SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

His aspiration is toujours inassouvie [never satisfied] – stability – eternity.
It is all the same whether it is physical immortality (VIEM 211 ) – immortality
through children – eternal life through metempsychosis – by going to
paradise – through the creation of enduring things of value – in the hearts of
the people, etc. (The American’s longing for “security”). 212
According to this passage, “all artistic activity” can be considered as Auswuchs, as
some form of “growth” or development, of a primary Trieb, an Urtrieb toward
“stability” and “eternity.” Just as it happened with “the Urphänomen of cinema”
in Montage, Eisenstein searches for an “originary” dimension capable of explainingaseriesofhistoricalmanifestations:theUrtriebreplacesheretheUrphänomen.
The German term Trieb, an equivalent of the previous urge, is clearly an implicit
reference to Freud and to psychoanalysis, and defines the urge as an unconscious
drive or impulse which runs through history searching for a response along very
different routes: in works of art but also in giving birth to children, “the creation
of enduring things of value,” the belief in paradise or in metempsychosis, or the
scientific studies on illnesses and the possibility of physical immortality conductedattheSovietInstituteforExperimentalMedicine(VIEM).
In a series of notes dated December 2, 1946, Eisenstein tries to summarize the
main forms of “recording” [fiksirovat’] or “securing” [zakreplyat’] phenomena,
anddistinguishesthreemainforms:
1. the reproduction of an event or person (dynamically)
or
2. the mummification of a person or event
or, if you like, a third way:
3. the recording by the means of a sign (from a pyramid to a gravestone, or
the inscription on a cross in a cemetery). 213
The second form, the “mummification of a person or event,” summarizes a genealogical
line which includes Egyptians mummies, the Roman portraits of the
ancestors, derived from death masks, that Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia
callsimagines, 214 the“giganticBuddhasinthecavetemplesandnichesofcliffsin
Tibet,” the portraits of the American presidents sculpted on Mount Rushmore.
Asinthepassageswequotedabove,Eisensteinonceagainconnectsphotographs
to death masks, referring to Balzac’s ideas on the photograph as a spectral layer
effectively removed from the body and captured by the emulsion – “Removal
(from the corpse) of the mask […] A photo is a ‘take’ (Balzac)” – and ends with
a definition of cinema as “dynamic mummification” (dinamicheskaia mumifikatsiia).
215 A form of mummification which in other passages from the Notes is connected
to the relic in all its various historical manifestations – the Christian “re-
76 antonio somaini