Sergei Eisenstein, Montazh (Montage) (Muzei kino, 2000), 262–63.
For excerpts from this archive see Sergei Eisenstein, “Notes for a Film of ‘Capital,’” trans. Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda, and Annette Michelson, October, no. 2 (1976); Elena Vogman, Dance of Values: Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project (Diaphanes, 2019). Soon a more extensive selection from Eisenstein’s Capital project will be published in October.
I would like to thank Olexii Kuchanskyi for sharing her precious thoughts on this film, which derive from her forthcoming PhD dissertation “In-Between Modernities: Media and Milieus in the Ukrainian Soviet and Post-Soviet Moving Image.”
In various texts Tretyakov analyzes the genealogy of the cinematic montage in Dadaism and futurism, movements deeply marked by the destruction of World War I. “But already in the atmosphere of war, in the bloody senselessness of the trenches, in the caning of the barracks, the rudiments of the Bolsheviks’ montage emerge.” Tretyakov, Kinematografičeskoe nasledie: Stat’i, očerki, stenogrammy, vystuplenija, doklady, scenarii (Cinematographic inheritance: Essays, drafts, shorthand notes, reports, lectures, scripts) (Nestor Istoria, 2010), 128.
Sergei Eisenstein, “Po tu storonu zvezd” (Beyond the stars), in Metod: Grundproblem (Method: The fundamental problem), vol. 1, ed. Naum Kleiman (Muzei kino, 2002), 33.
“Typazh,” the Russian word for “type,” is a concept for “typical appearance,” standing (and acting) for a social class. Eisenstein and other pioneers of Soviet cinema used this term to refer to nonprofessional actors, as opposed to professionals. The latter model presupposed a psychologically laden dramaturgy. The political formula for typazh used by Eisenstein in his manifesto on “Intellectual Attraction” referred to a “social-biological hieroglyph.” Its effect consisted of an immediate visual presence that displaces the norm and moves towards a singularity of expression.
Eisenstein, diary from September 13, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, 189–90. Emphasis in original.
Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Gertrud Bing (Teubner Verlag, 1932), 506.
Elena Vogman, “Die Osiris-Methode: Dialektik der Formen im Werk Sergej Eisensteins,” in Erscheinen: Zur Praxis des Präsentativen, ed. Mira Fliescher, Fabian Goppelsröder, and Dieter Mersch (Diaphanes, 2013).
Eisenstein, diary from February 20, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, 75.
Eisenstein, diary from February 20, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, 75. Joyce eventually confessed to Eisenstein that he saw in him a potential cinematographic adapter of Ulysses. Eisenstein describes his encounter with Joyce in “Inner Monologue and Idée Fixe,” a chapter of his unfinished theory project Metod, vol. 2, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa (Potemkin Press, 2008).
See also Erhard Schüttpelz, “Die Irreduzibilität des technischen Könnens,” in Materialität der Kooperation (Materiality of cooperation), ed. Sebastian Gießmann, Tobias Röhl, and Ronja Trischler (Springer VS), 438.
James Joyce, The Restored Finnegans Wake (Penguin, 2012), 204.
Eisenstein, Metod, vol. 2, 241.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (Continuum, 2001), 57.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 57. Emphasis in original.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 57.
See Philip Alain-Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (Zone Books, 2004); and Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Penn State University Press, 2016).
Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bainsand and Julian Pefanis (Indiana University Press, 1995), 101. I want to thank Henning Schmidgen for sharing with me chapters from his forthcoming book Maschinische Normativität: Versuche zu Félix Guattari (Machinic normativity: Approaches to Félix Guattari), which reconsiders Guattari’s work from the perspective of cinema.
Jean Oury, La Psychothérapie institutionnelle de Saint-Alban à La Borde (Institutional psychotherapy from Saint-Alban to La Borde) (Éditions d’une, 2016), 35–36.
Guattari, Chaosmosis, 102.