SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

in the Anglo-American world in the 1960s and 1970s. As an example we might
lookatBenBrewster’seditorialqualificationoftheonlyessayfocusingonEisenstein
published in Screen in the 1970s, “Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift” by
David Bordwell. According to Brewster, who found Bordwell’s essay not sufficiently
political to be published without additional comment, “The problem of
Eisenstein’s aesthetic theory is that at all stages unity prevails over heterogeneity
and incongruity – even kabuki is made into a monistic ensemble. […] Eisenstein
never saw montage as the deliberate promotion of heterogeneity itself for aesthetic
and political effect, which is what it always meant for the German practitionersofmontage,andforBrechtinparticular.”
21
But what is the relation between unity and equality? In the second version of
Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”
he claimed that “Any person today can lay claim to being
filmed.” 22 This provides an example of what I am calling cinematic equality,
which is to say an idea of cinema as a way of inscribing equality. Leaning either
ontheoldtheatricaltraditionofprofessionalactingortheemergingdiscourseof
celebrity, being in a film meant in 1935, as it still usually does, being an actor or
a star. In contrast, Benjamin looked to Soviet cinema for his model that he insisted
was in some sense inherent to the transformations in sense perception
brought about by capitalist modernity in which film was both symptom and
agent. According to Benjamin, “Some of the actors taking part in Russian films
are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves – and primarily in
their own work process. In western Europe today, the capitalist exploitation of
filmobstructsthehumanbeing’slegitimateclaimtobeingreproduced.” 23
Benjamin's statements about the egalitarian potential of mass media are frequently
evoked but the implications of them tend to remain unexamined. What
does it mean for everyone to have the right to being reproduced? By way of explanation,
Benjamin proposes an analogy. Using the example of letters to the
editor in daily newspapers, he suggests that the reader “as an expert [...] gains
accesstoauthorship.”AsinRussianfilms,innewspapers,“Workitselfisgivena
voice.” 24
Here we are in more familiar terrain and can recognize one of the central discourses
about Web 2.0 – the barriers to access are eliminating the distinction
between amateur and expert. But we should notice here two distinctions: There
is a slippage from subject to author in the analogy of the letter to the editor with
the worker portrayed on film. The worker who portrays himself on film is not
him or herself a filmmaker, the way the reader of the newspaper becomes a writer.
Nonetheless, it is a slippage that Benjamin would see as intrinsic to the new
art of mechanical reproduction in which the image of the artist/author genius is
no longer relevant. For Benjamin, the human body on screen also had a claim to
304 nico baumbach