Antonio Somaini, « Cinématique, Cinématisme and "the Urphänomen of Cinema" », in Andreas Beyer - Guillaume Cassegrain (Hg.), Mouvement. Bewegung. Über die dynamischen Potenziale der Kunst, München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2015, pp.203-216 (original) (raw)
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Montage and spectator: Eisenstein and the avant-garde
Semiotica, 1990
Montage, avant-garde, and reception of cinema We could say that the avant-garde at the beginning of the century received the advent of cinema enthusiastically; that is not strange. Though the differences between groups, movements, works, or acts that are included under this arrogant name are sometimes too vast, there was a similar projector group of projects-whose aim was to proclaim the crisis of a homogeneous world, born in the humanism of the Renaissance and validated in the Age of Enlightenment. Cinema thus became a suitable space for attacking and criticizing the artistic and cultural tradition. We can enumerate briefly some reasons for this attitude. First, cinema was one of the less 'artistic' forms of art, so to speak. Cinema was a modality placed in a field that was historically nearer to the development of the productive forces; in this way, it reestablished the old link between art and production by means of technique. Furthermore, this took place under a precise form of production (industry) that demonstrates the rupture with a characteristic bourgeois idea-the autonomy of art (Bürger 1984). Secondly, cinema revealed a high degree of mechanical reproduction. In its mechanism the loss of aura', whose beginnings were discovered by Walter Benjamin (1969) in the invention of the printing press and later in the general use of photography in the last two thirds of the nineteenth century, was definitively accomplished. The consequences of this lossthe end of the condition that links the artistic work with cult and ritual-were also pointed out in Baudelaire's poetry and criticism. In spite of his criticism of photography, Baudelaire's critical and poetic output showed the impossibility of artistic autonomy and its new status within modernity. Later, Adorno also found in cinema a 'suspicious' presence of these artistic auratic elements, but in any case cinema itself was the coup de grace to the sacred basis of art. Thirdly, the destruction of the rational subject, the guarantor of a
Film Theory in Media History explores the epistemological and theoretical foundations of the study of film through texts by classical authors as well as anthologies and monographs on key issues and developments in film theory. Adopting a historical perspective, but with a firm eye to the further development of the field, the series provides a platform for ground-breaking new research into film theory and media history and features high-profile editorial projects that offer resources for teaching and scholarship. Combining the book form with open access online publishing the series reaches the broadest possible audience of scholars, students, and other readers with a passion for film and theory.
Journal of Pragmatics, 1996
Apparently, David Bordwell is incapable of writing a bad, or even mediocre, book. His latest (in what seems a never-ending stream of scholarly work, coming at a pace that few of us could ever hope to match), The Cinema of Eisenstein, is simply further proof of this. It also is evidence that Bordwell is, without a doubt, the most important scholar of film working today. Not only has he written important works on such areas of film studies as the films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Bordwell, 1981), French impressionist cinema (Bordwell, 1980), the classical Hollywood film (Bordwell et al., 1985), and film narration (Bordwell, 1985), but this textbook, Film Art: An Introduction, written with Kristin Thompson (Bordwell and Thompson, 1993), is the standard text for 'Intro to film' courses, and his Film History: An Introduction, also written with Thompson (Bordwell and Thompson, 1994), is rapidly becoming the standard for film history courses. This most recent book, on the seminal Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, may come as a surprise to some. After all, much of Bordwell's recent work has been on Japanese cinema (see, for example, Bordwell, 1988). And, as Bordwell himself admits, there has been no lack of work on Eisenstein and his films. However, as the author points out, "students and general readers have lacked a straightforward introduction to [Eisenstein's] accomplishments" (p. xi). Most students learn of Eisenstein and his films through film history textbooks, which generally present him as one of a handful of filmmakers, along with Edison, the Lumi~re brothers, D.W. Griffith, and, maybe, a few German Expressionists, who shaped the silent cinema. Unfortunately, these texts often present the silent filmmakers and their films as museum pieces, antiques whose day is gone, whose chapters have been written and forgotten. On the other hand, more specialized works on Eisenstein, including the translated works of the director himself, tend to be too specialized, too narrow in their focus, or fail to place Eisenstein's films and writings in a historical context which would lead to a better understanding of his aims and accomplishments. And, these more specialized works tend to neglect some of Eisenstein's works, and especially the later films, in favour of the 'masterpieces', primarily Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky. Bordwell remedies this by offering a well-balanced account of all of Eisenstein's films, including such aborted works as Qu~ viva Mdxico and Bezhin Meadow, and
Eisenstein Notes For a General History of Cinema.
P. Montani, “Synthesis” of theArts or “FriendlyCooperation” between the Arts?
This book is published in print and online through the online OAPEN library (www.oapen.org) OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe. Cover design: Suzan Beijer Lay-out: JAPES, Amsterdam ISBN 978 90 8964 283 7 (paperback) ISBN 978 90 8964 844 0 (hardcover) e-ISBN 978 90 4851 711 4 NUR 670
Art history as Janus : Sergei Eisenstein on the visual arts
2017
My dissertation deals with the connection between cinema and art history, and their respective ways of looking upon artworks, exemplified by the writings of Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) on the visual arts. In the first part of my work, I focus on four of Eisenstein's texts dealing with three painters he considers cinematic: 'Yermolova' (1937) studying Valentin Serov's portrait of Maria Yermolova, 'El Greco' ( 1937) and 'El Greco y el Cine' (written between 1939 and 1941) considering the Cretan painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, and lastly 'Piranesi or the Fluidity of Form' (undated, presumably 1947) analyzing Giovanni Battista Piranesi's etchings. Eisenstein reads in the present, artworks taken from the past, in order to reimagine them in the future through cinema. It is this tension that I expose by reshaping the content of these articles around key concepts or around the paintings constitutive of Eisenstein's arguments, which I scrut...