Sergei Eisenstein was unavoidable in the curriculum of film schools as those new academies coalesced in the 1960s. As Luka Arsenjuk writes in Movement Action Image Montage: Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinema in Crisis, he was “canonical” and said to have been the first to articulate the language of cinema. It’s a debatable idea for which I can only say: Einstein added to a lexicon already being compiled by D.W. Griffith and others. Eisenstein’s preoccupation was with motion, as if the cinema reflected the primeval flux of the cosmos in a tiny mirror.
One of the problems with Eisenstein when seen from the 21st century was his role as modernist ideologue—not just as a sometimes-contentious culture worker for Soviet Communism but for his totalizing theory of cinema. He was the Marx of movies, the Engels of entertainment; for him, the motion in motion pictures was almost analogous to class warfare and the teleological laws of history. The postmodern world we slipped into by the 1990s viewed such grand narratives with suspicion.
Reading Eisenstein’s untranslated memoir and scrutinizing his work as a graphic artist, Arsenjuk proposes that we look at the director of Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky with fresh eyes. Unfortunately, the bracing promise of Arsenjuk’s ideas are often couched in the creaky argot of culture theory. He asserts that Eisenstein was a precursor of the “postcontemporary situation of cinema in which we find ourselves today.” I doubt most of us are aware of that situation (I gather “po-con” means eclectic, a charge already leveled against postmodern).
The strength of Movement Action Image Montage is the careful archival research leading Arsenjuk to conclude that Eisenstein was less monolithic than once taught in film school—“not one but several images of Eisenstein” emerge. Even if he presented his ideas as cinema’s unified field theory, close examination uncovers “a sort of crack or fissure” in his thought, which “opens up the possibility of its multiple appropriations.” Sounds postmodern to me.
Movement Action Image Montage is hard going but rewards patient reading with insights into one of film’s innovators. It’s published by the University of Minnesota Press.
