SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

InothersectionsofMetodEisensteinusesthesameterm“urge”whichappearsin
the Notes in order to indicate the way in which certain artistic forms bear the
traces of the same desire of “Mutterleibversenkung,” of “sinking into the mother’s
womb,” which he had identified reading Otto Rank’s Trauma der Geburt and Sandor
Ferenczi’s Thalassa: Versuch einer Genitaltheorie, both published in 1924. 158 This
“urge” had according to Eisenstein both a psychological and a social dimension:
it wasboththedesireto returntoastate ofindifferentiation betweenthebodyof
thefetusandthatofthemother,andan“urge towardsanon-division inclasses”
(urge k besklassovosti), 159 thedesire to return to a state of originary “communism”
which for Eisenstein was both an origin deeply rooted in the past, and a goal to
bepursuedinthefuture.ItisaccordingtothisperspectivethatEisensteinseesin
Disney’s Silly Symphonies the regression toward a world of “protoplasmatic”
forms which is both a “Rück-Rück [return-return] to evolutionary prae-history” 160
and a projection toward a utopian future. In the same way, in the text “Surge
towards Gliding” (“Poryv k pareniiu”) Eisenstein sees in the circular forms and
in the floating, flying figures that can be found through the history of the painting
the sign that “art tries invariably […] to revive in people this incessant thirst
[zhazhda] for ideal states which precede the division in classes”: an “Eden-Paradise”that
In the social biography of nations, is the state that precedes the division in
classes, the state in which there isn’t yet any exploitation of man by man, any
servitude.
In the individual and biological biography of man, it is the happiness of the
uterinestateoftheembryowhichisfreefromtheneedtofightforitslife,and
which exists in a state of serene well-being, of warmth and protection against
any possible discomfort. 161
In Montage as well Eisenstein tries to establish the psychological and the anthropological
foundations of the aesthetic principle that constitutes the focal center
of the book: the principle of montage. The foreword begins with a quotation
from Gorky’s Man (“All is in man – all is for man’s sake!” 162 ) with which Eisensteintriestoconveyimmediatelytheideathatmontageisaprocessthatisdeeply
rootedintohumannature.Thefollowingchaptersprovidebothananthropologicalandpsychologicalfoundationformontage.
The firstonecanbe found in asection ofthechapterof Montage entitled“Laocoön”
in the English edition, a section in which the origins of montage – here
defined as “method of dismemberment and reassembly” (metod i raschleneniia i
vossoedineniia) 163 – are found, through a “miraculous voyage deep into the history
of art,” 164 in “the myths and mysteries of Dionysus,” in which the crowd of the
participants took part in ceremonies remembering and reenacting “the legend of
thedismemberedandreconstituted god”:
eisenstein’s media archaeology 63