SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

The myths and mysteries of Dionysus, of Dionysus being torn to pieces and
the pieces being reconstituted in the transfigured Dionysus. Here we are at
the very threshold of the art of theater which in time was to become the art of
cinema, that threshold at which religious ritual gradually turned into art, at
which the straightforward cult act gradually turned into symbolic ritual, then to
metamorphose into an artistic image [obraz]. 165
In the myth of the young god Dionysus dismembered by the Titans and brought
back to life by Zeus, Eisenstein found the primordial example of an act of “dismemberment”
which is then followed by a reunification “in some superior new
quality,” just as in filmic montage the “dismantling” of a natural order of phenomena
is followed by the reunification of these separated phenomena into a
new, meaningful and emotionally charged “image” (obraz). Dionysus was for Eisenstein
the first of a series of gods whose bodies had been dismembered and
then reunified into a new whole. In the chapter “Dionysus and Osiris” he quotes
Alfred Winterstein’s Ursprung der Tragödie (The origin of tragedy) (1925), a psychoanalytic
study in which the author mentions the possibility of reducing the
content of different Attic tragedies to a small number of recurring figures of dying
gods: for example, “a pathos of the year-daemon, usually a ritual or sacrificial
death, in which Adonis or Attis is killed by the taboo animal; the Pharmakos is
stonedtodeath;Osiris,Dionysus,PentheusorHippolytusaretorntopieces.” 166
All these mythological figures represented for Eisenstein different manifestations
of a fundamental need to establish a community on the basis of the dismemberment
and the reconstitution of a sacrificial body: be it the real chief of a
tribe, a surrogate figure such as the slaves that the Aztec selected to be honored
forayearinordertothenbesacrificedas“imagesoftheking,”atotemicanimal,
the sacrifice of the body of Christ being commemorated in the sacrament of the
Holy Communion, or the killing of the bull in the “corridas in honour of the Virgin”thatEisensteinhadwitnessedinMexico.
167
What interested Eisenstein in all these rites involving some form of real or
symbolic sacrificial dismembering was, on the one hand, their social and political
meaning: the fact that through such rites what was achieved was “the unity”
of a collectivity, “its fusion into a single entity,” 168 showing how montage, since
its origins, could exert a concrete social and political function. On the other
hand, he was also interested in the passage from real sacrificial actsto their representation
(the real sacrifice being substituted by a ceremony of commemoration
and reenactment and then by a theatrical representation, the tragedy), and, finally,theelevationoftheactionsofdismemberingandrecomposingtothestatusof
a founding artistic principle: the principle of montage. At this stage, writes Eisenstein,
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