eisenstein at 100

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http://www.jstor.org Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Coming Attractions Author(s): Annette Michelson Source: October, Vol. 88, (Spring, 1999), pp. 69-85 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779225 Accessed: 28/06/2008 06:58 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Page 1: Eisenstein at 100

http://www.jstor.org

Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Coming AttractionsAuthor(s): Annette MichelsonSource: October, Vol. 88, (Spring, 1999), pp. 69-85Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779225Accessed: 28/06/2008 06:58

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the

scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that

promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Page 2: Eisenstein at 100

Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Coming Attractions

ANNETTE MICHELSON

Ilfaut organizer le dilire.

-Pierre Boulez

1. This brief and summary account, occasioned by a centenary celebration, of some aspects of recent Eisenstein reception in both East and West will offer something of a cautionary tale, as might be inferred from its title. Attractions are, in any case, here understood not in a specifically Eisensteinian sense, but as in the terminology of American film marketing and its deployment of the "trailer," the announcement of future programming. One cannot, of course, ignore the status of Eisenstein as a privileged site of post-Soviet iconoclasm, but I shall go on to consider a rather more recent and exotic effort at reintegration within the shifting canon of cultural production and its theorization in the West.

My epigraph for these reflections is that adopted for the celebration, ten years ago, of the ninetieth anniversary of Eisenstein's birth. I begin, however, with some recall of the earlier stages of the iconoclastic movement that was then gath- ering strength within the period of glasnost' a movement directed, as we know, at many aspects of what one might well term the Culture of Revolution. This current was, however, particularly aggressive in its assault upon the resonantly innovative Soviet cinema of a privileged decade, upon the heroic era of film history of roughly 1924-33. One recalls, as an especially salient example, the Festival of Totalitarian Film, organized by the film historian Maya Turovskaya in 1989 as a kind of side show to Moscow's Biennial Film Festival of the early glasnost 'era. And, like others, no doubt, over time I had compiled my own little anthology of anti- Eisenstein texts that antedate glasnost'by some years.1 I offer now, however, an account by the late Nestor Almendros, cameraman and man of the Left, of his meeting during the early days of glasnost'with a group of Soviet filmmakers who

1. See Annette Michelson, "A Specter and Its Specter," October 7 (Winter 1978), pp. 3-6.

OCTOBER 88, Spring 1999, pp. 69-85. ? 1999 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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had traveled to Hollywood in the (vain) hope of establishing links with film

production in the West:

I have experienced the bitter taste of disfavor into which the director of Potemkin has fallen in his homeland. In May 1989 a delegation of new Soviet filmmakers came to Hollywood to meet with their U.S.

counterparts. This glasnost 'get-together was held at the Academy of Motion Picture

Arts and Sciences. I was privileged with an invitation to take part in the

panel. I posed a question about early Soviet cinema-more precisely about Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. What was thought of them in the USSR now? The answer was brief and quite unexpected. It came from one of the youngest members of the delegation: "Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov were both liars." After a pause filled by the brouhaha of the

mostly Western audience, he went on: "Their films can be regarded as fantasies completely divorced from historical reality. These directors had great technical skill, but their work can only be taken seriously as formal exercises in editing and cinematography." The tone of the answer was almost angry: for a moment, I had the feeling that I was

being tacitly accused of Stalinism. I managed to speak again at the end of the meeting, and to rephrase

my question. .... I also advanced the idea of Eisenstein being, after all, another victim of Stalin. To which my interlocutor replied, "Don't be fooled, Almendros: Eisenstein was Stalin's man. The dictator personally gave him the highest awards."

I counterattacked: "But it was also Stalin who banned Bezhin Meadow and the second part of Ivan the Terrible, not to mention the countless

projects Eisenstein proposed, only to see them smashed from their very inception! Could he, under the circumstances, have done anything other than what he did?"

The answer could just as easily have come from Sartre when he said that, in a similar situation, "Man is always free to go to prison." "Eisenstein simply should not have made the films he did, or at least"-and here I thought I detected some Slavic humor-"he should not have made them so well."2

To Almendros, no doubt, as to many of us since then, the problematic consequences of the ejection of Baby with Bath were clearly evident. And as we have seen, the iconoclastic impulse which continued with interesting and justified attacks upon the culture of Stalinism has, in the present chaos of economic,

2. Nestor Almendros, "Fortune and Men's Eyes," Film Comment 27, no. 8 (July-August 1991), pp. 58-61.

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institutional, and governmental collapse, produced, among other effects, the symbolic rehabilitation of aspects of that very culture.3

Reviewing Ian Christie's and Richard Taylor's invaluable anthology of Soviet film texts just ten years ago, I noted that it was their declared aim to initiate, through documentation of the period, a revision of the existing historical accounts of Soviet cinema, of its canon and presuppositions. In so doing they tended-wrongly, in my view-to attenuate the distinction generally and correctly made between the deeply innovative production of 1924-32 and what followed. And it was here that crucial questions-and reservations-regarding their project arose.4 Such a revision did, of course, accord with the official Soviet view already signaled in 1930 by Ippolit Sokolov in his attack on "The Legend of Left Cinema."5 It was echoed, as well, in a number of texts written after the mid-1930s which, in their onslaught against "formalist aesthetics," dissolved important distinctions between these two eras of production. However, the promised work on the production of the 1930s has not appeared, and one wonders if the project as announced might appear inopportune at the present political juncture.

Questions of reception and scholarship are, as we well know, everywhere subject to political determination. Thus one's own entry into the consideration of Soviet film can be assessed as a countermove directed at the convergence of the Cold War, and that moment when in the United States, the reception, indeed the cult of American industrial production, instituted by the Cahiers du cinema and transmitted partly through the journalistic criticism of Andrew Sarris, an influential critic at that time, had stimulated a particularly intense American interest in local production. These two factors had inhibited the continuity of a traditional and very lively early American interest in Soviet film and its theorization in that of Eisenstein among others. To launch a reconsideration of Soviet film in the 1960s consequently involved a countermove directed against both official policy and the received ideas of a nascent film theoretical establishment. These retrospective considerations bring me somewhat closer to my present offering.

2. In 1979, Jacques Aumont concluded his excellent study of the practice and theory of our centenarian with some brief counter-indicative appraisals of approaches to Eisenstein. Considering Eisenstein's complex and frequently ambiguous theoretical discourse and his problematic reading of philosophical and scientific texts, Aumont speaks, in particular, of Eisenstein's tenuous relation

3. A striking example is the recent restoration of the statue of Felix Dzherzhinsky, founding director of the Cheka and the G.P.U., to its pre-giasnost' site in Moscow, for this object was one of the early, prominent objects of the period's post-Soviet iconoclasm. 4. See my "Comrades Behind the Camera," The New York Times Book Review, May 8, 1988, a review of The Film Factory, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, trans. Richard Taylor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). 5. See Ippolit Sokolov, "The Legend of Left Cinema," in The Film Factory.

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to dialectical materialism and the difficulty of encapsulating his work and thought within given theoretical frameworks. Among those proposed, he names two: structural linguistics (particularly in the work of Vyacheslav Ivanov) and the sort of dis-framing proposed by Raymonde Hebraud-Carasco, who argued for an exclusive stress on Eisenstein as explosive force, as welling-up, as outpouring-one might say as expenditure-of the formless. Aumont writes:

That moments in Eisenstein's films are overwhelming... that his readers find the prodigious course of his writing dizzying ... that he has, in short, a dynamism, and, if you like, a power that is at once captivating, baffling, and charming-all this I'd be the last to deny. But how can one forget that all this-the power, the prodigious writing, the charm, and, finally, the ecstasy-is absorbed into his calculation, his system "to be built"? I see no interest in considering Eisensteinian ecstasy as an eruption or as a dialectical leap-but rather as the calculation and mastery of the first, at the price of the second and in view of its inclusion in a general system.... Eisenstein was not in the least concerned with the formless, nor with the a-formal which he would, certainly and immediately, have subverted in the interest of form.6

And yet, and yet... little did one know, at the time, what awaited us. For a veritable Bataille industry, developing over the past decade, has proliferated to the point of generating a grill through which the reading of the Eisensteinian text is now proposed. Georges Didi-Huberman, in La ressemblance informe ou le gai savoir selon Georges Bataille, devotes a large section of his study to this project, culminating in the celebration of "Bataille with Eisenstein."7

I want briefly to rehearse something of the argument as developed within this book's central project, an analysis of Bataille's thought through an examination of his work as editor and constant contributor to the journal Documents, which was founded in 1929 by Bataille together with Georges-Henri Riviere. The journal achieved in its mere two years of existence a reputation for originality, intellectual focus, and force of impact that the passage of time has indisputably confirmed. Its role in the intellectual history of this century must now be seen as one of a seminal, prophetic intervention.8

Documents' project, signaled by the bold typography of its cover, was the rede- finition and remapping of a critical-discursive field for the consideration of artistic and other cultural practices within a perspective that could signal and

6. Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1979), pp. 211-12 (translation mine). 7. Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995). See especially pp. 280-333. 8. Documents: Doctrines, Archeologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, vols. 1 and 2, preface by Denis Hollier (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991).

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theorize contemporary developments in archaeology, the fine arts, popular culture, and ethnography. It thus attracted, as Michel Leiris was to observe, an interna- tional group of artists, writers, and scholars from diverse disciplines.

Insisting upon the interpretation of artistic production as social practice, Documents' intervention was stimulated by the reorganization of the Ethnographic Museum undertaken in 1927 by Riviere under the direction of Paul Rivet. The journal's texts thus represent a response to a developing interest in ethnography, in modernist practice, and in their interrelations. Editors and contributors were committed, as well, to the consideration, indeed, the valorization of popular culture. As a pioneering venture in the field of cultural studies, the interest and the particularly intriguing quality-one might say, the intellectual charm-of the journal derive partly from its intensifying juxtaposition of essays on forms and issues of popular culture with those of the fine arts, past and recent. The scholars and philosophers of the group, including Bataille himself, are of course among the most distinguished of a generation that brought both a sense of elation and theoretical sophistication to their appreciation of popular culture-American, in particular. Their work initiated and maintained a questioning of cultural canons, of the hierarchization involved in the categories of "high" and "low." In so doing-and this is crucial to an understanding of their project-they spearheaded a renewal of the siege against the ideology of an international bourgeoisie and its local, French variant.9

3. To his study of the journal as clearly and forcefully demonstrative of the development of Bataille's project in its central aspects, Didi-Huberman brings a considerable power of observation and sense of detail. His account of the French reception of Hegel is somewhat narrow, but his sense of Bataille's long struggle with the Hegelian system-and with the very notion of systematicity-is nuanced in ways that persuasively add to existing accounts. Central to his argument is his view of Documents' structure, of the iconography and layout of its individual issues as integral and related wholes, bringing to light and into significant relation texts and images through links that are not necessarily apparent, even to the attentive reader, establishing iconographic schemas that thread their way through the journal's contrapuntally organized discursive concert.

Didi-Huberman's point of departure for the Eisenstein-Bataille parallelism is a two-fold conception of montage. He echoes, in effect, the propensity of theorists and cultural critics of the 1920s and '30s to see montage as the new, generally operative organizing principle of both artistic practice and critical theory. He also sees the journal as wholly structured by the work of its iconography as "an amazing

9. For a selection of Bataille's contribution to the journal, see Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). See also October 36 (Spring 1986), Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing, trans. and ed. Annette Michelson.

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network of relations, implicit or explosive contacts, real and false resemblances, false and real dissemblances."10 This work, defined as that of montage and differ- entiated from a more general sense of layout, he sees as structuring and articulating the journal's discourse, bringing home Bataille's radical critique of dominant notions of art, of modernity, and of the sustained hegemony of the Idea. For this critique the notion of "the formless" ('informe) was to be central and decisive; in fact, it drives that critique, overturning, reversing that philosophical tradition in which there is an insistence upon form as the condition of existence of things.ll Montage, then, is enlisted in the service of the formless. However, Didi-Huberman pursues this notion as follows: "And when, in his pages on the formless, Bataille transgresses form, he ends by developing something new, constructing a resemblance in the very utterance of the formless and of non- resemblance."12 This operation, Didi-Huberman insists, is not contradictory but rather dialectical:

To claim that the universe resembles nothing and is formless comes down to saying that the universe is rather like a spider or spittle. Bataille therefore stresses transgressive resemblances: spiders, spittle, but also roots, decay. These are things that resemble nothing. And the journal therefore will have promoted an iconography, by turns "artistic" and "ethnological," sublime and sordid, according to a principle strictly equivalent to that which Bataille ... pronounces through the diminishing expression, something like ... It was therefore more effective, more deeply transgressive and pertinent, that the universe resemble some- thing wretched or ignoble rather than nothing, a nothing already too pure and perfect in its capacity for negation.13

It is not my present purpose to confront or exorcise the ghost of Hegelianism within this formulation. Rather, I want to lay the groundwork for Didi-Huberman's problematic assimilation of the Eisensteinian text to Bataille's project. He goes on to explain why Bataille is not content merely to eliminate forms, why, in fact, the strategy of desublimation with which we are familiar is effected through the evocation of "resemblances," involving, as central reference points, those that are seen as wretched or ignoble, those like spiders or spittle that convey the sense of the monstrous, and are therefore more deeply and effectively "transgressive" in effect. Thus, in a rhetorically climactic passage in support of the centrality of "resemblance," he will declare: "This means not getting rid of forms or remaining alien to them, but rather, work on forms that has the aspect of birth or death

10. Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, p. 13. 11. For a thoroughgoing consideration of the notion of the formless and its implications for artistic practice, see Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 12. Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, p. 20. 13. Ibid., pp. 20-21.

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throes, of an opening, a tear, a break, that kills something, and in that same move- ment of negativity, invents something absolutely new."14

A privileged site of this work directed toward the production of birth or death throes is that of the human countenance, of the traditions of its representation and the substantiality and stability of concepts, words, and aspects that ground it. Central to both tradition and stability are anthropomorphism and anthropocen- trism, focal points of attack through the journal's iconography and layout.

Of Bataille's role in that particular aspect of editorial work, we have, it must first be said, no precise account. And although the contributions of others, including those of Michel Leiris and Carl Einstein, are to some extent acknowledged, Didi- Huberman is concerned to present Bataille's constant and dominant preoccupation with what, alluding to Godard's term, he names his "beau souci,"15 that is, a montage- driven project composed of text and image through strategies of pairings, parallels, intervals, and variants produced on the level of both textual and iconographic editorship. A central aspect of montage as point of departure for Didi-Huberman's Bataille-Eisenstein tandem is represented by the publication, in Documents no. 4 (1930), of a double page of frames excerpted from The General Line, whose public screening in the Sorbonne had been canceled by order of the Commissioner of Police, Chiappe-an incident whose implications and impact are described in detail in the chapter of Eisenstein's memoirs devoted to his Parisian sojourn.16

I must specify parenthetically that while we know nothing of the meeting of Eisenstein and Bataille (for neither Bataille's name nor that of any of the group around Documents appears in Eisenstein's memoirs), Eisenstein did record his "close association" with a "splinter group" that had recently broken with Breton and had published its "delightful, personal attack upon him" titled "Un Cadavre." He reports finding these young men less arrogant, less snobbish than Breton, whose amour propre he castigates, while characterizing him as the sort of parlor pink in whom he has no interest.17 Eisenstein did, additionally, remark in a polite and

14. Ibid., p. 21. 15. Godard's early text, "Montage, mon beau souci" (1956), somewhat awkwardly translated as "Montage, My Fine Care," is one of several in which he presents what might be termed a possible rhetoric of film practice and theory-the two never being separate for him. The foundational intent of this text and of a preceding one, "Defense and Illustration of Classical Construction," is signaled by the allusive character of their titles. See Godard on Godard, trans. and ed. Tom Milne, foreword by Annette Michelson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), pp. 39-41. 16. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 4, Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: British Film Institute, and Calcutta: Seagull Books Ltd., 1995), pp. 186-200. 17. Eisenstein's account of his meetings with the Surrealists during his visit in 1930 includes the following: "Aragon ... was a comrade we knew and liked pretty much, although in those days he was still quite taken in by the pyrotechnics of the Breton wing of the Surrealists. ... My relations with this group of the Surrealists, which centered on their leader, Andre Breton, remained quite cool. I think that Breton, whose Marxist pose was fairly unconvincing, took offense somewhat when I failed to announce myself to him on my arrival in Paris. I find it an unrewarding experience mixing with drawing-room snobs who play at Marxism" (ibid., pp. 244-45).

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Frame enlargementsfrom Eisenstein, The General Line. 1929. From Documents 4 (1930).

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'i i : I f:D~~~~~~~

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rather vague statement given to the press that Surrealism works in a way that is antithetical to his own practice and within a diametrically opposite field. However, he then went on to invoke the need for "mutual understanding and respect," conceding that on a certain level there might be some common ground between his enterprise and that of the Surrealists in their "appeal to the subconscious."18

The Surrealists led by Breton, inveterate filmgoers that they were, had, of course, shown an early, specific, and intense enthusiasm for Eisenstein's cinema, for at a point when neither Bunuel nor Artaud nor Dali had yet produced their filmic work, Battleship Potemkin was greeted by them as the first truly Surrealist film, and I have elsewhere pointed to the inference of a relation between Eisenstein's conception of montage and Surrealism's radical and generative appropriation of Lautreaumont's image of the generative transaction on the dissection table between sewing machine and umbrella. Despite the gratitude for his reception by the group around Documents, might not Eisenstein's reticence with respect to Surrealism have been even more stringently exercised as to the claim of fellowship and convergence with Bataille's project of transgressive assault and ruination?

4. To answer this question we may begin by briefly considering the text that serves as point of departure for this reading. The double page of frame enlargements from The General Line published in Documents is introduced by Georges-Henri Riviere, who cites the suppression of the public screening as an unprecedented and unjustifiable invasion by the police of the precincts of the Sorbonne- unjustified, given the nature of the film, which had already been privately viewed by Riviere, Bataille, and others of the Documents group. Riviere specifies that Eisenstein has generously cut into his filmstrip (rather as his peasant heroine Marfa will, in a celebrated sequence and for a good cause, tear into her petticoat) in order to provide their readers with this hitherto unreleased condensation of the film in a set of images chosen and arranged by the filmmaker himself.19 And Eisenstein's contribution is followed by a fine, short text by Desnos which celebrates the concreteness of The General Line, its lack of bucolic sentimentality or platitude, and the manner of its return to a truer form of the bucolic through its powerful imagery of the soil. In this regard Desnos cites its celebration of the bodily contours of the cattle, and the implacable advance of a tractor through a storm of ripened

18. Eisenstein expresses throughout the 1920s his reservations and distrust of several of the avant- garde movements-of Expressionism and Dada among others. He follows his vitriolic remarks on Breton with a brief account of a first meeting in Paris with Marinetti: "I consider both Futurism and Surrealism equidistant in terms of ideology and form, from what we have done and continue to do" (ibid., p. 245). 19. See Documents, vol. 1, p. 217. Although Eisenstein, writing his memoirs at a later date, refers to the film as Old and New, according to the later retitling imposed by order of Stalin, the work is presented in Documents under Eisenstein's original title. For a reading of the film through a consideration of this double titling, see Annette Michelson, "Reading Eisenstein Reading Ulysses: Montage and the Claims of Subjectivity," Art & Text 38 (Spring 1989), pp. 64-78.

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wheat. And Desnos stresses, too, the international implications and especial interest of the film in a world of Capital:

This is a film with a single goal. Concreteness. Concreteness of what? Of the notion that in union lies the strength of the individual, that the past does not determine the present, a present responsible only to the future.... In any case, a film of this sort, transcending the mating of horned cattle and the thickening of cream in the mechanical separator, gives us an approach to a domain in which questions of a practical, philosophical, and social order are in play.20

Desnos concludes with an admiring reference to Eisenstein's conviction that everything is potentially expressible through cinema:

The photogeny of ideas remains to be studied. Eisenstein is already in the process of realizing the project presented in his Sorbonne lecture: to render concrete, tangible, and clear as daylight theories of the most abstract sort, the very conclusions of reason and of inference that are least accessible to the uninstructed. It was therefore confidently, if not without some surprise, that an audience of 800 listened to his intention of filming Marx's Capital21

For indeed, Eisenstein's project of an "intellectual cinema," first developed in the interval of work on the anniversary film, October, for which he had had to interrupt production of The General Line, centered at precisely this time on a cine- matic presentation of Marx's analysis of capitalist production and its implications for class relations.22 And this project is enthusiastically welcomed by Bataille himself as "the expression of philosophical dialectic through forms ... that could acquire the value of a revelation ... [for] the determination of a dialectical development of facts with the concreteness of visible forms would be literally overwhelming." And Bataille goes on to say that there is nothing that can so awaken the mind, so ravish the senses, nothing so frightening or that so stimulates admiration or a greater terror in human creatures.23

Central to Didi-Huberman's reading is Bataille's preoccupation with what is termed "the dialectical image." This notion has, indeed, a certain currency at the time and through the 1930s, as witness Walter Benjamin's own strong preoccupation with it as integral to his Arcades project. His conception is, despite Adorno's

20. Documents, vol. 1, pp. 220-21. 21. Ibid. 22. For this project see Sergei Eisenstein, "Notes for a Film of Capital" October 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 1-26. It is analyzed in Annette Michelson, "Reading Eisenstein Reading Capital" October 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 27-38, and October3 (Spring 1977), 82-89. 23. Cited in Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, p. 284 (translation mine).

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contestation, the most clearly defined within what appears to be the wide range of a floating signifier.24

Certainly Eisenstein's engagement with the notion displays a certain volatility, and rather than the idea of the dialectical image in itself, he had until the period under consideration insisted, somewhat naively, on the manner in which the

montage of shots can be planned and projected as a sort of triadic rehearsal of the dialectic. (One discerns in this view a vestige of his endorsement of Engels's problematic Dialectic of Nature.) Eisenstein's diary and correspondence, however, instruct us that by the time he had completed October and at the time of his

European journey, he had come to see the dialectical cinema as affording the

spectator, through an inferentially oriented system of montage, the possibility of critical analysis.

24. Benjamin's conception of the "dialectical image" is discussed at length by Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), in which it is presented as "overdetermined in Benjamin's thought" with "a logic as rich in philosophical implications as the Hegelian dialectic" and as central to the volume as a whole. It is, in any case, presented as a function of montage and "as a progressive form because it 'interrupts the context into which it is inserted' and thus 'counteracts illusion.'" Additionally, Buck-Morss specifies: "Not the medium of representation, not merely the concreteness of the image or the montage form is crucial, but whether the construction makes visible the gap between sign and referent, or fuses them in a deceptive totality so that the caption merely duplicates the semiotic conent of the image instead of setting it into question" (pp. 67-68).

Above and opposite: The General Line.

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I come now to the issue of Didi-Huberman's specious reading of Eisenstein's and Bataille's texts-the assumption of convergence or, in this case, "resemblance." Impelled by the discovery of the double page of frame enlargements, this is a reading undermined by errors of morphology and of homology. One source of confusion is the identification of the photographic work of Eli Lotar and Jacques-Andre Boiffard for Documents with Eduard Tisse's filmic close-ups. (The importance of Tisse's work is, by the way, not acknowledged in Didi-Huberman's text.)

A single important example, among many, is the rapprochement made between the image of the Obese Woman reproduced in Documents no. 6 (1930) with those of the gross kulaks of The General Line.25 This identification means, to begin with, a violation of the essence of montage as it functions throughout the Eisensteinian text, for the obesity of the kulaks signifies as one element of the system of oppositional relations involving lean and fat, as represented between the impoverished peasantry and the kulaks as possessors of means of agricultural production.26 This system is developed on multiple parameters: those of the

25. Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, p. 292. 26. Eisenstein's taste for the grotesque mode of presentation, which traverses his work in theater and in film as well as the graphic work he produced throughout his life-in drawings, caricatures, and in set and costume design-does offer a subject for further investigation. The study of recently released archival material together with a consideration of environing factors of Russian literary and theatrical tradition should further illuminate this preeminent aspect of his work..

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I animals (the hefty cattle of the kulaks and the exhausted, skeletal beasts of the

peasants); the spareness of insalubrious peasant housing compared to the decorative wealth of the kulaks' dwelling and the display of jewelry; the desperate labor of the peasants against the gross and soporific indolence of the kulaks. As one cannot speak of these images in isolation, one cannot ignore effects of camera

placement and angle, size of lens (as in the telling use of deep focus shots that

produce the contrast between the size and stolidity of kulaks and their beasts with the diminutive stature and timid bearing of the supplicant Marfa).

The General Line is, in its representation of the collectivization campaign and its preconditions, extraordinarily precise, to the point of statistical exactness. Accounts of the agricultural production and the condition of the peasantry in the

period preceding the collectivization campaign do, in fact, impress one with a concreteness of handling even surpassing that which Desnos recognized. For the

early sequences of the film present the concrete structural elements of the village economy and the paralyzing growth of an NEP bureaucracy partly recruited from

pre-revolutionary cadres inherited from the old regime. As we know from the studies of Erich Strauss and E. H. Carr,27 the average sown area per holding was of about eleven acres, with an annual gross production of less than three tons of

27. See especially Erich Strauss, Soviet Agriculture in Perspective (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969).

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Above: Obese Woman. From Documents 6 (1930). Opposite: The General Line.

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OCTOBER

grain, two tons of potatoes, and a few hundred-weights of cash crops. The average peasant householder had fewer than one and a half horses, three head of cattle, including a single cow, one pig, and five sheep and goats. The average unit of production at the end of the NEP period was therefore pathetically small. I have cited these few figures because they are the ground of the penury and its pathos that are articulated by Eisenstein in the most precise and statistically exact way; they are, as it were, the very ground of the concreteness and force that so impressed Desnos. Moreover, Eisenstein is at pains to demonstrate not only the principle of increase of production in the country through collectivization and mechanization, but the vital factor of circulation through exchange of manufactured goods and agricultural products between town and country. This is dramatized in the crucial-and comic-sequence of the tractor's repair, through Marfa's sacrifice of her petticoat. For this sequence is not only an exercise in peasant humor flavored with a certain traditional feminine modesty, but also a demonstration of the real commitment involved in a peasant woman's sacrifice of expensive manufactured goods-textiles-in a situation of drastic and increasing economic disequilibrium. The result was the famous "scissors effect" of the economy, a near catastrophic disproportion between the prices of agricultural and factory-produced commodities and the breakdown of their circulation between town and country. The lyricism and humor of the film thus function heuristically, and they do so, not in the service of a principle of Bataillard decomposition, but in Eisenstein's unambiguously articulated project of the period: the construction of a socialist economy.

Another particularly telling category of misdirected reading involves the celebrated image of the slaughtered beast in the concluding sequence of Strike. This sequence functions as an overwhelmingly powerful metaphor of the brutal repression of a pre-revolutionary proletariat at the hands of Capital. Images of the abattoir abound in Documents no. 6 (1929) but they function very differently indeed. Bataille's short text in that issue, "Abattoir," accompanied by Eli Lotar's photographic reportage,28 celebrates the lost tradition of the slaughterhouse as the sacred site of both prayer and ritual slaughter. For Bataille, the banishment from view, the repression of the slaughterhouse in our own time, eliminates from modem life the dimension of horror that would save modem existence from its stupefying mediocrity. There could be no more striking example of the divergence of the two projects than the elision, in Didi-Huberman's reading, of the unquestionably metaphorical status of Eisenstein's image-whose power of effect is a function of the straightforward relation of tenor and vehicle-as antithetical to Bataille's nostalgic celebration of the site of sacrifice and terror. (Eisenstein, when in Mexico, is not fascinated by violence, by the dimension of Aztec cruelty, but horrified, as he makes clear in his film footage, by the manner in which the repression by the conquistadors is maintained within modernity by a system of peonage.)

28. See Bataille, "Slaughterhouse," trans. Annette Michelson, October36 (Spring 1986), p. 10-13.

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Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Coming Attractions

For their two projects are not to be identified or confused by superficial morphological similarity or "resemblance." Eisenstein, Bataille's exact contemporary, belongs nonetheless to that generation of men (it included, among others, Vertov, Epstein, Eli Faure, and to some extent, Benjamin) imbued with what I have elsewhere termed an epistemological euphoria, those for whom the cinema

promised a wholly new and privileged access to a fuller, more intimate under-

standing of the phenomenal world and its transformation. For Eisenstein that

understanding was indissolubly linked to the project of the construction of socialism. This informs not only his technique of "intellectual montage," it pervades, as well, his constant preoccupation with a systematicity of theory and practice. In construct-

ing his systemics, he frequently invokes others, such as that of the Golden Section. These aspects of his project are also evacuated from the reading in question.

Eisenstein scholarship, traditionally resistant to many of the methodological advances developed over the past two decades of cinema studies, is, however, about to benefit greatly from the release of archival material, as demonstrated by Mikhail Iampolski's reflections elsewhere in this issue. It stands to gain, as well, from investigations driven by research in other fields. Thus, the recently published inquiry by Philippe-Alain Michaud into the cinematic implications of Warburgian iconology appears to offer a fresh and promising avenue of approach.29 Cinema studies has, however, little to gain from an elaborate effort of assimilation to the latest addition to the academic canon now current in the West as represented by Bataille studies. For Eisenstein, an inheritor of the project of Enlightenment, frenzy, madness, expenditure-even these-were, in Boulez's phrase, to be organized.

29. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg et l'image en mouvement, preface by Georges Didi-Huberman (Paris: Macula, 1998).

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