B25
Gesture–“a flash in slow motion through centuries of evolution”: Sergei Eisenstein’s Method
In his 1923 manifesto Montage of Attractions, director and fi lm theorist Eisenstein announced the dismantling of “illusionistic representation” through a chain of “real productions”: The viewer was to be subjected to a direct “sensuous” impact in a “visual laboratory.” For Eisenstein, montage was not a mere aesthetic process, but an ecstatic “method” of linking psychological equivalents. But it was also a “method” of theoretical writing that Eisenstein critically juxtaposed as “polystylistic” with an authorship style and system. The unfinished 2,500page bundle of papers entitled Metod (Method, 1932–48), therefore, does not write a history of art, but rather one of “sensuous thinking”: A history of gestures in which “the function of touching, of grasping with the hand transitions into the same function by the eye.” At the end of a sequence of four drawings, Eisenstein breaks art history down into a meandering cartography whose constellations follow a “concave” and a “convex” line. Acts of shaping and being shaped, of grasping and being grasped, of understanding and being understood, characterize this évolution regressive of art in different historical epochs. B25 (290)
Sergei Eisenstein, On the History of Art, Sheet 1, Manuscripts from the inventory of Muzej Kino (reproduction) · Courtesy Eisenstein Collection, Moscow.
B25 (291)
Sergei Eisenstein, On the History of Art, Sheet 2, Manuscripts from the inventory of Muzej Kino (reproduction) · Courtesy Eisenstein Collection, Moscow.
Volume – Space Volume and space have a common origin – counter-volume [kontrob’em]
[Drawing 1]
like this with the hand <even more with plasma [drawing] >
(290–291)