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The Unlimited Montage. Eisenstein’s Anthropological Gaze
Marie Rebecchi
To cite this version:
Marie Rebecchi. The Unlimited Montage. Eisenstein’s Anthropological Gaze. Marie Rebecchi, Elena Vogman. Sergei Eisenstein. The Anthropology of Rhythm, NERO, pp. 21-34, 2017, 978-88-8056-004- 3. �hal-03226442�
Sergei Eisenstein and the Anthropology of Rhythm Marie Rebecchi and Elena Vogman
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a The Anthropology of Rhythm Marie Rebecchi / Elena Vogman
b Unlimited Montage. Eisenstein’s Anthropological Gaze Marie Rebecchi
c Hors de soi. Eisenstein’s Mexican Diaries Elena Vogman
Sergei Eisenstein. Diary ( Excerpts)
Translated and commented by Natalie Ryabchikova d Sergei Eisenstein. Drawings
e Figures of Rhythm and Archeology of Time Elena Vogman
f Bezhin Meadow
Marie Rebecchi / Elena Vogman g The Great Fergana Canal Till Gathmann / Elena Vogman
Shaman of the Image Raffaella Frascarelli
p. Ch.
Contents
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Stills from Mexican Footage (Gosfilmofond )
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20 b1, b2 Episodes for Study, Leyda
20 21
Marie Rebecchi
Flowing to the ritual beat of a rhythmic drum,1 frames pass quickly and hypnotically before the spectator’s eyes, triggering a weakening of the superficial layers of consciousness and re- activating a powerful aesthetic and anthropological dimension:
a pre-logical and sensory mode of thinking.
Thus, in the chapter of Method* entitled “Rhythmic Drum,”
Sergei Eisenstein states that cinema — with its capacity to com- bine different streams of rhythmic and ritual movements, both organic and inorganic, ranging from dance to breathing, prayer to meditation, drumming to the sound of a heartbeat — reveals itself as a medium capable of reaching down into the deepest layers of “sensuous thinking.” In this way, he outlines what we could call an anthropology of the moving image, linking the corporeal and emotional appeal of cinema with invocations of archaic practices, forms, and desires.2 Bodies are thus in turn transformed into a “living medium,” capable of “process- ing, receiving, and transmitting images.”3 As Oksana Bulga- kowa points out in the afterword to Eisenstein’s notes on Walt Disney: “Art could thus be considered an anthropological
necessity.”4
From Paris to Mexico
To better understand the effects of this “anthropological turn”
in Eisenstein’s thinking during the 1930s, we should take into consideration his Paris sojourn from November 1929 to May 1930, which preceded his Mexican journey from December 1930 to March 1932. Eisenstein’s Parisian period is crucial in help- ing us to understand certain critical aspects of his anthropolo- gical vision of Mexico, as well as to grasp the influence of his conceptualization of the principle of “intellectual and conflict- ing” montage within “heterodox” surrealism. This dissident branch of surrealism was predominantly represented by Georges Bataille and his journal Documents. In response to André Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto published in Decem- ber 1929,5 which directly criticized certain members of the movement, the “expelled” surrealists ( Jacques Baron, Jacques-
* Eisenstein’s fundamental “anthropolog- ical” work, which remained unpublished until 2002 and is today in the process of being translated into German, English, and Italian.
The Unlimited Montage. Eisenstein’s Anthropological Gaze
1 The journal Mexican Folkways (1925–1935), where Brenner’s article appeared, featured a considerable number of corridos, songs, poems and ballads often with printed music and text, and were always bilingual, in Spanish and English. Anita Brenner, “Mexican Ballads,” in Mexican Folkways. Legends, Festivals, Art, Archeology 1, no. 5 (1926): 11.
See Elena Vogman “Figures of Rhythm and Archeology of Time,” in this book.
2 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution ( London: Penguin Books, 1964), 42.
3 See Alphonse Bertillon, Identification anthropométrique; instructions signalétiques (Melun: Imprimerie administrative, 1893).
4 Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” Documents 1(1930): 45.
5 Ibid., 46.
6 See Sergei Eisenstein, Notes for a General History of Cinema, ed. Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2015).
7 Sergei Eisenstein, Method, ed.
Oksana Bulgakowa (Berlin: Potemkin- Press, 2008), 879, 931.
8 Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” 47.
9 Ibid., 46.
10 Ibid., 48.
11 Ibid., 52.
12 Ibid.
13 See Benjamin Noys,
“Georges Bataille’s Base Materialism,”
in Critical Values 2, no. 4 (1998), 499–517.
14 See William Coffman Mc Dermott, The Ape in Antiquity. The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Archaeology, no. 27, ed. David M. Robinson ( Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1938), 289.
15 See Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille ( Paris:
Macula, 1995).
16 Sigmund Freud, “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur” [Civilization and Its Discontents], Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14 (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanaly- tischer Verlag, 1930), 419–506.
17 Ibid.
18 Sigmund Freud, “Die Frage der Laienanalyse. Unterredungen mit einem Unparteiischen,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, 258.
19 Ibid., 81–83.
20 Sergei Eisenstein, Diary, published in this book, 42.
21 Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime. An Essay on the Aesthetics of Sound (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1931), 204. Eisenstein extensively quotes this study by Lanz in his Mexican diaries.
b
b1, b2
b3–b8 Stills from The General Line (1927–1929) by Sergei Eisenstein, D 2, no. 4 (1930)
22
André Boiffard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Robert Desnos, Georges Limbour, Michel Leiris, Jacques Prévert, Roger Vitrac, etc.) published a pamphlet entitled A Corpse (Un Cadavre ) on January 15, 1930. In his Memoirs, Eisenstein asserts his fellow feeling towards the “left democratic wing of Surrealists, which had broken away from the Breton faction. They were my friends.”6 This leads us to identify a common ground between Eisenstein
and this dissident branch of surrealism, first and foremost through a convergent approach, namely that of a “conflicting and dialectic montage.”7 The convergent method was most effectively explained in the concept of montage developed by Eisenstein in four essays written during the course of 1929 (“Beyond the Shot,” “Perspectives,” “ The Dramaturgy of Film Form” and “ The Fourth Dimension in Cinema”8), as well as through the explicit dialectical montage of texts and images published in the journal Documents in 1929 and 1930.9
The roots of this methodological affinity are to be found in cer- tain events in Eisenstein’s life, interwoven with his publishing en- deavours for the magazine Documents, in particular the publica- tion of thirty frames from The General Line in a two-page spread in the fourth issue of 1930.10 Along with an introduction to the film by Robert Desnos, the stills are prefaced by Georges-Henri Rivière, who thanks Eisenstein for having “agreed to cut his film, thus providing readers with a completely new illustration, chosen and laid out by the author himself.”11
* In the early 1930s, Eisenstein’s intel- lectual and personal vicissitudes became entwined first with those of the photo- grapher and filmmaker Jean Painlevé (known for his documentary work on underwater fauna), and later with those of Georges Bataille and the group of intellectuals and anthropologists who animated the journal Documents.
Shortly after their meeting, Eisenstein and Painlevé developed a strong friendship, as evidenced by the correspondence they kept up throughout Eisenstein’s travels in the United States and Mexico (1930 –32), up until his return to the Soviet Union.
On Eisenstein’s diary page dated January 2, 1930, where he draws a crab that looks like a “praying Buddha,” which Painlevé ironically mentions in the commentary that accompanies one of his films, Hyas et Sténorinques (Hyas and Stenorhynchus, 1928). Finally, Eisenstein concludes his notes by stating: “Three days ago I was at Painlevé’s. He blows up the images to 200 times larger.” RGALI, 1923-2-1116, 1.
23 declaring the great distance separating his “way of work-
ing” from that of the surrealists,* but also identifying a few points of contact: Eisenstein notes that both he and the surreal- ists draw on the “subconscious,” albeit investigating it using diametrically opposed methods.15 In a passage from Eisenstein’s diaries published in this book, Eisenstein recalls this episode:
“Montage is the construction of images for emulation by the viewer’s thought process with all the resultings. Historically, it [montage] has the ‘correct’ (practical) premises. Almost simultaneously with my statement of this final thesis (see my lectures at the Film Society — December 1929), Surréalisme made ‘automatic writing’ films: Un Chien Andalou [An An- dalusian Dog ] — the process of thinking spread out onto a strip of film (cf. my criticism — the Sorbonne lecture, February 1930! — meaning, that it is the direct opposite of my formula).
The intermediate link can be found.” **
Ethnography is another key interest shared by Eisenstein and the authors of Documents, as can be noted in Eisenstein’s line of thinking in the 1930s and in the articles published in Documents by Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris, Paul Rivet, Georges-Henri Rivière, and others, in 1930. The fact that Eisenstein was already reading about ethnography while in Paris — as well as through- out his trip to the Americas, and especially while shooting his Mexican film— underscores this convergence with the group of ethnologists affiliated with Documents.
In addition to his experiences within the circle of the anthro- pological journal Mexican Folkways and his own journey through Mexico, Eisenstein also explored the oeuvre of Lévy- Bruhl, chiefly his book Primitive Mentality,16 which, as he relates in a chapter of his Memoirs called “Epopée,” he had managed to get hold of during his time in Paris. The concepts of prelogical modes of consciousness and sensory thinking were of particular interest to Eisenstein. This “sensory” con- sciousness — as Lévy-Bruhl writes in Primitive Mentality — corresponds to the non-analytical stage of the thought process,
* Here Eisenstein likely refers to Breton’s
“orthodox” surrealist group.
** See Eisenstein’s diaries, published in this book, 39.
Later, on February 17, 1930, Eisenstein gave a lecture on “intel- lectual cinema” at the Sorbonne, which should have coincided with the screening of the film The General Line, organized by the vice president of the French Psychoanalytic Society, René Allendy. However, the film was banned by the prefect of Paris, Jean Chiappe, while the text of the lecture was immediately published by La Revue du Cinéma under the title “The Princi- ples of New Russian Cinema.”12
The lecture was attended by many intellectuals of the time, and two thousand people gathered to see the film,13 probably including Georges Bataille, Jean Painlevé * and others who colla- borated with Documents.14 The text of the lecture contains the kernel of Eisenstein’s reflection on the power of “intellectual cin- ema” as being the only form capable of bringing about a dialectical synthesis between concrete/emotional and intellectual elements, thereby restoring “emotional fullness” to the intellectual pro- cess. In another important passage of the same text, Eisenstein replies to the question “Que pensez-vous du surréalisme?”(What do you think of Surrealism?) in a cogent manner, immediately
b5–b8 b3, b4
b10 “Janus Masks from Cross-River (Cameroun)” by Eckart von Sydow, D 2, no. 6 (1930) b9 “Acephalic god beneath two animal heads (Cabinet des Médailles) ” in
Bataille, “Le bas materialisme et la gnose,” D 2, no. 1 (1930)
24
in which causal connections are eschewed. To characterize the “primitive mentality,” Lévy-Bruhl employs the terms mystic (i.e., based upon a faith in supernatural forces) and pre-logical.
By this he does not mean to suggest that primitive mentality comes before or is opposed to logical thought, but rather that it does not fully obey the laws of logic, in particular the identity principle. The primitive thought, formed by collective repre- sentations that are not purely intellectual, can then open it- self up to contradictions: it obeys a principle which is not part of rational logic, namely the “law of participation,” by virtue of which a human being can be both him- or herself and some- thing else. In a passage from Les fonctions mentales dans les so- ciétés inferieurs (How Natives Think ), 1910, Lévy-Bruhl clarifies this argument with an imaginative example:
“The same ideas are at the bottom of the universal belief which affirms that certain men become animals — tigers, wolves, bears, etc. — whenever they put on the skins of such. To the primitives, such an idea is wholly mystic. They are not con- cerned with knowing whether the man, in becoming a tiger, ceases to be a man, and later, when he becomes a man again, is no longer a tiger. That which is of paramount importance to them is the mystic virtue which makes these individuals ‘participate,’ to use Malebranche’s term, of both tiger and man in certain conditions, and consequently more formidable than men who are never anything but men, and tigers which are always tigers only.”17
It was during his time in Paris that Eisenstein first discovered the “ethnographic” leaning of surrealism, particularly through the mediation of Georges-Henri Rivière. In May 1928, the jour- nal Beaux-Arts published an article by Georges Henri-Rivière — who founded the Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires in 1937 — devoted to the Exposition d’Antiquités Américaines du Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a show that he had contributed to organizing, and the success of which earned him the nomination of deputy director of the Trocadéro Musée d’Ethnographie by its new director Paul Rivet.* It was in the “eth- nographic” context of this exhibition that Rivière met Bataille:
the exhibition was in fact accompanied by a special number of the Cahiers de la République des Lettres des Sciences et des Arts entitled “L’art Précolombien. Amérique avant Cristophe Colomb,” in which Bataille published one of his earliest writings, “L’Amérique disparue” ( Extinct America).18 This text will prove fundamental to understanding both the impor- tance of ethnographic studies in the content of Documents
* Paul Rivet was the founder of the Musée de l’Homme in 1938.
25 (in particular in relationship to the so-called “ethnographic
surrealism”19 and the numerous articles devoted to the criti- cal re-elaboration of the question of the influence of “primitiv- ism” in the artistic avant-garde), and the subsequent develop- ment of Bataille’s anthropological reflections on the notion of dépense and the importance of the sacrificial economy in Aztec civilization.
At this point we could note Bataille’s remark in an article en- titled “Pieds Nickelés,” * in which he compares the sacred figure of the god Quetzalcoatl to the childish, cruel characters found in the Pieds Nickelés comic strip created by Louis Fourton for the magazine L’Épatant : “A Mexican god, like Quetzalcoatl, who enjoys letting himself slide from the top of the mountains sitting on a small board, more than any other thing expressible with the unfortunate vocabulary of usual words, always seemed to me to be a Pied Nickelé (Nickel-plated foot)” [“Un dieu mex- icain, ainsi Quetzalcoatl, qui s’amuse à se laisser glisser du haut des montagnes assis sur une petite planche, plus que toute au- tre chose exprimable avec le malheureux répertoire des mots usuels, m’a toujours paru être un Pied Nickelé”].
This helps us to appreciate the extent of the affinity between Bataille’s written work and Eisenstein’s vision of the Mexican deity, and more generally his views of the eroticism and cruelty of Mexico itself. Eisenstein had read his early texts from the late 1920s, including Histoire de l’œil (which he himself mentions in his diaries and in his book Method when commenting on a series of iconographic associations with the image of an eye). 20
* The article was published in the fourth issue of Documents in 1930; it was placed right before the frames from The General Line in that same issue. Bataille, “Pieds Nickelés,” Documents 4 (1930), 215–16.
As he notes in his diary, Eisenstein met Georges Bataille, the “Gnosticism connoisseur ,” in January 1930 “chez Georges-Henri Rivière.”Rivière was indeed with Eisenstein when the Russian visited the Trocadéro Musée, where he was fascinated by “arti- facts from the Congo and Australia.”21
This anthropological convergence between Eisenstein and Bataille does not totally explain the meaning and reach of Eisenstein’s “anthropological gaze.” Eisenstein’s Mexican “field- work” experiences would complicate, enrich and challenge many of the intellectual suggestions he gathered in Paris. Far removed from the tendency to aestheticize the presentation of ethnographic materials — evident in a few texts published in Documents, such as the article by Eckard von Sydow, “Masques- Janus du Cross-River (Cameroon),”22 the group of artists, anthro- pologists and intellectuals behind the journal Mexican Folk- ways would, from this point of view, significantly influence what we defined in the introduction to this book as Eisenstein’s “lay anthropology” perspective.
b9
b10
b13, b14 Mexican Footage (Gosfilmofond ) b11 Mexican Footage (Gosfilmofond )
b12 “Janus Masks from Cross-River (Cameroun)” by Eckart von Sydow, D 2, no. 6 (1930)
26
The Encounter with Mexico: Beyond the “Exoticizing Clichés”
Eisenstein’s first direct contact with Mexico and its cultural syncretism correspond to a fourteen-month journey through the country, which fueled the filmmaker’s curiosity about and interest in Mexican culture and art.
In Mexico, Eisenstein had the chance to relate his Mexican experience to the anthropological knowledge he had acquired during his Parisian stay, from the ethnographic books he con- tinued to read throughout his time in the US and Mexico (in addition to Lévy-Bruhl’s book he bought in Paris, Eisenstein reveals in the “Bookshops”23 chapter of his Memoirs that he also brought to Mexico the volumes of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, purchased in the United States), or through his contro- versial contacts with the Bataillean strain of Surrealism.24
In 1927, after meeting Diego Rivera in Moscow, Eisenstein became acquainted with the art of Mexican muralists, which he saw in Edward Weston and Tina Modotti’s photographs for Anita Brenner’s book Idols Behind Altars (1929). With his collaborators Tisse and Aleksandrov, Eisenstein arrived in Mexico City in December 1930. After discussions with the Interior Ministry regarding the formalities of his Mexican film project, the Ministry of Education engaged Adolfo Best-Mau- gard, an artist and intellectual with close ties to Diego Rivera, and the writer and journalist Augustín Aragón Leiva, to ac- company Eisenstein as translators and consultants.25 Leiva was special assistant to Eisenstein on the production, serving in the capacity of guide, interpreter and adviser on Mexican folklore and history. In a text entitled Eisenstein on Mexico,26 he points to a fundamental aspect of Eisenstein’s “anthropological gaze,”
namely his capacity to be simultaneously immune to both the “exoticizing clichés,”27 so common in the discourse on primi- tivism at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to the documentary approach of ethnographical films. With Que viva Mexico!, Eisenstein could develop a completely new attitude on Mexican culture and society, rejecting “the exotic, which has been the passion of all tourists and superficial writers who have visited Mexico in the last hundred years … The film is a poem of a sociological character, rather than an interpretative essay on Mexican evolution. With its deep significance and form, I consider it a new type of genre in cinematography, with no antecedents, and one that immediately achieves perfection.
Also, a very difficult film to surpass or even to imitate.”28 This is why Leiva calls the film a “poem of a sociological char- acter” rather than an “interpretative essay on Mexican evolu- tion.” These ideas are indeed apparent in Eisenstein’s view of Mexican society. The Mexican footage reveals an impressive
27 Mexico: The “Anachronic Syncretism” of the Images
Despite the ideological constraints imposed by both the So- viet authorities and the American sponsors of the film, with their bottom-line considerations, during his Mexican period Eisenstein did enjoy a few moments of great creative freedom.
Thus his Mexican experience turns out to have been a path to- wards a montage of idols and altars, of pagan gods and rituals of Christian ceremonies, a step in the development of a dialectic that can be described as both a regressive and an ecstatic expe- rience. This dialectic was central to his reflections on montage in the 1930s: a biological regression towards carnality — the pri- meval cruelty of animal and human sacrifice — and the ecstat- ic-religious syncretism manifested in Eisenstein’s idea of the simultaneous coexistence of pre-Columbian and Catholic rites.
Anita Brenner’s book was the first work to document the intrinsic association between art and religion in Mexico from prehistory through to the 1920s. Eisenstein had read Idols Behind Altars just prior to his arrival in Mexico, and used it as
* The monument is located at the intersection of Avenida de los Insurgentes and Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City.
A work by Francisco Jiménez and Miguel Noreña in the “neoindigenismo” style, it was meant to promote the new govern- ment of Porfirio Díaz.
collection of variations of the gesture of turning one’s head: we see it done by masked and unmasked faces, in Christian and pa- gan dances, contemporary faces juxtaposed with monumental ruins of Aztec and Maya cultures.
Several segments from the Mexican footage illuminate the anthropological character of Eisenstein’s look at Mexican his- tory and culture, in particular the idea of an anthropology of the human face.29 Many sequences of the film shed light on Eisenstein’s outstanding cartography of expressive movements and articulate the transformative power of bodies in his work, unleashing their potential for rhythmic and ecstatic transforma- tions: from face to mask, from body to skeleton, from human figure to architecture, from animal to vegetal physiognomy. An example is the intense and expressive close-up of the faces of three young workers—emblematic incarnations of modern Mexico—
standing out against the backdrop of history from his Mexican film material. Here the materiality of the faces actualizes and embodies an image of the past, connecting them to the episode of the “martyrdom of Cuauhtémoc,” the last Mexican ruler of Tenochtitlan, represented in the bas-relief behind them.*
Eisenstein’s anthropological gaze is grounded in a stratified composition of spatial-temporal elements: an “anachronic gaze”
through which the construction of the fundamental elements of Mexican history and society, “considered as a whole time, is dissolved in a combination of epochs.”
b11
b12
b13, b14
b16, b17 “Sacrifice of heart-extraction (Codex Vaticanus, Library of Vatican)” and “Nenenepiltequilizili, tongue piercing, rite of blood oblation (Codex Letellier, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris),” in Herve, “Sacrifices humains du Centre-Amérique,” D 2, no. 4 (1930)
b15 Frontispiece, Anita Brenner, Idols behind Altars. Modern Mexican Art and its Cultural Roots ( New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929)
28
a guide throughout his time there. 30 As Brenner states in her book, “religion has always been the dynamo of Mexican art;
idols on altars, crosses on mountains, idols behind crosses.”
This sort of “anachronic syncretism,” characteristic of Mexican culture and landscape, is evoked in an important passage from the book, underlined and annotated by Eisenstein, dedicated to the work of the artist Manuel Martínez Pintao: “Here all styles are constantly being repeated; there is primitive, Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, Impressionism, Cubism, classicism, realism, conscious and unconscious, all simultaneously.”31
Idols Behind Altars has three sections, each corresponding to dominant periods in Mexican art: the syncretism of pre- Hispanic and Catholic art and religion (from ancient Maya ruin sites and temples to sixteenth and seventeenth-century monas- teries and churches); the art, the beliefs, and the architecture of the Mexican Colonial period, culminating with an interpretation of the “prophetic” works of the illustrator Guadalupe Posada;
and finally, an examination of the return of native values and the Mexican Renaissance artists — the muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros, as well as Francisco Goitia, and Jean Charlot — all of whom were friends or acquaintances of Weston and Modotti.
Mexican Drawings. The “dessin automatique”
During his stay in Mexico, the dialectic between regression and ecstasy is also clearly apparent at another level of Eisen- stein’s creative process: his practice and use of drawing. He had stopped using drawings eight years earlier, when transitioning from theatre to cinema, but started again in Mexico in the in- novative form of automatic writing, corresponding to the sur- realist écriture de l’inconscient. In a chapter from his Memoirs called “How I Learned to Draw,” Eisenstein reveals: “One day I shall have to analyze the ‘thematic’ course of my drawings.
But there are more holes here than cheese. The most revealing and shamelessly frank drawings are torn into tiny shreds almost straight away, which is a pity: they were drawn almost auto- matically. But how obscene they were!!”
In addition to the surrealist écriture de l’inconscient, an- other influence permeates Eisenstein’s drawings: that of the Marquis de Sade .32 Like other books purchased in Europe, the United States and Mexico during the trip that kept him away from the Soviet Union for nearly three years ( for example D. H.
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Plumed Serpent ), Sade’s The New Justine accompanied Eisenstein during his long European and American journey, and probably also influenced
29 his ironical and cruel vision of Mexico. A clear sign of this influ-
ence can be seen in the series of “Mexican Drawings” included in his “Secret Drawings.”33 The culture, history, and geography of Mexico are revealed in a privileged context and connected by Eisenstein to the aspect of intimate and uninhibited creative activity, full of sadism, masochism, cannibalism, cruelty, sensu- ality, pornography, and blasphemy.
In some of the “Secret Drawings” — for example Machin sadiste, Cruauté and Plaisir masochiques, and even the series in which appears the theme of pierced (Defeated Cyclops *), decapitated ( Salomé* holding and kissing the severed head of John the Baptist), and crucified bodies (the Stigmates * series as well as the draw- ings devoted to bullfighting where the bull and the bullfighter become in turn the victims of crucifixion) — one finds, in fact, mani- festations of explicitly sadomasochistic acts, often modeled on a figurative conflict between Eros and Thanatos: drawings that “could illustrate one of the episodes of Sade’s 120 Journées de Sodom.”34 An example of this ever-hopelessly ironic, sadistic / cannibalistic drive that Eisenstein expresses through his drawing is the series Écorchés vifs (Skinned alive)* as evidenced by a passage from his diaries ( published in this book) dated May 22, 1931:
“I am much improving in drawing. Today I did my series of ‘skinned alive’ (stimulated by the expression of Emile, to which I subscribe with both hands, not to say — on all fours! ) Showed it to Best. (30 pesos a day as assistant to me.) Best says that the ancient Aztec tradition (as seen in ‘codices’) is to flay the enemy (the defeated one) and, while it’s still warm, to put the skin on yourself ( like a dry suit).
Hands: Eyes:
I was reminded of that now. Cannibalism is consuming, taking your enemy inside (cf. my thoughts in the vegetarian cafe- teria ‘Home Comfort’ — Pokrovka St., Moscow, and Chateau de La Sarraz, [owned by] Mme de Mandrot, Lausanne, Switzer- land.)Cannibalism as a form of immortalization — ‘formal’ as opposed to ‘substantial’ by decoration of constitutive elements ( modern processes) for the benefit of the ‘outside form.’” **
In a note that precedes this passage, Eisenstein refers to the biog- raphy of Emile Zola written by Bertrand de Jouvenel: “Je ne fais pas du cinéma — je fais du Mexique et du moi. (Aujourd’hui la Vie de Zola )” [ “I am not making cinema — I am making Mexico and myself. Today {reading} The Life of Zola ”].It is in this book that Eisenstein finds the expression “ecorché vif ,” *** where
* See the drawings in this book.
** See the passage from Eisenstein’s diaries, published in this book, 56.
*** Bertrand de Jouvenel, Vie de Zola ( Paris: Valois, 1931). In this regard, Arun Khopkar stresses that “when Eisenstein writes about color he uses expressions which burn the color impressions on your skin. In fact, his use of a phrase from Zola, écorché vif, to describe the shock of an encounter with a Greco canvas is applicable both to his use of color and to his descriptions of the experience of color .”See Arun Khopkar, “Reflections and Refractions —A Refracted View of Eisenstein’s Reflections on Colour,”
India International Centre Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1991): 108.
b15
b17
b16
b22 Episodes for Study, Leyda b18 Illustrations by Jean Charlot for MF 1, no. 3 (1925)
b19–b21 Episodes for Study, Leyda
30
de Jouvenel describes Zola’s hypersensitivity: “Ah! The gener- ation of 1830 knew how to support itself, to sustain one an- other! But he’s alone. Ecorché vif , he does not go out anymore, speaks no more to anyone, locks himself up in Rougon with a maniac stubbornness.”35
31 of both the camera and the subjects can awaken a “sensory”
dimension of thinking in the viewer. As Leyda points out in one of the intertexts in his study version, Eisenstein emphasizes “the absorption of Christian rites into traditional Mexican rites,” and “after observing several modern survivals of ancient Indian reli- gions” makes “a synthetic reconstruction of an Easter ceremo- ny that masked a more ancient ritual.” Leyda is describing how Eisenstein rethinks the ceremony of the Stations of the Cross, by filming the long procession of pilgrims repeating the journey of the Passion along paths leading to Catholic sanctuaries built on top of pre-Columbian temples .38
The anachronic syncretism of Mexican culture re-emerges in ecstatic dances, marked by circular and repetitive rhythms, that accompany ceremonies in honor of the Virgin, and in the celebra- tion of Corpus Christi, which re-enacts Saint James’ forced “con- version of the heathen Moors” ( a danced allegory of the Spanish conquest of Mexico).39 Likewise, the syncretic and archaic char- acter of the dance is more than ever present in bullfighting, with its deadly face-off between the bull’s violent ferocity and the matador’s androgynous elegance, a topic to which Eisenstein would return extensively in the series of drawings dedicated to the theme of the corrida made during his Mexican sojourn.40
The Fiesta episode, dedicated to the memory of Francisco de Goya ,* was planned as a collage of all of the most Spanish elements in Mexican life. The central action is one afternoon’s bullfight program: “The first of the four novellas: its subject and style were drawn from the peculiarly Spanish elements in Mexi- can life. Three characters of its story are involved in a triangular drama (a jealous husband, an unfaithful wife, and a picador, Baranito).” The polarities in the background are the Church and the bullfighting arena. Leyda introduces the matador dance filmed by Eisenstein with these words: “The ‘paso mariposa’ — the butterfly step — was filmed with all variants, either because Eisenstein planned to give it special attention (for its resemblance to ballet ) or because it was a Liceaga specialty.” An erotic and repetitive choreography, the Liceaga ballet is performed to a continuous back-and-forth rhythm, animated and amplified by a whole range of alternating approaches and withdrawals, in a crescendo towards the contact, culminating in a final thrust .41
The incomplete and unfinished nature of the Mexican foot- age also points to one of the most fascinating and controver- sial aspects of Eisenstein’s way of thinking and writing, which often moves through endless digressions and linguistic mon- tages. Incompleteness, and the incessant activity of breaking apart and recomposing that underlies it, is at the very root of the montage process.
* The single parts of Que Viva Mexico!, in certain cases, were to be dedicated to an artist: the Prologue was dedicated to David Alfaro Siquieros (it embodies the composition of his fresco “The Worker’s Burial”); Sandunga to Jean Charlot;
Fiesta to Francisco de Goya; Soldadera to José Clemente Orozco.
The Filming of Que viva Mexico! . The Unlimited Montage36 The filming of Que viva Mexico! has been defined by Valeri
Bossenko “an authentic, tragic epic of world cinema.” The trag- ic nature of the events related to the film seems to have carried over into the saga of the Mexican footage and the editing of the successive versions based on this material. The project was funded by the American socialist writer Upton Sinclair and his wife, Mary Craig Sinclair. Due to costs overruns and politi- cal difficulties (on November 21, 1931, Sinclair received a tele- gram from Stalin in which Eisenstein was accused of being a deserter ), and after filming over 200,000 feet of film rushes with a running time of nearly forty hours, Que viva Mexico! was left unfinished and unedited by Eisenstein, who had to go back to the Soviet Union in May 1932.
Over the years, the Mexican film became the object of repeat- ed manipulations: in 1933 and 1934, Sol Lesser, in agreement with Sinclair, partially edited the two episodes entitled Maguey and The Day of Death, from which he was able to extract two films: Thunder over Mexico (1933) and Day of the Dead (1934). In 1939, Marie Seton, Eisenstein’s biographer, bought part of the footage from Sinclair and edited her own version entitled Time in the Sun. This was followed in 1941–42 by William F. Kruse’s Mexican Symphony, only partially based on Eisenstein’s footage. In 1954, after Eisenstein’s death in 1948, Sinclair donated all the footage to the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1955, Jay Leyda — a former student in Eisenstein’s film course at the Gosudarstyennyi Institut Kinimatografii (GIK) in the 1930s — edited the 225-minute-long study version Eisen- stein’s Mexican Film: Episodes for Study. In 1979, on the occasion of the 6th Moscow International Film Festival, Alexandrov used the Mexican footage for his own version of Que viva Mexico!. In 1998, the filmmaker Oleg Kovalov presented another edition of the film, Mexican Fantasy. Film director Lutz Becker has recently acquired the rights of all film material from Upton Sinclair’s estate in order to make another version of the film.37
In the Mexican footage we can note how, especially in the sequences dedicated to ritual dances, pilgrims’ processions and the matador’s dance in the corrida, the rhythmic movements
b18
b19–b21
b22
Stills from Episodes for Study, Leyda
32
In his Theory of Montage (1937–40),42 written in a completely different historical and biographical context from that of the Mexican journey, Eisenstein rethinks the issue of the birth of montage. He now sees it in the light of a principle of “unlimit- ed” decomposition and “recomposition” — meaning the endless process of the dynamic reconstruction of a new unit—and of the ancient myth of the original unity of the body of Dionysus and its subsequent dismemberment. In other words, as a pre- lude to a new and superior “divine and incorruptible unity in contrast to the mortal and contingent one.” Eisenstein recogniz- es in montage — and in its fundamental process of decomposing and re-constituting — the same force that lies at the root of the myths and mysteries of Dionysus, in which the body of the god is first ripped apart by the Titans and later recomposed into a completely transfigured image.
The myth of Dionysus, remarks Eisenstein, represents the thresh- old between the art of theater and the art of cinema: “The actual cult action gradually fades into the symbol of the rite and then becomes an artistic image.” The tribal unit, Eisen- stein points out, is formed when the tribal leader, after being ritually killed and eaten, re-establishes the unity of his body in the “body” of the tribe that has eaten him. In the subsequent development of the arts, the “birth of the tragedy,” according to Eisenstein, no longer has anything to do with the myth or the “sacred action” of the dismembered god Dionysus, but relies solely upon one fundamental process, destined to con- tinue without end: dismemberment and recomposition, which form the anthropological principle of montage.
33
a4 1 Sergei Eisenstein, “The Rhythmic
Drum,” in Method, vol. 1, ed. Naum Kleiman ( Moscow: Muzej Kino, 2002), 183–93.
2 On the relationship between cinema and anthropology, see Teresa Castro,
“Penser le ‘cinéma animiste’ avec Jean Epstein,” Jean Epstein. Actualités et postérités, eds. Roxanne Hamery and Éric Thouvenel (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016), 247–60.
3 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 5.
4 Oksana Bulgakowa, “Self Portrait as Someone Else,” in Sergei Eisenstein, Disney, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa and Dietmar Hochmuth, trans. Dustin Condren ( Berlin: PotemkinPress, 2011), 141.
5 André Breton, “Second Manifeste du surréalisme,” La Révolution surréaliste 12 (1929). English translation: Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
6 Sergei Eisenstein, “Epopée,” in Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 4, ed.
R. Taylor ( London: British Film Institute
& Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1995), 213.
7 See Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris:
Macula, 1995), 280–333.
8 Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot”
(1929), in Selected Works, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1988), 138–50. “Perspectives” (1929), ibid., 151–160; “The Dramaturgy of Film Form”
[“The Dialectical Approach to Film Form”]
(1929), ibid., 161–180; “The Fourth Dimen- sion in Cinema” (1929), ibid., 181–94. See François Albera, “Stuttgart,” in Eisenstein et le constructivisme russe (Lausanne:
L’Âge d’homme, 1990), 13–109.
9 Documents [1929–1930], 2 vols., reprinted Denis Hollier (Paris: Éditions Jean Michel Place, 1991).
10 Ibid. 4 (1930): 218 –19.
11 Georges-Henri Rivière, “La ligne générale,” Documents 4 (1930): 217.
12 Eisenstein, “The Principles of the New Russian Cinema,” in Selected Works, vol. 1, 195–202.
13 Oksana Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography (San Francisco:
PotemkinPress, 2001), 105.
14 See Marie Rebecchi, “Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Painlevé. Science is Animation,” Critical Quarterly 59, no. 1 (April 2017): 47–59.
15 Eisenstein, “The Principles of the New Russian Cinema,” 201–2.
16 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalité primitive (Paris: Alcan, 1922); English edition: The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, trans. P. G. Riviere (New York:
Harper and Row, 1975). See also Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 34–7.
17 Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inferieurs (Paris: Alcan, 1910), 104–5. English translation: How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (London: Allen und Unwin, 1926). See Frédéric Keck, “Causalité mentale et perception de l’invisible. Le concept de participation chez Lucien Lévy-Bruhl,” in La Révue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 130, no. 3 (2005): 303–22.
18 Georges Bataille, “L’Amérique disparue,” in Cahiers de la République des lettres, des sciences et des arts 11 (1928);
Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I, Premiers écrits, 1922–1940 ( Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 152–58. English translation: A. Michelson, October 36 (1986): 3–9.
19 James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (1981):
539–64.
20 In her commentary on the text, Oksana Bulgakowa emphasizes that this is the novel by French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille, Histoire de l’œil [Story of the Eye ], published under the pseudonym Lord Auch. An erotic and provocative romance à la Sade, Histoire de l’œil establishes a series of metonymic equivalents, analyzed by Roland Barthes in La métaphore de l’œil (1963). Eisenstein interprets Bataille’s series of associations as metonymic phenomena stemming from his own conception of the pars pro toto, or by the psychoanalytic associa- tions on which these phenomena insist.
See Eisenstein, Metod / Die Methode, ed.
Oksana Bulgakowa, vol. 2 ( Berlin-San Francisco: PotemkinPress, 2008), 595.
21 Eisenstein, “Epopée,” 208–9.
22 See Documents 6 (1930): 321–28.
23 Eisenstein, “Bookshops” in Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, 372.
24 See Marie Rebecchi, “1929 –1932:
de Paris à Tehuantepec. Eisenstein et la vision surréaliste du Mexique,” in Eisenstein. Leçons mexicaines. Cinéma, anthropologie, archéologie, eds. Laurence Schifano and Antonio Somaini (Paris:
Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2016 ), 101–15.
25 See William Harrison Richardson, Mexico Through Russian Eyes, 1806 –1940 (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press 1988), 166–68.
26 Augustín A. Leiva, “Eisenstein’s film on Mexico,” in Experimental cinema 4, no. 4 (1933): 5–6.
27 See Andrea Noble, “¡Que viva Mexico!:
Eisenstein’s Travels in Mexico,” in Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 12, no. 2–3 (August–December, 2006): 179.
28 Leiva, “Eisenstein’s film on Mexico,” 5.
29 Roland Barthes, “Visages et figures,”
Esprit 204 (1953): 1–11. See Noa Steimatsky, The Face on Film (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017).
30 See Marie Rebecchi, “Anita Brenner,”
in Reading with Sergei Eisenstein, eds. Ada Ackerman and Luka Arsenjuk (Montreal:
Caboose, forthcoming).
31 Anita Brenner, Idols Behind Altars (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), 94.
32 Eisenstein, “ To the Illustrious Memory of the Marquis,” in Beyond the Stars, 516.
33 Jean-Claude Marcadé and Galia Ackerman, eds., S. M. Eisenstein: dessins secrets ( Paris: Seuil, 1999).
34 Ibid., 37–38.
35 De Jouvenel, Vie de Zola, 123.
36 The story of Que viva Mexico! is well documented in Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman, eds., The Making and Unmaking of “Que Viva México! ( Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 1970);
Inga Karetnikova and Leon Steinmetz, Mexico According to Eisenstein (Albuquer- que: University of New Mexico Press, 1991). See also Julia Vassilieva, “Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Qué viva México! through time: Historicizing value judgement,” in Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24, no. 5 (2010): 693–70.
37 See Salazkina, In Excess, 2–4.
38 Antonio Somaini, Ejzensˇtejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio (Turin:
Einaudi, 2011), 128– 40.
39 See the intertexts in Leyda, Eisenstein’s Mexican Film: Episodes for Study (1957, 225 min.).
40 Ada Ackerman, “Les représentations graphiques de la corrida par Èjzensˇtejn,”
Revue des études slaves 1 (2007): 34.
41 See Michel Leiris, Miroir de la tauromachie. Quatre illustrations d’André Masson (Saint-Clément de Rivière:
Fata Morgana, 2013, reprint 1981).
42 Eisenstein, Selected Works. Vol. 2.
Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, trans.
Michael Glenny (London: BFI Publishing, 1994), 168–72. Italian edition: Sergei M. Ejzensˇtejn, “La nascita del montaggio:
Dioniso,” in Teoria generale del montaggio, ed. Pietro Montani (Venice: Marsilio, 1985), 226–31. See Montani, “Il pensiero denso e il principio dionisiaco del mon- taggio,” in Fuori campo (Urbino: Quattro venti, 1993), 61–79.
35 The folder entitled “Diaries, Notebooks” is perhaps one of the
largest within the vast corpous of Eisenstein’s papers at the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art ( RGALI ). It is cer- tainly the most extensive and challenging part of Eisenstein’s still unpublished writings: challenging because of its highly frag- mentary but simultaneously epistemically adventurous charac- ter. The Mexican journey constitutes a crucial caesura in the mode of Eisenstein’s theoretical work. While in the 1920s all of his theoretical reflections — beside the immediately published articles and manifestos — took place in these “diaries” and “note- books,” his return from Mexico in 1932 marks a methodical “start” for his concerted construction of a theoretical oeuvre—
albeit one which nevertheless remained unpublished during his lifetime.1
Mexico not only revived Eisenstein’s drawing practice, but also stimulated his writing pace, comprising thirty, sometimes forty diary pages per day. Nowhere does the rhythmic compo- sition unfold more dynamically than in these Mexican diaries, which strive at all times to establish the “connection of every- thing with everything.”2 It bears notice that the associative and rhizomatic character of these diaries runs through his entire late work, from 1932 to 1948, the year of Eisenstein’s death.
In any case, the diaries from Mexico should be read as labile constellations conforming neither to the écriture de soi of the typical personal diary, nor to the conceptual astringency of theoretical work. What is the use value of this type of writing?
Taking into consideration Michel Foucault’s concept of hypom- nemata, we can understand these diaries in the first place as aides-mémoires; that is, as “supports for memory” in the broad- est sense. In Greek antiquity, this term designated a structured collection of notes, citations and excerpts that served at once as a memory bank for its author, and as an inventory of mate- rial for producing future texts. “The writing of hypomnemata,”
according to Foucault, is “a regulated and voluntary practice of the disparate. It is a choice of heterogeneous elements.”3 As a series of experimental configurations, such materialized mne- monic supports can acquire a remarkable epistemic force. Such is the case with Eisenstein’s diaries.
Hors de soi . Eisenstein’s Mexican Diaries
Elena Vogman
c
1 Within these complex theoretical projects, published by Naum Kleiman in Russian within the series of Muzej Kino and Èjzensˇtejn Centr, should be men- tioned: Montage (2000), Method, vol. 1 and 2 (2002), The Non-indifferent Nature, vol. 1 and 2 (2004). “Start” is the title of Eisenstein’s chapter in Method, dedicated to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe whose article on “concrete thinking” (Gegen- ständliches Denken ) inspired Eisenstein's consequent writing. Eisenstein, Method, ed. Bulgakowa, 191–199.
2 Eisenstein, Method, ed. Bulgakowa, 240.
3 Michel Foucault, “L’écriture de soi,”
Dits et écrits , vol. 4, ( Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 415– 430.
