Sergei M. Eisenstein's Aesthetic Theory and Modernity in the Early
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Beyond Vision – Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Aesthetic Theory and Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Akademischen Grades eines Dr. phil., vorgelegt dem Fachbereich FB 05 – Philosophie und Philologie, der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz von Xiaoxian Ye aus Shanghai (Volksrepublik China) Mainz 2016 Die Dissertation wurde durch ein Promotionsstipendium des China Scholarship Council (CSC) gefördert. Referentin: Koreferent: Tag des Prüfungskolloquiums: 20 Dezember, 2016 Table of Contents Introduction............................................................................................................................ 1 1. Time, Movement and Abstractness from Chronophotography to Expressive Movement..................................................................................................21 1.1. Movement of Animal Locomotion in Marey’s Chronophotography........................ 26 1.2. Marey’s Geometrical Chronophotography and the Modernist Art Movement......... 31 1.3. Painting vs. Cinema: Malevich on Movement and Abstractness.............................. 35 1.4. The Synthesis of Moving Images: German Absolute Film and Animation.............. 41 1.5. Motion, Affect and Abstract – Eisenstein’s Expressive Movement..........................50 Summary...........................................................................................................................54 2. Metamorphosis as the Conceptual Movement................................................................. 56 2.1. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Eisenstein’s Plasma Drawings......................................57 2.2. Metamorphosis in Early Animations.........................................................................62 2.3. Time and Movement in Shot and Montage: the Cine-fact Debate between Eisenstein and Vertov.................................................................................66 2.4. Fire as a Means for Magic and Metamorphosis.........................................................70 2.5. Montage of Attraction as the Metamorphosis in Glumov’s Diary............................ 73 Summary...........................................................................................................................78 3. Animism, Mimesis and Cinema as the Modern Magic....................................................79 3.1. Animism as a New Episteme.....................................................................................80 3.2. Cinema of Mimesis Faculty as the Modern Magic....................................................82 3.3. Eisenstein, Disney and Animism...............................................................................85 3.4. Electricity to Kill or to Animate in Early Films........................................................ 90 3.5. Anima in Art Crafts................................................................................................... 92 Summary...........................................................................................................................98 4. Offscreen Experience of Cinema: the Introduction of Sound and Synaesthesia............100 4.1. Internality and Idealism: the Hierarchy of Sight and Sound................................... 102 4.2. The Polemics of the Introduction of Sound.............................................................104 4.3. The Audiovisual Correspondence and the “Lack of Perspective”...........................107 4.4. Eisenstein’s Definitions of Synaesthesia.................................................................111 4.5. Eisenstein’s Phenomenological Body and Senses...................................................114 Summary.........................................................................................................................121 5. The Invisible Color: the Symbolic and Affective Coloration........................................ 123 5.1. Timbre and its Occult Tradition in the Time of Modernity.....................................124 5.2. The Color-Sound Schema and the Objectless Color............................................... 130 5.3. Color Leitmotif in Ivan the Terrible, Part II and the Unfinished Pushkin Project (The Love of a Poet)..................................................................... 136 5.4. Color, Music and Dance as the Lines of Polyphonic Structure...............................141 Summary.........................................................................................................................145 6. The Synchronicity of Senses and the Synthesis of the Dialectic Principle....................147 6.1. The Path of Eye Movement as the Affective Vision in the Single Set-up...............149 6.2. The Inner Synchronicity of Linear Movement in Vertical Montage.......................153 6.3. Musical Montage Method: Conflicts between Content and Form .........................158 6.4. The Problem of Analogizing Musical Overtone with Overtonal Montage............. 162 6.5. The Dual Dialectical Principle of Overtonal Montage in The General Line...........164 6.6. The Perception of Sum Total and the Process of Thought in the Overtonal Montage....................................................................................... 173 Summary.........................................................................................................................177 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................179 Bibliography.......................................................................................................................185 Filmography....................................................................................................................... 200 Ye 1 Introduction Modernity is a fascinating multiplicity of history, economics, sociology, science, technology, philosophy and art, all of which interacts with each other through both collaboration and confrontation. On the other hand, philosophical schools of thought, primitive and occult traditions, science and technologies, and artistic styles and genres, all experienced their autonomous transformation. As Carl E. Schorske expressed it, “modern architecture, modern music, modern philosophy and modern science – all these define themselves not out of the past, indeed scarcely against the past, but in independence of the past.”1 This fragmentation of Intellectualism in fin-de-siècle Vienna suggests a less definitive attitude and method towards the modernity thesis, which was disintegrated and scattered into multiple disciplines of their own developments and mutual influences, and thus to research on modernity is to research the respective pieces rather than under an integrated Hegelian Zeitgeist. According to Schorske, one fin-de-siècle tremor was that “rational man whose scientific domination of nature and whose moral control of himself were expected to create the good society” gave place to “that richer but more dangerous and mercurial creature, psychological man” who defined new man “not merely a rational animal, but a creature of feeling and instinct.”2 At the turn of twentieth century, rational man believed by Eurocentric liberal culture tend to measure psychological man, just as primitive civilization for anthropology and ethnography, subconsciousness for psychoanalysis, affect for experimental psychology, Klangfarbe for physics and psychology, mimesis faculty for sociology. Rational man attempt to make these psychological or physiological intuitions traceable and visible to be analyzed. Both cinema and Sergei M. Eisenstein were born in this fin-de-siècle tremor related to all fields of art and science. The content, form, style and mechanism of cinema consist of scientific principles and instinctive experience. Eisenstein’s aesthetic theories of film also centered upon this paradoxical co-existences in cinema: the cinesthetic body is the ecstasy and pathos of psychological man as well as the mathematic and empirical method of rational man. However, it is necessary to point out that Eisenstein was limited to his infatuation of primitiveness in aboriginal cultures from a westernized perspective just as the nineteenth-century anthropologists and ethnologists that he admired. 1 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1981), xvii. 2 Ibid., 4. Ye 2 Situated in a period of modern times with the intense engagement of mass media, what did Eisenstein think of cinematic content and forms within the modernity thesis? How did he associate other artistic fin-de-siècle fragments with cinema? How did he mediate the rational and psychological man in the processes of production and projection? This dissertation thus selects one of fin-de-siècle fragments, the polemics of cinematic vision, to embrace the modernity thesis, the episteme of cinema and Eisenstein’ aesthetic theories. Rather simply see what happens in a film, cinematic experience is a process of comprehending the remediated magic and a physiologically-initiated multi-sensorium. This experience triggered by vision is a conceptual and sensorial matrix beyond vision, which Eisenstein persistently pondered throughout his life. The study of this matrix of “beyond vision” designates Eisenstein as not only a film artist who centered upon cinematic aesthetics, but also a media theorist who associated cinema with the both collective and individual activities of human beings in the