SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

arrested by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto, and in order to avoid feeling pity, he
preferredto“comeacross”–ortoextract,rather–someBarthesian“thirdmeaning”
solely in the accessory of dress, the cap of the little Jewish boy, without a
word for the event itself constituted at first glance by all these raised hands, all
these petrified bodies, and all these crazed looks under the death threat documented
in unbearable detail by the image. One might say that for a sizable number
of post-Barthesian – and post-Lacanian – critics, the pathos would be the
worst of the image, it being understood that the Imaginary would already be the
worst of the Symbolic: in short, an appalling illusion. Specious, uninformed,
mistaken. Could it be that in images of lamentation, one may find only lamentableimages?
This point of view, however, is trivial, defensive, moralistic even. The contempt
for pathos in the political field is akin to the rejection of kitsch – the “bad
genre,” the “error of taste” – in the aesthetic field. It may be deconstructed in
several ways: thanks to the aesthetics of intensities according to Friedrich
Nietzsche, the anthropology of Pathosformeln according to Aby Warburg, the metapsychology
of affects and representations according to Sigmund Freud, the
ethnology of the “obligatory expression of feelings” according to Marcel Mauss,
thepoeticsofpassionsaccordingtoErichAuerbach,the“sacredsociologyofthe
contemporary world” according to Georges Bataille or, more recently, what
could be called the “pathetic politics” according to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Glauber
Rocha. How not to see, above all, that the best response to the Barthesian
critique of pathos lies in Eisenstein’s film itself, and more generally, in the poeticsofthegreatfilmmakerandtheoreticianthathewas?
On the one hand, scenes of mourning and lamentation almost always hold
pivotal positions in Eisenstein’s dramaturgic compositions: this may be seen in
Strike, which ends with the vision of the bodies of murdered strikers, a vision
whose slight high angle at eye level is exactly that of someone who would come
and assess the situation (from the standpoint of history or praxis) or to meditate
(from the standpoint of mourning or pathos). In October, there are also dead revolutionaries
that the camera itself “mourns for,” not to mention the structural
inversion of this situation in the famous scene of “Orpheus put to death by his
verymaenads(hisbourgeoiswomen).”
In The General Line, a poisoned bull is mourned collectively. In Que Viva Mexico!
mourning rituals – half-pagan, half-Christian – run through the entirenarration,
in an economy of images constantly oscillating between documentary style and
Surrealist composition. As to the construction of Bezhin Meadow, it is held together
by two funerary scenes, the mourning of the mother at the beginning and
the mourning of the child at the end. In Alexander Nevsky, it is of course the braveryofsoldierskilledinactionforwhichtearsareshed.Finally,inIvantheTerrible,
funeral vigils are bombastic and ominous as they must have been under Stalin:
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