SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

1. What Renders Daumier’s
Art So Cinematic for
Eisenstein? 1
Ada Ackerman
In his Notes for a General History of Cinema, Eisenstein seeks to demonstrate that
cinema is the artistic medium most capable of satisfying essential, immemorial
human impulses or “urges” [Triebe]. The anthropological agenda which lies at
the basis of this historical project leads him to define cinema as a phenomenon
that extends beyond the mere technological apparatus. His definition claims for
cinema a variety of cultural ancestors that extend backward through history,
reaching beyond the nineteenth-century devices typically considered as “precinematic”toremoteperiodssuchasAntiquity.
It is in this context that Eisenstein quotes several times the name of Honoré
Daumier, the French painter and lithographer. For Eisenstein, Daumier's art responds
to two anthropologically rooted “urges”: first, the will to manipulate
light (Daumier’s monochrome lithography is first evoked in an undated section
of the Notes for a General History of Cinema entitled “Dynamic Mummification,” in a
paragraph entitled “From the Mechanical Copy of Reality to the Conscious
Photographic Creation and the Art of Photography, and from the Photographic
Camera to the Film Camera” 2 ) and then the desire to capture and represent the
effectsofspaceandtime.Thisessayisconcernedprimarilywiththelatter.
In the section of the Notes for a General History of Cinema dated December 25,
1947, and dedicated to the theme “Sound in Painting,” Eisenstein refers to Honoré
Daumier’s work as a forerunner to both Robert Delaunay’s Cubism and the
cinematographictechniqueofmontage:
A forerunner, [in the line] of multiple perspectiveness, of Robert Delaunay,
regardingobjectivephenomenaoftheworld,ofarchitecture(theEiffelTower,
etc.), was Honoré Daumier: both in time! and in the organic development of
sequence: breaking the human figure into various successive phases of one
movement.
255