Uploaded 1 March 2000
Figure 1: Animated loop from video: Hegel’s grave in Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof
The Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof
A VIP cemetery in East Berlin. In a quiet section, a group of luminaries lie at rest, though in life, had they all lived at the same time, there would have been no peace between them: the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, responsible for the Neoclassicism which gives Berlin its particular architectural character, much loved by the Nazis and now being revived by the new unified German state; Helmut Herzfeld, better known as John Heartfield, much hated by the Nazis, whose photomontages attempted on a single plane what the Soviet filmmakers tried across space and time; Bertolt Brecht and Helene Wiegel, Hanns Eisler and two ancestors of these modernists: Johann Fichte, now lying close to the figure who superseded him, Hegel. There is more light on this grave than the others, more sun reaches it, so my video camera squints in its brightness.
Figure 2: Staircase, Humbodlt University, Berlin from video
Humboldt University
A monument to Frederick the Great – and to a lost idea of the university. In the main building, a classical staircase leads the visitor into the interior of the space, before dividing left and right and continuing upwards. On the marble panelled wall in the gap opened out by the stairs’ division between right and left, there is a large inscription in stone:
Die Philosophen haben die Welt
nur verschieden interpretiert
es kommt aber darauf an
sie zu verändern[2]
A young couple sits on the stairs, briefly preparing their notes for a class before ascending the stairs oblivious to the words which they pass, oblivious also no doubt to the history of the square in front of the building, Bebelplatz, where on the evening of 11 May 1933, books were pulled from the adjacent library and burned. In the centre of the square a brilliant artwork by the Israeli artist, Micha Ulman, serves to remind passers-by of the square’s history. It is best to stumble upon the work at night, when you are drawn towards it by a glow of light emanating from inside and underneath the square itself. Drawing near, you notice that the faces of passers-by, gazing into the light below, appear to be lit as if by firelight. A perspex sheet covers a cavity beneath the square, a brightly lit chamber lined with dazzling white bookshelves which are devastatingly empty.
In the life of Sergei Eisenstein whom Deleuze has likened to “a cinematographic Hegel”, [3] Berlin is also the city where his father, an assimilated German Jew, is buried and the city of his first adult encounters with the world of the flesh, attending his first lesbian ball in the mid 20s, writing later of its impression upon him as something “engraved on the retina” [4] and his visit to the Museum of Sexualwissenschaft of Magnus Hirschfeld where he looked through files on the sexologist’s heroes, all of whom were claimed, by Hirschfeld, to be homosexual. His test for determining sexual inclination was a simple one. “Are you carrying a penknife?” he asked Eisenstein and his companions. [5] They emptied their pockets but not one of them was able to come up with the desired object. “Aha!” he declared. No homosexual ever carries a penknife. [6] , thus successfully outing the group with as much precision and considerably greater economy than today’s gay activists.
Figure 3: Video clip from Ivan Grozny
The colour of ecstasy
Berlin is also the city which literally provides the materials of ecstasy – the colour stock seized by Soviet troops and brought back to Moscow as one of the spoils of war, used in Ivan Grozny to represent the frenzy of power and religious ritual. Today we see the echoes of this sequence in Scorsese’s Kundun in the excess of feudal monasticism, the colour, the composition, the theme.
*****
How to show you the images of an unmade film, how to evoke the beginning and end of cinema and the future of the image… ? Such a project would have Eisenstein at the heart of it, although the recent films made about Eisenstein [7] concentrate on the presence of the body, registering this presence with rare archival footage of the man himself, so that the archive becomes a kind of tomb where the remains of Eisenstein are to be found. It is the body of this enigmatic Soviet citizen, a saint, a sinner which stands in the way of understanding the energy of his cinema.
Marfa Lapkina
Perhaps this is why I am more interested in the possible dialogue between Eisenstein and arguably his most remarkable character, Marfa Lapkina the heroine of The Old and the New. Here is a face which deserves to be one of the icons of cinema, as emblematic as the face of Renée Falconetti in Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc, or Greta Garbo, but is less known because The Old and the New fell into disfavour in the Soviet Union as soon as it was made and Marfa Lapkina did not herself see the finished film for fifty years. [8] In the West, the film still circulated in different versions but its narrative was too troubling, too close to the realities of forced collectivisation to be viewed separate from the context in which it emerged. [9] If however this face and this body should disappear from cinema, then it would mean that all human bodies like it are doomed to disappearance not only from the space of representation but from life itself, all these bodies in the name of which an entire moral economy has been formed in the last century and a half. Yes, of course they will die, but I’m speaking more of the prospect of an impression that they never existed at all and that it is only the great men – the Eisensteins, the Hegels – who deserve to be remembered. It is also the concept of a particular ideal cinematic figure – the mass hero – whose future is at stake here.
Figure 4: Marfa Lapkina in The Old and the New
The relation between Eisenstein and Marfa Lapkina we know only through images. There is no doubt that she is one of the finest representatives of the theory of typage, which some Soviet filmmakers, like Eisenstein, espoused – a theory which gives a place in the history of the image to figures who are invisible to history. The theory of typage is the culmination of all those attempts from the eighteenth century on to understand the language of the body, all those theories of bodily legibility through which character might be read. The theory of typage is replaced at a certain point by a concern with personality rather than character, since this makes everything simpler. Modernity demands that character declares itself, is made visible in the form of “the personality”, the performing subject, who creates the appearance of depth and the problem of “good” and “bad” character disappears into the question of good or bad performance. No longer is moral judgement required, since the subject merely reveals itself, speaks itself. This is far more efficient since the temporalities of modernity do not allow for the slow revelation of character which pre-industrial societies depended upon. Now it is necessary to make decisions on character from first impressions, from the strength of performance when the image, character or person first appears. But traces of earlier neurophysiological and mechanistic theories exist in the physiognomic sources of biomechanics, reflexology, behaviourism, through which montage develops, producing the new man and woman, not merely of communism and Stalinism but of modernism in general. (And let’s in any case admit here that Stalinism is nothing more than the name which we give to our youthful enthusiasms when they have congealed – or when we have become disenchanted with them).
Beyond the face and body of Marfa Lapkina there exists a subject who lived through an extraordinary time, not knowing that it was history. In this sense she was no different from Eisenstein, who could write:
I want to describe how, like a completely unforeseen counterpoint, an average man passes through a time of greatness. How a man can not notice historical dates, which he brushes with his sleeve. How it is possible to be engrossed in Maeterlink while in charge of trench work during the civil war, or in Schopenhauer while crouching in the shadow of a troop train. [10]
It is unlikely that Lapkina had time to read Maeterlink or Schopenhauer, through the period of collectivisation in which she lived, as if in the landscapes of a Platonov novel[11] But there exists a sense in which Eisenstein realises himself in her presence in a way which he fails to do with anyone else. The Old and the New is the most sacred and the most profane, the most religious and the most pagan of his films, the most sensuous and the most libidinal and he picks it out for particular attention in his discussion of ecstasy in the now famously ambiguous and revealing milk separator scene. [12]
Figure 5: Eisenstein “christening” Marfa Lapkina’s daughter in milk separator from The Old and the New
There are two images which might provide fitting addenda to his ideas of ecstasy and “sensuous thought” which begin to be articulated powerfully in The Old and the New and both relate to Lapkina. In the first, an extraordinary image taken on the set of The Old and the New Eisenstein, as a kind of priest of modernism, is photographed “christening” Lapkina’s baby daughter, in the baptismal font of the milk separator, perhaps the most paradigmatically fetishistic object of his entire cinema, an object which has proved the efficacy of communism and collectivisation in its explosive ejaculatory torrent, one which has the capacity to engender an entirely new world. This is a dream of regeneration which bypasses maternity, involving a shift of utopian consciousness from the “geographically horizontal” to the “cosmic vertical” principle [13] – a modernisation of the utopian imagination itself – thrusting upwards and out, rather than lying down.
Shades of this kind of spatiality exist in Eisenstein’s development of the idea of the square screen as a compromise between the wide screen and the tall screen and although he insists that he does not want to enter “into the dark phallic and sexual ancestry of the vertical shape as a symbol of growth, strength and power”, he is nonetheless explicit in his intentions in moving beyond “passive horizontalism”: “It is my desire to intone the hymn of the male, the strong, the virile, active, vertical composition!” [14]
Projectors
One of the key sources of this thinking in the Russian context is the late nineteenth century religious thinker and recluse Nikolai Fedorov for whom the objective and the subjective are replaced by the projective:
The idea in general is neither subjective nor objective, it is projective. [15]
As the Bulgarian critic Vladimir Todorov has written:
the principal concern of the project is the invention of a blissful collective organism. The earthly constitution of the body has to be changed radically. For the purpose, new cosmic nutritional substances will be invented along with a new structure of digestion. The cosmic transmutation of the body will overcome the zoomorphous nature and will implant vegetative organs in it. Thus the body becomes capable of feeding on, and accumulating the all pervading cosmic substance: light. The flesh turns into a photosynthesising biomass charged with light and warmth in special greenhouses in outer space. Light and sunshine become a primary economic force possessed, consumed and reproduced by the new human organism. The worker and the machine which produces the cosmic resource (light) become one entity. [16]
This is a wild impossible philosophy, one which also involves a belief in the resurrection of the bodies of the forefathers, rescued from their graves and reunited with their spirits roaming in the cosmos. [17] Although Eisenstein never directly draws upon this thinking, it does remain in the background of Bolshevik thought, an aspect of its suppressed dependence upon late nineteenth century idealism, absorbed via symbolism and ultimately providing the imaginative space within which the possibilities of space travel could later be projected [18] as well as many of the utopian proposals for the remaking of the human, attempted by the total revolution of the everyday.
If victory over the sun was one dimension of this utopian imagining of the transcendence of nature, then the earth in particular was a space to be escaped from, not least because it partook in the pagan trinity of an early Slavic image of the maternal body, – mat’ syra zemlia – Mother Moist Earth [19] – considered too primitive in this new utopian consciousness about to be born.
The arrival of cinema exacerbates a certain horror of women, who can enjoy pleasure and in particular, the movies the way a man – and particularly a serious man – cannot. William D. Routt has written of what is at the heart of this fear of women, in his reading of another Russian instance of the early reception of cinema: Maxim Gorky’s first ambivalent encounter with cinema (“the Kingdom of Shadows”) at the All-Russian Exposition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896 and of his discomfort in the company of women, enjoying the first demonstration of le cinématographe Lumière in Café Aumont:
He wants their babies and he can’t say it. Of course he can’t. Maxim is a man, spell MAN, a natural born lover man. Maxim can’t have babies – or at least he can’t have women’s babies (he can have art babies, aesthetic progeny; books and stories and such) Maxim hangs around with his mates and drinks and talks about politics and art and important stuff. … He has the most meaningful relationships in his life with men, especially with boss men, Iron Johns like Lenin and Stalin, Tolstoy and Chekhov, bigger men than he is, active men who can beat him up if they try, older men who tell him who he truly is … and Maxim would be less a man, less like the Czar and the Czar’s police, if he joined the laughter and the talk with the painted ladies at Aumont’s. His integrity would be violated if he looked at what they might want to see on the screen. The purity of his thought would be polluted if he recognised that it is life he wants, wants us, not to look at on the screen. [20]
Figure 6: Marfa Lapkina and Eisenstein, holding Marfa’s daughter on the set of The Old and the New
In the second “Old and new” image, a happy “Holy Family” portrait is taken, with Lapkina and Eisenstein, holding the new baby as if it were his. Eisenstein is at ease in a way one rarely sees him in photographs, in which his body is frequently distorted, or he is performing for the camera.
Of course the child is not his: such a thing could never have occurred. There is throughout his life a problem of mothers and fathers and babies. In his autobiography he poignantly identifies the dilemma of his being caught between his mother and father, appropriating the recognisable language of a psychoanalytically inscribed discourse: “No doubt”, he says “Mama was, as the Americans say, ‘oversexed’. and Papa, in his turn, was ‘undersexed.'” [21] Valery Podoroga tells the story of a young woman who met Eisenstein and who noticed that he spoke with a very high pitched voice – as if he had not yet found a voice of his own but alternated between the voice of his mother and that of his father [22] Grigory Alexandrov writes of two other incidents of non-identity or of gender confusion. On the way to the La Sarraz conference of independent filmmakers in Switzerland, attended by Walter Ruttman, Bela Balasz, Cavalcanti, Hans Richter, Leon Moussinac, Ivor Montagu [23] and others, the Eisenstein party found themselves in a difficult situation without appropriate visas. They were travelling at the time with a Swiss industrialist of Russian descent, Lazar Wexler, who – aware of their difficulties – performed a kind of ad hoc adoption of the three Russians in order to avoid the difficulties of passing through a Europe in transition. “You will be my three sons”, he told them. “In hotels I will write: Wexler with three sons. I am your father.”[ [24]
Wexler, it will be remembered was the figure who had commissioned them to make a film campaigning for the legalisation of abortion and although in the usual stories of the making of this film, credited to Tisse, Eisenstein played no official part, Alexandrov describes a curious moment in the shooting of the film when no pregnant woman could be found to play a scene involving a Caesarean birth. Eisenstein grabs Alexandrov, instructs him to lie down and be a pregnant woman and so the shoot continues. [25]
If there are difficulties in telling the difference between men and women, the differences between women are entirely eliminated in another story told by Mikhail Iampolski, describing Eisenstein’s interest in photographs of women supplied by a Berlin firm, which “could, through photographs, find an exact substitute for the girl who was the object of a man’s hopeless fantasies …One man would be dreaming of the inaccessible Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. Another would be thinking of a girlfriend from his youth who had since married someone else.” [26]
Projecting perfection
The possibility of constructing an ideal woman by the combination of the features of different women, in a kind of identikit portrait is imagined:
This one’s hair. That one’s gait. A third has a dimple on her cheek. A fourth has a pouting lip. A fifth has eyes spaced apart and slightly splayed. That one has full legs. But this one has a strange break in her waist. A voice. A certain way of holding her handkerchief… The mechanisms of association are difficult to fathom: through them we are able suddenly to substitute one thing for another on the basis of a microscopic shared detail, a passing resemblance…. [27]
Although Iampolski suggests that Eisenstein understands this phenomenon in general terms as a kind of Don Juan complex, it might also be recognised as a remnant of Kuleshovian creative montage, as practised in the early days of Soviet cinema. [28]
What is remarkable about the performance of Marfa Lapkina in The Old and the New is that she is the only figure in Eisenstein’s early cinema who avoids the anonymity of the Kuleshovian construction of the (abstract) whole from the presentation of (body) parts: hands, faces, close-ups of mechanical action involving the body subordinated to the machine. It is the full bodily presence of Marfa which dynamises the film and while it is not unusual in cinema for the woman’s body to function in this way, it is the only instance in Eisenstein’s cinema where this occurs. It is her face which is truly the film’s voice, more forceful than sound or dialogue might have been and it is her body’s movement which is transformed through the narrative, most powerfully embodying the ideal new subjectivity dreamt of by communism but only realiseable in its dreams and images. (In this sense, The Old and the New might be seen as an extended commercial or prototype for a new product, which unfortunately, due to certain problems of supply, did not sell.)
The problem for us is that the concept of the mass hero coalesces in the face of Marfa Lapkina (who, from this perspective might be thought of as the epic form of a more local Australian figure, much referred to of late, “the battler”). But the image culture of the twentieth century orients us towards the luminescence of the face of Liubov Orlova; one face possesses the ideal beauty of the transcendent star which we desire to emulate and the other, a real beauty of the everyday which we desire to enhance. In fitting metaphors, Naum Kleiman distinguishes the beauty of these two figures of Soviet cinema in a way which is doubly illuminating by saying that one represents the beauty of the natural light of the sun, while the other represents the beauty of the artificial light of electricity. [29] One is authentic, the other inauthentic in this account, one is the untouchable heroine of Eisensteinian montage in perhaps its most ecstatic realisation. The other is, in spite of its luminescence the more hybrid, impure realisation of kitsch Soviet life, appropriating the most slapstick and crudely popular elements of Hollywood in order to lead the masses into a passivity from which they cannot realise their historical potential as the figure of the mass hero. (This at least is an old argument about the relation between the purity of real art and the impurity of mass culture and one frequently hears such arguments stated in the post-Soviet context, though no-one seriously wants to return to a world without electricity.)
Figure 7: Liubov Orlova in Circus
Figure 8: Marfa Lapkina as tractor driver in
The Old and the New
But ironically, the products of Eisenstein’s ideal and imaginary cinema become frozen in time, become unwatchable for a mass audience, serving rather as raw material for a more ironic, parodic retake on Soviet culture by a post-Soviet postmodern artistic culture which recasts the dream of the Great Utopia as a nightmare from which the population is now awakening. Meanwhile it is Alexandrov’s fairytales, the Stalinist dreamworld, the socialist-realist musical comedy which retains a mass audience in the nostalgia for a lost paradise known and experienced only through these kitsch images and songs and the faces of Stalinist nomenklatura superheroes, posing as ordinary folk.
The inflationary crowd
Marfa Lapkina’s ordinary beauty by contrast, is recast by the late twentieth century as merely a surface which might be remade by diet, exercise or plastic surgery into the enhanced body of an ironic cyborg subjectivity, while those bodies, those masses unable to make this transition are doomed to redundancy. In describing the iconoclasm of the post-Soviet destruction of monuments, Mikhail Iampolski identifies the special phenomenon of the inflationary crowd (which) has appeared, consisting of masses of depreciated individuals. The inflationary crowd is precisely the crowd in Hannah Arendt’s understanding, that is, the totality of the `refuse’ from all groups and classes. Its emergence is closely connected with alterations in temporality. Such `refuse’ appears precisely as a result of the passage of time, which discards certain elements as outdated and anachronistic. It is not hard to observe that, for the first time in all the years of Soviet power, perhaps since the 1920s, an image has entered people’s consciousness of a part of the population as being left behind, thrown by the wayside, and doomed. The accumulation of inflationary crowds, of course, is a very dangerous phenomenon, fraught with, among other things, the possibility of fascism. It is also for the first time, however, that this new mass formation arises precisely when an excited group of people crosses the invisible boundaries of the sacral zone surrounding monuments, switching on the chronometer of history, and by this very act, condemning themselves to be left behind. [30]
In a landscape of this type (one which is not restricted to a post-Soviet locality but bears the features of the experience of globalisation everywhere), it is tempting to say that it is the great men, buried in the graves and monuments who will be resurrected in this new world, while their places are taken in their empty graves by the bodies who form the inflationary crowds. The mass hero, the century’s figure of universal hope is left, at the end of the millennium, to occupy the mass grave.
But this too is a kind of romance of disappointment which begs a reversal, rewinding the film, running it backwards. You can just hear it in the background of the soundtrack in this romance, a faint sound at first, then gathering as more voices join in: “Arise, ye wretched from your slumbers …” We could never remember the words but the tune keeps reverberating through the crowds.
Figure 9: Video clip from the restoration of the statue of Alexander III in October
Footnotes:
[1] An earlier version of this paper was presented on 6 August 1998, at a forum at the Melbourne Film Festival in commemoration of the centenary of Eisenstein’s birth.
[2] “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it” Marx: Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach in Lewis S Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Collins/Fontana, 1969), 286.
[1][3] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 210
[1] [4] Sergie Eisenstein, Immoral Memories (Trans. Herbert Marshall) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,1983), 4.
[5] Sergie Eisenstein, Immoral Memories (Trans. Herbert Marshall) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,1983)
[6] [6] Ivor Montagu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood (International Publishers/Seven Seas Books, 1969), 2 [7] Sergei Esienstein, Autobiography (Russia: Kovalov, 1995); Eisenstein en México: El círculo eterno (Mexico: Islas, 1996); Dom mastera (The Master’s House)(Kireyeva/Iskin with script by Naum Kleiman, Russia/Germany/France, 1997).
[8] A film was made in 1978, recording Lapkina’s first viewing of the film.
[9] For a fuller discussion of the reception of The Old and the New see my essay, “Sensuous thought” in J. Brooks and G.Kouvaros, eds, Cinema and the Senses (Sydney: Power Publications, forthcoming 2000).
[10] Eisenstein, “Immoral memories”, 4.
[11] See in particular, Andrei Platonov, Chevengur (Ann Arbor:Ardis Publishers, 1978). See also Collected Works (Ann Arbor:Ardis Publishers, 1978) and Fierce, Fine World (Raduga Publishers, 1983).
[12]Sergei Eisenstein, “Pathos: the milk separator and the holy grail” in Nonindifferent Nature: Film and the Structure of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
[13]Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 60
[14] Sergei Eisenstein, “The dynamic square,” in Sergei Eisenstein, Writings 1922 – 1935, (London: BFI / University of Indiana Press, 1988), 207.
[15]Todorov, 60
[16] Todorov, 61
[17]for a more recent instance of the (ironic) revival of the Fedorovian concept of the project and the projective, see Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Palace of Projects (Artangel, 1998).
[18] For a recent discussion of this territory see Viktor Mazin and Olessia Tourkina, “The golem of consciousness: mythogeny’s lift-off,” Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 210-233.
[19]Helena Goscilo, “The gendered trinity of russian cultural rhetoric today – or the glyph of the h[i]eroine” in Nancy Condee, ed., Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth Century Russia, (Indiana University Press/BFI Publishing 1995).
[20] William D Routt, “Looking forward and backward at the same time: Maxim Gorky goes to the movies” UTS Review: Cultural Studies and New Writing 2, no. 1, (May 1996): 83
[21] Eisenstein “Immoral memories”, 24
[22] Interview with author, Moscow August 1996.
[23] See Montagu’s account of the conference in “With Eisenstein”.
[24] G.V. Alexandrov, Epokha i kino (Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1976), 120. (My translation).
[25] Alexandrov”Epokha”, 121
[26] Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertexuality and Film(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 222 (Russian edition: Pamyat’ Tiresia (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1993), 373.
[27] Iampolski “Tiresias”.
[28] Mikhail Yampolsky [Iampolski], “Kuleshov’s experiments and the new anthropology of the actor,” in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., (London: Routledge, 1991).
[29] Interview with author, Moscow, March 1993
[30] Mikhail Yampolsky [Iampolski] “In the shadow of monuments: notes on iconoclasm and time” in Nancy Condee, ed., Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth Century Russia, (Indiana University Press/BFI Publishing 1995), 110.