Sergei Eisenstein

Partant des débats entre « film joué » et « film non-joué » ayant entouré la sortie d’Octobre d’Eisenstein en 1927, nous interrogeons la notion de punctum de Barthes à travers le rapprochement qui a pu en être fait de celle d’attraction. Remettant en question l’existence même du punctum, d’une vérité intrinsèque de l’image, nous proposons avec Merleau-Ponty de cesser de considérer l’image cinématographique comme une « seconde chose » pour en faire valoir la rencontre, seule capable de nous en faire comprendre la réalité. Nous rappelons alors la figure de « précession réciproque » évoquée par Merleau-Ponty dans L’Œil et l’esprit, qu’il identifie à la « vision même », pour montrer combien elle peut nous aider à saisir les potentialités de l’image cinématographique déjà entrevues par Eisenstein qui voyait en elle un phénomène de « momification dynamique ».

“‘The Underlying Gesture’. Towards the Notion of Gesture in Jean d’Udine and Sergei Eisenstein”. In: Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina, Valentina Valente (eds.), From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media. Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2019, 102-115.

My interest in this essay will be focused on the studying of an original score written near to the end of the silent period: Edmund Meisel’s score for the first release in Berlin of Battleship Potemkin (1926) and abrief commentary on a second score written by Nicolaj Kryukov, for the thirtieth anniversary release of the film in Moscow, in 1956. Kryukov’s score is not the only one to be written after Eisenstein’s death in 1948.For instance, for the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in 1967 Grigori Alexandrov reconstructed the original version of the film “October” on the basis of Eisenstein’s notes with a new score by Shostakovich.

In late 1929, as he developed his preparatory notes for a film called Glass House, Sergei Eisenstein considered the material significance of the glass used in the construction of camera lenses. In these notes, he reimagines the history of optics—one not founded upon the placement of an objectif before a camera obscura, but rather one that recognizes the subjective “will and intention” of the one controlling the ground glass device and the film frame (the director).

These thoughts are couched within the director’s ongoing polemic with Dziga Vertov’s kinoki and what Eisenstein saw as their theoretical overinsistence on cinematic objectivity. Against the background of his recently published essay “The Play of Objects,” this essay focuses Eisenstein's insistent slippage from the objective to the subjective through the director's proposal that the objects which fall before the subjective camera lens might be made capable of “acting” and his later writings on Walt Disney's method of animating objects.

Sergejaus Eizenšteino veikalas "Montažas" (1937) pateikia kino montažo teoriją, padarusią didžiulę įtaką pasaulio kinui ir kino teorijai, taip pat montažo priemonių bei jų analizės sąvadą. Eizenšteinas plėtoja savo kino montažo teoriją kitų menų kontekste ir patekia pavyzdžius iš dailės, architektūros, literatūros, žiniasklaidos sričių, aptikdamas montažinį mąstymą Vakarų, Rytų ir rusų meno istorijoje nuo pirmykščio laikotarpio iki avangardistų. Knyga sudomins kino, vizualumo, dailės, kultūros istorijos specialistus ir studentus, taip pat visus besidominčius šiomis sritimis.

" If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor's cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible. " Liberty and the Press, Walter Lippmann " Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today , which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. […] The shadowy idea becomes vivid; your hazy notion, let us say, of the Ku Klux Klan, thanks to Mr. Griffiths, takes vivid shape when you see the Birth of a Nation. […] I doubt whether anyone who has seen the film and does not know more about the Ku Klux Klan than Mr. Griffiths, will ever hear the name again without seeing those white horsemen. " Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann The three lectures cover three stages of the epistemological paradigm-change that the technical invention of the telecommunication of recorded movement ushered in at the turn of the twentieth century. The lectures present new evidence and arguments about the collaboration of Griffith and Wilson as well as about Hitchcock's authorship of the first Holocaust documentary and contain close-reading of cinematic examples from the films discussed.

"Il rapporto tra la prima avanguardia italiana e la coeva generazione poetica spagnola: un tema “difficile” quello che Daniele Corsi analizza, mettendo al centro della sua indagine la creazione linguistica del primo Novecento nella penisola iberica. Dopo aver tracciato un panorama storico dell'incontro tra gli intellettuali spagnoli e l’“avanguardia”, ed aver rilevato l'influenza anche lessicale del Futurismo italiano sulla produzione spagnola del periodo, l’autore si concentra sull'elaborazione dei codici retorici di sessantacinque manifesti letterari in spagnolo e in catalano dal 1909 al 1928. Il percorso termina con un’analisi degli apporti spagnoli al linguaggio ultraista, con il loro “bisogno furioso di liberare le parole”, e la “migrazione” della metafora al linguaggio filmico, con Buñuel. Né manca la valutazione di "Eliche" di Guillermo de Torre, di cui Corsi, nel 2005, è stato brillante traduttore in italiano. "Futurismi in Spagna" segna così il punto di arrivo di ricerche intraprese da un decennio, che sono orgogliosa di aver visto nascere e crescere".

Tratto dalla "Prefazione" di Maria Grazia Profeti

http://www.aracneeditrice.it/aracneweb/index.php/pubblicazione.html?item=9788854874435

Trabalho similar ao de minha dissertação Metamorfose da Linguagem, porém com algum avanço teórico, pois embora de menor fôlego, escrita um ano depois. Trata-se de tentar entender a relação possível entre o texto-fonte de prosa ficcional e sua adaptação em quadrinhos.

Following the principle of contamination of the arts, this text explores the artistic affinity between the work of Mies van der Rohe and that of Kandinskij and Ejzenštejn. The three masters, in their respective fields of expression, have investigated the different conceptions of space, coming to surprisingly similar conclusions. In support of this thesis, a universally recognized masterpiece of the Miesian production is analyzed here: the German Pavilion created for the International Exhibition in Barcelona (1929). The two volumes Punto, linea e superifice and Lezioni di regia, constitute the framework through which the reasoning is here developed.

Sergei Eisenstein's visit to Hollywood and Mexico, from 1930 to 1932, finds the famous director in rather unfamiliar territory. While his stay yielded little artistic output, in the form of an unfinished movie on Mexico, his theoretical reflections on American film and its foremost champions, Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney, count among the most fascinating, yet also contentious elements of Eisenstein's intellectual biography. A central part of his American aesthetics is his theory of »totemism«, which he develops in an intricate dialogue with the various encounters on his journey as well as from a plethora of literary references that seems to betray the agenda of his communist beginnings. The article argues that, despite its mystical overtones and logical contradictions, Eisenstein's theory of »totemism« remains connected to his earlier convictions through an attempt to reconcile his new insights with a critical social or sociological theory.

Gutiérrez, Edgardo, (2018)-Construcción de la realidad y percepción de lo real en el arte cinematográfico‖ Rigel. Revista de estética y filosofía del arte N°5 (2018): Pp. 8-29.
Construcción de la realidad y percepción de lo real en el arte cinematográfico
Construction of Reality and Perception of Real in The Cinematographic Art
Edgardo Gutiérrez  (Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires)
Resumen: En el marco del realismo filosófico Eisenstein desarrolló una teoría del montaje cinematográfico que se emparenta con las tesis estéticas que encontramos en la obra madura de Lukács. En contraste, en la obra teórica de Tarkovski hallamos propuestas antagónicas de estética del cine, que se pueden relacionar con las ideas del joven Lukács en esta materia. A su vez, encontramos que es dable asociar estas dos estéticas con los principios ontológicos contenidos en Materia y memoria de Bergson, donde se distingue la percepción habitual de la percepción atenta. Sostendremos que la primera, que supone la construcción de la realidad, es reflejada por el montaje cinematográfico según lo concibe Eisenstein, mientras que la segunda, que nos brinda la percepción de lo real, se muestra en la imagen-tiempo del cine de Tarkovski.
Abstract Within the framework of philosophical realism Eisenstein developed a theory of the cinematographic montage that is related to the aesthetic theses that we find in mature work of Lukács. In contrast, in Trakovski´s theoretical work we find antagonistic proposals of aestherics of cinema, which can be related to the ideas of joung Lukács in this matter. At the same time, we find that it is possible associate this two aesthetics with the ontological principles contained in Bergson´s Matter and Memory, where the habitual perception of the attentive perception is distinguished. 1 Doctor en filosofía. Docente en UBA, UNCPBA y UNA.

A crime melodrama called as They Paid with Their Blood was the first movie that Osman Seden was behind the camera and his third film was The Flame of Vengeance which is an example of hybrid genre movie. The formal significance of this film which immingled two popular dominant genres of Turkish cinema (detective, melodrama) underlie in eclectic approach on aesthetics of editing. From the beginning to the end, the director who applied the continuity editing which is the hallmark of the film genre that is the bearer of the transparency aesthetics of classical Hollywood cinema (Institutional Mode of Representation) completely changes the editing style in the forty-seventh sequence of the film which consists of nine shots. Seden who uses three non-diegetic inserts which are not related to diegesis filmed as close-ups respects the visual aesthetics of the silent film through modern montage style.
The objective of this article to analyze aesthetics effect of Soviet Montage School on The Flame of Vengeance. Therefore, scope of this study has been narrowed down by explaining the eclectic editing style which is common to the film mentioned. The main question of the research has been determined in this framework: What is the contribution of this formal preference to style of the film, aesthetics and narrative strategy, which reminds the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein who deliberately distorts visual continuity and fluidity with montage of attractions theory and practice? The technical method of article is based on “sequence analysis”. Firstly, decoupage of the film (shots and sequences which compose the film will be classified) will be
mentioned; and then the detailed analysis of the forty-seventh sequence within the context of aesthetics of editing will be carried out through description, analysis and interpretation phases.

Recent developments in image-making techniques have resulted in a drastic blurring of the threshold between the world of the image and the real world. Immersive and interactive virtual environments have enabled the production of pictures that elicit in the perceiver a strong feeling of being incorporated in a new and autonomous world. In doing so, they negate themselves as " images-of-something " , as icons: they are veritable " an-icons ". This kind of picture undermines the mainstream representationalist paradigm of Western image theories: " presentification " rather than representation is at stake here. My paper will address this challenging iconoscape, arguing for the necessity of a specific methodological approach—namely, an-iconology.

Si la filosofía y la ciencia se han basado históricamente en el privilegio de la visión, ha sido el siglo XIX y XX, con sus nuevas tecnologías de la reproducción audiovisual las que han permitido alcanzar cotas insospechadas al modelo cognitivo basado en la imagen. Las vanguardias artísticas, aquí recogidas en las experiencias cinematográficas de Charles Chaplin y S. Esenstein, han elaborado nuevas formas de considerar, de interpretar, el mundo icónico. Mirando con ellos hemos aprendido dimensiones desconocidas del mundo. Pasolini ha reflexionado y ha practicado una forma de hacer cine como conciencia subjetiva.

This chapter offers a wide-ranging assessment of cosmopolitan interpretations of war in the European sentimental tradition. Taking impetus from Tolstoy’s reporting on the Crimean war, Gusejnova draws on the Russian formalists’ interpretation of his technique to reconstruct Tolstoy’s use of literary montage, which was later adapted in film by Sergei Eisenstein. The chapter then contextualises the history of this technique within genealogies of cosmopolitan thought on the one hand, and literary sentimentalism on the other. Drawing on works by Adam Smith and Stendhal, Gusejnova surveys some of the intellectual and literary techniques thanks to which cosmopolitan sentiments became widespread in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European societies. The capacity to generate multi-sensory experiences of compassion through montage presents the case for a fundamental connection between mediated experiences of war and nineteenth-century ideas of cosmopolitanism. The chapter proposes that greater understanding between people was driven by the literary, visual, and sonic mediation of violent wartime encounters.

Studies in epic cinema have flourished in the past decade, but one senses that
scholars take the term to be self-explanatory,
without considering its literary
origins and the variety of films that can be placed under the rubric of the
epic. Furthermore, the question of epic style has received less scholarly attention.
In this article, I propose that in order to define epic cinema we need to
look at literary, philosophical, and film theoretical discussions of the epic. In
doing so, we will be able to appreciate that epic cinema is an exceptionally
expansive umbrella term that covers many and diverse film practices, including
films (1) with epic subject matter but not epic style, (2) with epic subject
matter and epic style, (3) with epic style but not epic subject matter, and (4)
films which can be placed under the rubric of the modernist epic.

Film može da stoji sam za sebe, i njegovo značenje je vanvremensko ali u velikoj meri zavisi od društvene situacije u kojoj je prikazivan. Skoro svi kritičari složili su se sa činjenicom da je ,,Oklopnjača Potemkin”, premda ima dozu propagande, pre svega revolucionaran film u istoriji kinematografije. Neki ga kritičari vide kao delo umetnosti koje zaslužuje jedinstveno mesto u istorji filma, dok su ga drugi, poput Gebelsa videli kao čistu propagandu i sredstvo koje ima snažnu moć ubeđivanja. Danas je film postao toliko popularan i toliko se govori o njegovim tehničkim dostignućima za vreme u kom je sniman, da je u neku ruku i izgubio svoj prvobitni smisao.

Tout semble opposer la musique, qui est un art des sons et du temps, au paysage, qui se déploie dans l’espace et qui, dans notre culture, est lié principalement à la vue. Mais il est vrai que la spatialisation joue un rôle non négligeable dans la musique et qu’il existe un « paysage sonore ». Bien des artistes ont eu l’intuition d’une « musique du paysage », qui ne se confond pas avec la présence de la musique dans le paysage mais tient, selon Michel Collot, à la façon dont l’une et l’autre « nous parlent ». Ils véhiculent tous deux un sens qui s’adresse à notre sensibilité et qui ne saurait se réduire à aucune signification précise. Il se prête notamment à exprimer le lien qui unit l’homme à la nature, comme le montrent aussi bien le lied romantique allemand que le cinéma d’Eisenstein et beaucoup de compositions contemporaines.

In "Tracking Star Guitar," I examine Michel Gondry's music video for the Chemical Brothers' song as a surprising engagement with film history and theory. Deploying the device of the "track," the essay discusses film's relationship to railroad imagery, the development of music video's relationship to its sound track, and the image track of the video as an instance of Eisensteinian musical montage. Because of its intricate connection between synthesized sound and digital montage elements, the video "goes outside the normal," which permits it to aim for an ecstatic effect not commonly seen among music videos.

The formal, cinematic language specific to immersive motion pictures is an area of cinema theory that has been neglected up until now. This paper investigates a new language of cinematic montage specific to immersive cinema, somatic montage, while it examines historical precedents in the sciences, arts, and cinema of the twentieth century. We propose somatic montage as a model for developing new poetic structures in time-based works that inhabit a three-dimensional, architectonic space – a space of embodiment, motion, perception, and participation in the reception of a work of art. In this paper, we consider cinema as a four-dimensional artwork conceptually engendered by the principles of hyper-dimensions, the outgrowth of scientific discoveries made at the turn of the twentieth century. The expanded cinema mediums of fulldome cinema, immersive video and film installation, virtual reality, and extended reality, when approached as four-dimensional cinema space, allow for a spatialized, non-linear juxtaposition of the cinematic elements. Somatic montage is presented here as an extended, supra-dimensional notion of what Sergei Eisenstein called the ‘disjunctive method of narration’.

Keywords
Immersive cinema, Somatic montage, 20th-century avant-garde, Modernism, Relativity theory, N-dimensional geometry, Montage, Sergei Eisenstein

"Le sacrifice et la création dans l’œuvre d’Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille et Sergueï M. Eisenstein », in Le sacrifice et le don : Représentations dans la littérature et les arts francophones, sous la direction de Irène Chassaing et Juliette Valcke, avec la collaboration de Ziyan Yang, Moncton, Perce-Neige, 2018, pp. 131 - 150.

Comparing Chion's theory on acousmatic sound, with Eisenstein's manifesto on the use of contrapuntal sound, I examine the innovative ways in which Lang expands the space of the cinematic frame by engaging the image and sound within and beyond it in a myriad of unexpected ways.

The purpose of this essay, written from the viewpoint of a moderately supportive viewer of 'history on film', is to explore and assess what it is about the topic that provokes such expressions of hostility and defensive  enthusiasm. The strengths of film, in an historical context, are examined within the broad category of public consumption and impact. Weaknesses are considered under the headings of firstly: accuracy, authenticity and invention and secondly: interpretation. While the essay concentrates on historically-themed feature films (using Titanic and Zulu as examples) since these provoke the most discussion, the theoretical ‘reality’ genre of newsreels, propaganda films and documentaries is also evaluated.