The Eisenstein Universe by Ian Christie

Author:Ian Christie [Christie, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350142107
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 57232180
Published: 2021-03-12T08:46:39+00:00

9

Eisenstein’s Scream(s)

Ada Ackerman

What is ‘humanism’? In what terms can we define it without engaging in the logos of a definition? In those terms that will remove it farthest from a language: the cry (that is to say the murmur), cry of need or protest, cry without word, without silence, ignoble cry where, perhaps, the cry writes the graffiti of high wal s.

—Maurice Blanchot, ‘Atheism and Writing: Humanism and

the Cry’, The Infinite Conversation, 1993 [1966]

Endowed with a prodigious visual memory, Sergei Eisenstein created his

powerful images out of numerous multilayered references from art history. In turn, his iconic images have inspired many artists, including painters. The visual fortune of Potemkin’s screaming nurse,1 one of Eisenstein’s most famous motifs and a striking pars pro toto of his entire oeuvre, provides a clear example of such circulation and re-elaboration, from painting to cinema, and from cinema to painting.

Eisenstein’s poetics of the scream

Eisenstein’s films, especially from the silent era, have often been analysed and described in terms of screams. As his close friend the communist critic Léon Moussinac wrote as early as 1928: ‘Eisenstein’s films are like a cry.’2

An enthusiastic Eisenstein approved this definition of his art, as shown by the reply he wrote to Moussinac: ‘My warmest thanks for your book that I have received and which pleased me much. The difference you establish

between Pudovkin and myself, between a song and a scream is astonishing and brilliantly apt. ’3

Eisenstein’s Scream(s)

153

Twenty years later, Georges Sadoul, another close friend of Moussinac,

used the same simile in reference to The Battleship Potemkin, in a text symptomatically entitled ‘The Scream Becomes a Hymn’: ‘in Potemkin, the cradle rolling down the stairs, the blood from the wounded eye, the clenched hands of the woman on her injured belly – all these elements present themselves as screams’. 4

Umberto Barbaro claimed that Eisenstein’s treatment of the scream

in Potemkin profoundly transformed film history, in the same way that Caravaggio’s screams drastically revolutionized art history. In Barbaro’s eyes, Potemkin’s plastic achievements should be equated with Caravaggio’s dramatic and expressive open mouths:

A mere close up of a sailor at work, or of an intellectual woman looking through her glasses, a mere wide open mouth desperately shouting, a mere frame or continuity shot in Potemkin were enough to push into a past era every former cinematographic achievement, even the highest, and to announce new times.

Just as four hundred years ago, the silent screaming mouths by Caravaggio […]

would weigh heavily on all painting to come. 5

Interestingly, Barbaro drew on a pictorial model to describe Eisenstein’s filmic achievements. Moreover, he describes Caravaggio’s mouths as paradoxical objects, since they are silent and screaming, exactly like Eisenstein’s screams in his silent films – screams that are not literally heard, but which nevertheless roar, and roar powerfully (Figure 9.1).

Screams play a pivotal role in Eisenstein’s films, where they are explored in all their polysemy, ambivalence and diversity. The scream is a notion that is hard to define and which, according to Alain Marc in his book Writing the Scream, still awaits theorization.

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