SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

For Eisenstein, Futurism is little more than a kind of glorified primitivism. The
movement conveyed in its art has nothing in common with the dynamism of
worksbysuchfiguresasDaumierandTintoretto.Eisensteinpraisedtheseartists
for their refusal to destroy the unity of representation in their works. As he explainsinthesametext:
The masterly skill of both artists lies in the fact that despite the difference
between the stages of movement in the various limbs, they contrive to retain
an overall impression of the wholeness of the total figure. 22 […]
The method itself – of depicting sequential phases for conveying a sense of
movement – is firmly entrenched in those paintings which particularly
surprise us by showing apparent movement while simultaneously retaining
the integrity of the object, person or phenomenon depicted. 23
At this point in Eisenstein’s career, in 1937, the preservation of representational
integrity was fundamental to his art, and to all effective forms of montage. He
similarlydisqualifiedDelaunay’sworkforviolatingthisprinciplein“Laocoön”:
What “way out” was there for an Impressionist who wanted, nevertheless, to
give a total image of a phenomenon and not simply a representation of a
single impression of it? Obviously there could only be one way: to record a
series of impressions of the subject. And the forerunners of Impressionism –
the Japanese – adopted just such a practice: to mention the most popular
examples we need only recall Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Fuji and the
Thirty-six Views of Fuji by […] the same artist. The overall impression derived
from these gives a complete mental image of Mount Fuji.
If the Impressionists made a mistake in their relentless insistence on
uniqueness, then the Cubists who criticised them were equally mistaken in
their stress on the quality of summation existing within a single canvas.
Delaunay’s famous Eiffel Tower is really “One hundred views of the Eiffel
Tower” crammed into a single picture of it! As we shall see, when engaged in
revealing this problem no one single trend in painting was capable of solving
it. (I stress “when engaged in revealing this problem,” because hundreds of
instances of an integrated synthesis of generalising typicality, mobility of
figuresorgraphicdepictionaretobefoundinclassicworksofartpriortothe
19th century which were quite unconcerned with revealing these particular
problems, while isolating and detaching other separate problems from the
integrated expressive, and above all ideational, content of the totality of the
picture.) A way out and a solution for both of them would have been to create
a dynamic fusion of a series, moving past the spectator, of those hundred
views of the Eiffel Tower or Fujiyama. 24
264 ada ackerman