SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Los
Angeles:UniversityofCaliforniaPress,2004),vol.1,pp.9-16.(Translator’snote:the
quotations appearing here come from the original essay published in Diehl’s
collection, and the translations from the French are my own.)
53. One is titled “L’invention de la photographie.”
54. Bazin’s text has a genealogy of its own: Girard-Cordonnier, Le Christ dans sa passion
révélée par le saint-Suaire de Turin (Paris: Dillen, 1935); Paul Claudel, “La Photographie
du Christ,” in Toi, qui es-tu? (Paris: Gallimard, 1936); and several articles on
photography in Esprit in the 1930s, including René Schwob, “Art poétique de la
photographie,” on death every twenty-fourth of a second, and the superiority of
photography over the (stilled) single frame.
55. “Peinture et photographie,” Arts de France 19/20 and 21 (1947). This is the
transcription of a conference at “Travail et Culture,” where Bazin was also active.
56. This refers to Baudelaire’s expression in his “The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public
and Photography”: “Daguerre was his Messiah” (in Francis Frascina and Charles
Harrison,eds.,ModernArtandModernism:ACriticalAnthology[London:Sage,1982],p.
19). Bazin’s text manifestly echoes Baudelaire’s, whose condemnation he turns
round while keeping its religious isotopy.
57. These questions were debated and dismissed by Descartes with his Dioptrics.
58. See François Dagognet, Philosophie de l’image (Paris: Vrin, 1984), p. 55.
59. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Seven Treasures Publications,
2009), p. 29.
60. The editors of the Memoirs situate this undated text between 1943 and 1946: cf.
Beyond the Stars, in SW 4, pp. 290-298.
61. The onlooker’s reflection on the daguerreotype plate is one way to understand
Baudelaire’s evocation as he wrote that “our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a
man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal” (Baudelaire, “The Salon of
1859,” p. 20.
62. Beyond the Stars, in SW 4, pp. 292-296.
63. As distinguished from the epic vs. dramatic opposition in “The Dramaturgy of Film
Form” (1929) in which the epic principle is associated with Pudovkin and linear
assembly, as opposed to dialectical montage based on conflict (S.M. Eisenstein,
Cinématisme. Peinture et cinéma, introduction, notes and commentary by François
Albera [Dijon: Les presses du réel], p. 25). On pathos, see in this volume “Pathos
and Praxis (Eisenstein versus Barthes)” by Georges Didi-Huberman, pp. 309-322.
64. See Sergei Eisenstein, Glass House (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2009), and his text on
intellectualattraction(“A.I.28”)inFrançoisAlbera,ed.,Eisensteindansletexte,special
issue of Cinémas 11.2-3 (2001). In “Pioneers and Innovators” Eisenstein writes: “My
limit is intellectual film” (here, p. 250).
65. See “Documents from Novy LEF,” Screen 15.3 (1974). For the movement as a whole,
see above all the works of Maria Zalambani: L’Arte nelle produzione: avanguardia e
rivoluzione nella Russia sovietica degli anni ’20 (Ravenna: Longo, 1998); La morte del
romanzo: dall’avanguardia al realismo socialista (Roma: Carocci, 2003) (Russian edition:
Literatura fakta: ot avangarda k sotsrealismu, Sankt-Peterburg, 2006); for cinema and
literature, see Elizabeth Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in
notes 495