The Cannibal Emperor in Latin Literature: Domitian ‘the Man-Eater’? (original) (raw)

Eisenstein Reloaded: New Directions for Research

Eisenstein reloaded: new directions for research This interdisciplinary panel explores the recent trends in the reappropriation of the legacy of revolutionary Russian filmmaker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein as more of his texts come to light and become translated (his late magnum opus Method, Moscow 2002 and the recently translated Notes for a General History of Cinema, Amsterdam 2015) and as film theory raises new issues pertinent for the twenty first century. It offers an analysis of the mobilization of Eisenstein’s heritage by various approaches within film studies and neighboring disciplines and provides some examples of the emerging ‘readings’ of Eisenstein from the positions of psychology and neurosciences, physiognomy, graphology and chirognomy. The panel bridges historical perspective in film studies and current advances in what can be described as ‘psy’ disciplines - the disciplines that aim to both understand subjectivity and to form, mold or construct a subject, in which attention to the body and the senses become increasingly prominent. Reflecting on more than thirty years of experience as a leading Eisenstein scholar, Professor Ian Christie discusses the evolving graph of Eisenstein’s reputation – away from films and towards a closer engagement with his writings and graphics that allow a growing number of theoretical perspectives to claim his legacy. Drawing on her expertise in neurosciences, Anna Kolesnikova explores how Eisenstein’s treatment of expressive movement, embodiment of emotional theme and pathos anticipates embodied perspective in contemporary film studies. Cultural theorists Ada Ackerman and Olga Kataeva shed light on Eisenstein’s interest in graphology and chirognomy and his fascination with occultism – dimensions of his creative method which are much in need of further exploration and understanding. Film scholar and psychologist Julia Vassilieva revisits Eisenstein’s collaboration with cultural psychologist Lev Vygotsky and neuropsychologist Alexander Luria and analyses how it enabled Eisenstein to address Grundproblem, the main problem of art researched in Method. The physiognomy of lines: graphology and chirognomony as components of Eisensteinian creative method. Another axis of Eisenstein's research which can be related to the fields of neuroscience and psychology concerns handwriting in general and that of mentally affected persons in particular. While studying the works of graphologists belonging to opposing schools of graphology (French and German, according to W. Benjamin) Eisenstein analyzes and construes handwriting and drawing as various expressions of discharge of a psychosomatic conflict, a material he intends to articulate to his systematic and general attempt to define a creative method in arts and especially in cinematography. Being himself a patient of graphologists Schermann and Zuev-Insarov, acquiring an important amount of books on the topic, Eisenstein is interested in the physiognomy of lines, in the expression of an emotional tension which is translated into a graphic trace. This interest can be tracked down to his youth, when he discovers physionomony and is appealed by the classification of the world it proposes ; Eisenstein then is even involved in chirognomony and dedicates some of his youth material to the subject, in a conjunction of science and esotericism which deserves deep discussion. Relying on unpublished documents from Russian archives and from the Eisenstein apartment museum in Moscow, our lecture will propose an analysis of the “inexact” science of graphology as components of the Eisensteinian cinematographic method.