E, did not use them in leading roles. These ‘models’ (naturshchiki) are as a rule simply extras, shown one after another in brief close-ups to achieve two effects: (1) constructing a litany by sequencing ‘x’ interchangeable faces which the audience interprets as ‘he is very bourgeois’, or ‘he is very poor’; (2) accumulating many different portraits to demonstrate the lack of cohesion in a social group, notably the peasantry and sub-proletariat.
2 ‘Yudif’ (Judith), from which this quotation comes, was written in 1947 but only published for the first time in 1968, in IP 5, pp. 364–96; French translation in Mémoires 2, Oeuvres vol. 5, pp. 195–244; quotation from p. 234 of this edition.
3 At least three versions of The Old and the New are in circulation. I worked from the two 16mm prints in the Cinémathèque Universitaire in Paris. The first of these, titled in English and duped in New York by Glenn Photo Supply, appears to be the 1926 version, entitled The General Line. The second, identical to the print in the Cinémathèque Française, with French titles, is the 1929 version, retitled The Old and the New (in the epilogue a Ford tractor bears the date 1929). I noted five major variations:
4 On the distinction between semiotic and agential subjects, see M.Lagny, M.C.Ropars and P.Sorlin, Générique des années 30 (Paris: 1986), p. 97. The semiotic subject is the character who mediates the audience’s viewpoint. He can be an agent of vision (revealing an object, whether or not anthropomorphised, in subjective shots) and/or an agent of perception (perceiving images understood by the audience as mental images attributable only to this character). The agential subject is the character who is empowered to achieve a goal and so assumes control of the narrative, directing its syntagmatic concatenation.
5 At the bottom of the letter/testament, the signature Yakov Strongin is clearly legible.
6 The two sailors, seen in profile, first in medium close-up then from waistlevel, are not only wearing the same uniforms, but have similar moustaches and physiques.
7 He falls clutching his cap, a metonym for the Potemkin.
8 E, ‘Organic Unity and Pathos’, in NIN, p. 13.
9 In the original scenario he is named as ‘Voinov’. He first appears in the same frame as one of the sphinxes on the University Embankment, one of the most prosperous districts of Petrograd.
10 M.C.Ropars and P.Sorlin, Octobre, écriture et idéologie (Paris: 1976), p. 139.
11 Ibid., pp. 145–53.
12 Repression is first indicated, by synecdoche, when a single machine-gunner moves into the front rank.
13 M.Lagny, M.-C.Ropars and P.Sorlin, La Revolution figurée: film, histoire, politique (Paris: 1979), p. 203.
14 E, ‘The Milk Separator and the Holy Grail’, in NIN, pp. 45–6.
1 Photogramme has been extensively used in French film theory as a quasitechnical term for the individual film frame when it is considered as an element in the series of frames which comprise a shot. This contrasts with ‘cadre’, referring to the composition (framing) of the image, which is the usual sense of ‘frame’ in English. The issues at stake in his essay— perceptual, semantic, philosophical—suggest that Albera’s ‘photogramme’ is best rendered by the somewhat unusual ‘photogram’. [Trans.]
2 Osnovnoi kinofenomen, or in his German writings Urphänomenon des Films. ‘Montage’ is newly translated in ESW 2, pp. 11–58.
3 On the ‘phi-effect’ considered in relation to early Soviet film theory, see V. Petrić, Constructivism in Film (Cambridge, Mass.: 1987), pp. 139–48; also, more generally, I. Montagu, Film World (Harmondsworth: 1964), pp. 13–30. [Trans.]
4 The text referred to here as ‘Stuttgart’ was commissioned from Eisenstein by El Lissitsky and Sophie Küppers, the organisers of the Soviet section in the ‘Film und Photo’ exhibition. It has since appeared in differing truncated versions under various titles: as ‘La Dramaturgic du film’ in Bifur no. 7, December 1930; as ‘The Principles of Film Form’ in both Close Up vol. 8, no. 3, September 1931, and Experimental Cinema no. 4, February 1933; as ‘A Dialectical Approach to Film Form’ in Film Form’, and as ‘Dramaturgic der Film-Form’ in H.J.Schlegel (ed.), Sergej M.Eisensten: Schriften 3. Oktober, (Munich: 1975). The full text remains unpublished and for this study I have used the typescript deposited by Jay Leyda in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The English translation made by Ivor Montagu in Hollywood in 1930 under Eisenstein’s supervision served as the basis for publication in Close Up and Experimental Cinema— although these versions differ from the original and each other in several respects!—and quotations here are from this typescript, also deposited at MoMA. See also ESW 1, pp. 317–18, n. 51.
5 V.Nilsen, Tekhnika kombinirovannoi kinos’ëmki (The Technique of Trick Photography) (Moscow: 1933). Eisenstein’s introduction is translated as ‘George Méliés’s Mistake’ and first published in ESW 1, pp. 258–60 (see also p. 324, n. 26).
6 This and subsequent quotations are from the respective MoMA typescripts. See also ESW 1, p. 164.
7 See ESW 1, p. 34.
8 ‘Za kadrom’, written as a postscript to N.Kaufman, Yaponskoe kino (Japanese Cinema) (Moscow: 1929). Translated by Leyda as ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’ in Film Form, pp. 28–40; and as ‘Beyond the Shot’ by Taylor in ESW 1, pp. 138–50; see p.
9 In ‘Stuttgart’, we can see the term Bildausschnitt displacing the earlier Stück. In his (unpublished) ‘Afterthoughts on Stuttgart’ of 24 July 1929, Eisenstein wrote: ‘Congratulations to the Germans for their expression Bild-Ausschnitt’ [Bild-Schnitt-Ausschnitt = image-editing-framing]. This term amounts to the equivalent of the Russian kadr, as Nilsen explains in a passage (Ch. 2, p.) omitted from the English translation, The Cinema as a Graphic Art (London: 1936), of his Izobrazitel’noe postroenie fil’ma (The Graphic Construction of Film) (Moscow and Leningrad: 1936).
10 The concepts of ‘ecstasy’ (ekstaz) and ‘image’ (obraz) had been in common use by the Russian avant-garde since the first decade of the century. After Uspensky developed them from the Neoplatonist philosophy of Plotinus in his Tertium Organum, they reappear in many other contexts, including Aleksei Kryuchenykh’s definition of Futurist poetry as zaum (trans-sense) rather than ordinary instrumental use of language (and Eisenstein would later speak of zaum in connection with certain passages of October). The painter and musician Mikhail Matyushin, in his translation of Gliezes’s and Metzinger’s Du Cubisme also in 1913, made use of Uspensky’s notion of the ‘fourth dimension’, as did Kazimir Malevich and Eisenstein (the latter in his 1929 ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, ESW 1, pp. 181–94). Such terms, emerging from a mystical conception of knowledge, served to proclaim the allegiances and express the aims of an avant-garde, while also perpetuating an ambiguity which is evident in Eisenstein. The goal of expanding consciousness (political or social) is often expressed in terms of the Neoplatonic expansion of vision (towards a ‘total’ revelation).
11 ‘The world, for [Bergson], is divided into two disparate portions, on the one hand life, on the other matter. …Life is one great force, one vast vital impulse.’ B.Russell, History of Western Philosophy (2nd edn, London: 1961), p. 757. See also G.Deleuze, Cinema 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris: 1983), especially Chs 1 and 3, on the continuing significance of Bergson for a philosophy of cinema. [Trans.]
12 ‘The Montage of Film Attractions’, ESW 1, pp. 39–58.
13 See Ch. 11 above, especially pp. 178–80.
14 Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) defined his ‘new poetic’ thus in a letter of October 1864. [Trans.]
15 ‘We: Variant [Version] of a Manifesto’, Kino-Fot no. 1, 1922; translation in A. Michelson (ed.) and K.O’Brien (trans.), Kino-Eye: the Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley, Calif., London and Sydney: 1984), pp. 5–9; also FF, pp. 69–71.
16 F.de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generate (Geneva: 1915); trans. W.Baskin as Course in General Linguistics (London: 1960); on the concept of ‘value’, see pp.
17 ‘Painting should not be exclusively retinal or visual; it should have to do with the gray matter, with our urge for understanding.’ Interview with Duchamp, ‘Regions which are not ruled by space and time’ (1956), in M.Sanouillet and E. Peterson (eds), The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: 1973), p. 136. [Trans.]
18 ‘Béla Forgets the Scissors’, ESW 1, pp. 77–81.
19 On the ‘October’ group, see J.E.Bowlt (ed. and trans.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934 (New York: 1976), pp. 273–9. [Trans.]
20 K.Malevich, ‘I likuyut liki na ekranakh’ (And Faces are Rejoicing on the screen), Kinozhurnal ARK no. 10, October 1925, pp. 7–9. It should be noted that there are two terms for ‘face’ in Russian: the religious, lik, for the face of Christ in icons and the secular litso. This opposition is similar to that between obraz, signifying an image distinct from its manifestations, and izobrazhenie, meaning representation or resemblance. Malevich’s second text on cinema, ‘Khudozhnik i kino’ (The Artist and Cinema), appeared in Kinozhurnal ARK no. 2, February 1926, pp. 15–17.
The ‘Wanderers’ (Peredvizhniki), also known as the ‘Itinerants’, invoked by Malevich to stigmatise E and Vertov, were a group of young painters inspired by democratic ideals, although relatively conservative in aesthetic terms, who seceded from the Petersburg Academy of Art in 1863 and organised a series of touring exhibitions with the avowed aim of bringing art to the people. See The Itinerants: Society for Circulating Art Exhibitions (revised edn, London, Sydney and Leningrad: 1982). [Trans.]
21 On the ‘Das Kapital’ and ‘Glass House’ projects, see EAW pp. 35–7.
22 On the origins of the concept of zaum (trans-sense), see V.Shklovsky, ‘O poezii i zaumnom yazyke’ (On Poetry and Trans-sense Language) (1916), trans. G. Janacek and P.Mayer in October no. 34, Fall 1985, pp. 3–24. [Trans.]
The links between Fernand Léger and E deserve a study in their own right. We know that Léger’s Ballet mécanique was classed by E among the ‘children’s playthings’ of cinema in a 1926 text which pokes fun at almost all the pioneers of European avant-garde cinema, including Picabia, Léger and Chomette (‘Béla Forgets the Scissors’, ESW 1, p. 77). However it is also clear that Léger’s film exercised a profound influence on E, notably in The General Line (the cream separator, filming of everyday objects, the role of intertitles and lettering). In an interview he gave to Mon Ciné on 27 March 1930, E recalled ‘Léger’s Ballet mécanique…which remains unsurpassed. … Despite being a painter, Léger has nevertheless understood the formal essentials of cinema.’ But he never wrote anything about the film, even though Léger asked him in February 1933 to contribute to a special issue of Cahiers d’art devoted to the latter’s work on the occasion of an exhibition in Zurich (unpublished letter, Eisenstein Cabinet, Moscow).
23 See Tsivian, Ch. 5. Is this a script or an editing plan? Tsivian has decided in favour of the former, but there remains something unexplained. Shot no. 409 refers to ‘cows panicking’, yet Grigori Alexandrov wrote in his memoirs: ‘There remained not a single image with cows!… Yes, what a shame that all the painstaking labour which went into filming Alexandra Fyodorovna Romanova’s personal stable resulted in nothing because of technical faults. He was bitterly disappointed!’ G. Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino (The Epoch and Cinema) (Moscow: 1976), p. 103.
24 N.Kleiman, ‘Tol’ko pyatnadsat’ fotogramm’ (Only Fifteen Photograms), Iskusstvo kino no. 3, 1976.
25 Reduced to its most fundamental procedures, any pschoanaltic reflection on the cinema might be defined in Lacanian
terms as an attempt to disengage the cinema-object from the imaginary and to win it for the symbolic, in the hope of extending the latter by a new province.… the imaginary, opposed to the symbolic but constantly imbricated with it, designates the basic lure of the ego, the definitive imprint of the stage before the Oedipus complex.
(C.Metz, Le Signifiant imaginaire (Paris: 1977); trans. C.Britton, A.Williams, B.Brewster, A.Guzzetti as The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington, Ind.: 1982), pp. 3, 4)
Metz’s book provides an extended and systematic account of the extensive use made of Lacan’s concepts in the last twenty years to theorise the spectator’s relationship to cinema. [Trans.]
26 I have analysed at length in my thesis the sequences of the flag-carrier’s death during the July 1917 demonstrations and the sack of the Tsarina’s bed-chamber. These offer a series of inverse symmetries—fugitive vs pursuer; armed vs unarmed; seer vs seen; male vs female; revolutionary vs reactionary—which enable them to be compared and contrasted, in terms of narrative vs discursive and metaphoric vs metonymic. However splendid the scene of ‘raising the bridges’, it clearly makes uses of an earlier rhetoric, the ‘pathetic’ of Potemkin, which E thought at this time outdated. F. Albera, ‘Stuttgart’: dramaturgie de la forme cinématographique: S.M.Eisenstein et le constructivisme russe, doctoral thesis submitted to the Faculty of History of Art, University of Geneva, 1987; published as Eisenstein et le constructivisme russe (Lausanne: 1990).
27 D.Bordwell, ‘Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift’, Screen vol. 15, no. 4, Winter 1974–5, pp. 32–46.
28 Seton, p. 218. The letter is undated and, somewhat confusingly, appears in Seton’s narrative amid references to later events, such as Que Viva Mexico! in 1932. However, the reference to a change in the format of Close Up, which took place in January 1931, enables it to be identified more precisely. Seton speaks of an ‘article entitled “Film Form”’, but this can only be an abbreviation for ‘The Principles of Film Form’, which appeared in September 1931 in McPherson’s and Bryher’s review. E noted that ‘it might be presented as a page of my still (and I am afraid for ever!) “forthcoming” book!’
29 ESW 1, pp. 165 and 318 n. 61.
30 E came to regard Honoré Daumier (1808–79) as ‘a genius, ranging alongside the greatest artists of the greatest epoch of art’ (Memories, p.). Valentin Serov (1865–1911) started his career as a landscape painter, influenced by the nationalist revivalism of Mamontov’s Abramtsevo colony, but soon emerged as the leading Russian portraitist of his generation. [Trans.]
31 IP 2, pp. 393 et seq.
32 V.B.Shklovsky, Literatura i kinematograf (Berlin: 1923); Fr. edn (Paris: 1985).
33 H.Bergson, L’Èvolution créatrice (Paris: 1907; 1983 edn), pp. 272–3.
34 V.B.Shklovsky, Literatura i kinematograf, pp. 113–14; see also his Za 60 let (From 60 Years) (Moscow: 1985).
35 Shklovsky, ‘The Semantics of Cinema’, in FF, p. 133.
36 A.Piotrovsky, ‘October Must be Re-Edited’, in FF, p. 216.
37 A reference to Duchamp’s abandoned major work, ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even’, also known as the ‘Large Glass’ (1912–23). [Trans.]
38 Léger’s short film, Ballet mécanique (1924) co-directed with Dudley Murphy, was known in the USSR during the 1920s. Joseph Plateau (1801–83) was the Belgian inventor of the Phénakistoscope, which animated successive drawings viewed in a mirror. W.G.Horner’s ‘Zoëtrope’ was another of the many optical toys which preceded cinema. [Trans.]
39 Yu.Tynyanov, Problema stikhotvornogo yazyka (Leningrad: 1924); trans. M. Sosa and B.Harvey, The Problem of Verse Language (Ann Arbor: 1981). In this translation, Abschnitt is rendered as ‘halt’ or ‘stop’ in the context of Tynyanov’s discussion of metre as a component of rhythm (pp.). [Trans.]
40 Charles Dekeukeleire (1905–71), Belgian experimental and later documentary film-maker. His second film, Impatience (1928, 511 metres) introduces four ‘characters’ in its credits: The Mountain, The Motorcycle, The Woman, Abstract Blocks’. See K.Thompson, ‘(Re)Discovering Charles Dekeukeleire’, Millenium Film Journal nos. 7/8/9, Winter-Fall 1980–1, pp. 115–29. [Trans.]
41 Paul Sharits (b. 1943), American experimental film-maker and theorist, best known for such ‘flicker’ films as Ray Gun Virus (1966) and N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968). Peter Kubelka (b. 1934), Austrian experimental film-maker, who has produced a small body of extremely short perfectionist works, including Adebar (1957), Arnulf Rainer (1958–60) and Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa) (1961–6). On these and other formal or ‘structural’ film-artists, see Film als Film: 1910 bis heute (Film as Film: 1910 to the present), catalogue of a touring exhibition organised by B.Hein and W.Herzogenrath (Cologne: 1978); also Film as Film, catalogue of an expanded version of the exhibition at the Hay ward Gallery, London (London: 1979) [Trans.].
42 Werner Nekes (b. 1944), German experimental film-maker and historian of precinema optical devices and early cinema. His films include Jüm-Jüm (1967), Uliisses (1980–2) and Was geschah wirklich zwischen den Bildern? (What Really Happened Between the Pictures, also known as Film Before Film) (1986). Nekes has elaborated a semiotics of film in which the minimum unit is the ‘kine’ or relationship between two frames. See his text, ‘Whatever happens between the pictures’, Afterimage (USA) vol. 5, no. 5, November 1977.
1 P.Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: 1972), p. 62.
2 N.Burch, ‘Sergei M.Eisenstein’, in R.Roud (ed.), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (London: 1980), vol. 1, p. 323.
3 D.Bordwell, ‘Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift’, Screen vol. 15, no. 4, Winter, 1974–5, pp. 32–46.
4 On issues around this question see Stanley Mitchell, ‘Marinetti and Mayakovsky: Futurism, Fascism, Communism’; and P.Wollen, ‘Some Thoughts Arising from Stanley Mitchell’s Article’, in Screen Reader 1: Cinema/Ideology/ Politics (London: 1977), pp. 380–93.
5 B.Brewster, ‘Editorial Note’, Screen vol. 15, no. 4, Winter 1974–5, pp. 29–32.
6 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (enlarged edn, Boston, Mass, and London: 1979), pp. 207–9.
7 Ibid.
8 R.Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in Image-Music-Text (London: 1977), pp. 69–78.
9 ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’, in Film Form, p. 242.
10 Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’ in Image- Music- Text, p. 70.
11 Ibid., pp. 72, 73.
12 NIN, p. 349.
13 I would like to thank Jill McGreal, A.L.Rees, Ian Christie and Richard Taylor for their critical remarks on earlier drafts of this essay.