SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

our perceptions work. This is not only the primary phenomenon of cinematic
technique [pervichnyi fenomen kinematograficheskoi tekhniki]; it is above all a
primary phenomenon of the human mind’s capacity to create images. For
strictly speaking what occurs in this case is not movement; instead, our
consciousness displays its ability to bring together two separate phenomena
into a generalised image; to merge two motionless phases into an image of
movement. 173
Referring to the way in which single perceptions are “edited” by consciousness
intoacontinuousanduninterruptedperceptualflow,Eisensteincontinues:
The principle of cinema is no more than a reflection, transferred to filmstock,
footage, frame and projection speed, of an inevitable and absolutely
basic psychological process that is common to each individual consciousness
from its first steps in the absorption of reality. I refer to what is called
eidetics. Reality exists for us as a series of foreshortenings and images.
Without eidetics we would never be able to reduce all those “split-second
photographs” of the separate aspects of phenomena into a single image. 174
On the other hand, the “most fundamental cinematic phenomenon” is consideredbyEisensteinasaparadigmaticexample
oftheunificationofseveral “representations”
(izobrazhenie) into a general, meaningful, and emotionally powerful
“image” (obraz) of which one can find an infinite number of variations throughout
the history of the arts. Here it is important to underline how in several passagesofthechapterentitled“Laocoön”EisensteinusestheGermantermUrphäomen
(“originary” or “fundamental phenomenon”) in the expression “the
Urphänomen ofcinema,” 175 a clearreference toGoethe’s scientific writings 176 and
to his idea that one could consider the infinite, metamorphic variety of natural
phenomena as an endless series of variations of a small number of transcendental
models or “types.” The different plants could be considered a series of morphological
variations of an “originary plant” (Urpflanze), the variety of animal
bones could be reconducted to an “originary vertebra” (Urwirbel), while the different
colors could be considered as resulting from the interaction of the Urphänomeneoflightandshadow.
177
Like several other authors writing during the first decades of the twentieth
century – we may recall the names of art historians, philosophers, film theorists
and cultural critics such as Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin,
Georg Simmeland BélaBalázs, Walter Benjaminand Siegfried Kracauer–Eisenstein
had found in Goethe’s morphology the model of a “tender empiricism”
(zarte Empirie) 178 capable of finding morphological analogies among phenomena
that at first sight could seem distant and heterogeneous. 179 If Goethe conceived
the Urphänomen for the first time during his trip to Italy in 1786, when, aston-
66 antonio somaini