SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

of a socio-political type often dominates the approach and clearly leads to a series
of contradictions. One such contradiction can be located on the level of discordbetweenthevisionasawhole–along-termsocialhistory–andtheprecise,
documented examination of the history of media, spectacles, and symbolic practices
of all orders. The interest that Eisenstein shows toward expressive procedures
is developed under the sign of an assessment of the whole, always deferred,
postponed until later, and sometimes brutally articulated: all plastic and
literary effervescence unfolds against the backdrop of decadence, of the social
disintegration of bourgeois society and capitalism, 93 and a “baroque” drifting of
the arts (the “neobaroque” that he alleges at the outset). 94 Eugenio d’Ors, whom
hereferenceshereandwhodevelopsatranshistoricalconceptionofthebaroque,
givesthispreliminarydefinitionofit:
Everywhere where we find multiple contradictory intentions united in a single
gesture, the stylistic result belongs to the category of the baroque. The
baroque spirit – to express ourselves in a vulgar manner – does not know
whatitwants.Itwants,atthesametime,theforandtheagainst.Itwants[…]
to linger and to flee. […] It flouts the demands of the contradiction
principle. 95
One might relativize the importance of these statements by seeing in them a
tributepaidtothereigningZhdanovism,adoxathatitwashardlywisetocontradict.
Thus in Nonindifferent Nature Eisenstein opposes the “healthy and physical
polyphonic synesthesia of the beginning of the century” to its degeneration “at
theendofthecenturyandduringtheeraofdecadence,”a“formalism”(theword
carries a great deal of meaning) that leads him to recognize his own “excesses”
concerning “attractions” when he admitted to considering them “outside of a
unifiedplot.” 96
This argument (of a tacked-on Zhdanovism), however, fails to take account of
two factors: for one, Eisenstein dared to show his heterodoxy in the field of art
theory more than once, even in public (recall his intervention at the All-Soviet
Congress of Film Workers in 1935 – “Film Form: New Problems” – and the responsethathemadetothenumerousindividualswhodisagreedwithhimaswell
as to certain “friends” who spoke against him at the podium). Second, these
Notes and most of the texts in Metod and the Memoirs remained “private” texts, in
any case not published during their author’s lifetime, not submitted for publication,anddoubtlesslynotconceivedwithimmediatepublicationinmind.Mostof
all, this argument ignores the connection between Eisenstein’s exposition of his
aesthetic“method”andhis“sociologizing”statements.
In Eisenstein studies, some pointed out several years ago how on both the
diachronic axis (an evolution of thought marked by an “epistemological
break” 97 ) and synchronic axis (a double regime of a “wide-shot” and a “close-
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