In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

“the principle” (or, later, “the method”) that would reveal matter while
going beyond mere representation. In this extended metaphor, the skeleton
is analogous in Eisenstein’s thought to that essential line, which in a
“montage of the attractions” links the body of the spectator to the visual
image on the screen through the movement of the viewer’s eye following
the outline of the visual image. This process, according to Eisenstein,
mirrors an ecstatic out-of-body experience. Although Iampolskii seems
to affi rm the primary role of the bone structure (as a metaphor for the
“real form”) and its independence from the fl esh of the body (i.e., from
representation, the body of the text), Eisenstein’s texts hardly support
the rigidity implied by this hierarchy. The paradox of the image of the
bones is that if, for Eisenstein, it is a metaphor for real form, for the principle
and the order of things, it is also a metaphor for the life force and its
energy, its essence. Thus an image culled from the order of death stands
for life in one of these typical Eisensteinian reversals and shifts, and form
becomes its essence, the skeleton, as it were, “comes to life.” Likewise,
for Eisenstein the mask—and the process of theatrical metamorphosis, of
constant change—and its artifi ce are, paradoxically (or rather, once again,
dialectically), the fi gure of the essential, (mesto predela vyrazitel’nosti) as the
“end point of artistic expression”: his Method. 36
Eisenstein was also interested in the questions of myth and allegory
that he explores in his writings, linking them once again to the subject
that is of greatest interest to him—prelogical thinking and the regress to
human prehistory. In his memoirs of 1946 he makes the following observation:
“Allegory (consists) of an abstracted representation intentionally
and arbitrarily assuming the form (odevaetsia) of a particular image. The
fi gurative form of the expression is then like a myth—the one accessible
means of making it familiar/assimilating it (osvoenie) and a comprehensible
expression for consciousness. Only later does it attain the level at
which it is able to put abstract notions into formulated concepts.” 37 Note
the choice of verb—odevaetsia, meaning literally “ is dressed or clothed”—
describing the process of taking form. This suggests that it is a form of
cloaking and, therefore, of disguise. Here again we see a link between the
disguise of essences and mythological thinking.
In Eisenstein’s 1935 speech at the All-Union Creative Conference of
Workers in Soviet Cinematography, he links myth and allegory, perceived
as forms of artistic expression, to the methods of cognition that
form the epistemological component of prelogical consciousness:
Take mythology. We know that at any one stage mythology is, properly
speaking, a complex of science of phenomena set out in language
158 : chapter four