Eisenstein,
the Glass House and the Spherical Book |
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In 1851, visitors to the Great Exhibition in London saw an architectural sensation: Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace. Enthusiasm and scepticism accompanied the invention of this Glass House. In 1863, Nikolai Chernyshevsky took the Crystal Palace as inspiration for the house of the future that the heroine of his novel What Is To Be Done? saw in a dream, a materialisation of a Utopian vision of a Socialist community. But already, only one year later in 1864, Fedor Dostoevsky published a response to the euphoric reception of the Glass House in Notes from the Underground, where the main character is repulsed by, and mocks, the building as a glass chicken coop. But the real question was: could we deal with transparency? The symbolic vocabulary of transparency was developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and correlated with light, glass, crystal, water and nakedness in contrast to stone, veiling and deception. The transparency of nature was seen in contrast to the opacity of the social world; but it was unclear where to place a human being. Modernity was fascinated with the idea of transparency. According to German architect Bruno Taut, a glass building would establish other relationships between people and the universe, modifying their visual perception and habits. The Constructivists hoped a transparent building would help in the creation of transparent relationships and destroy the distinction between public and private. Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1929 essay on Surrealism: |
1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, in Selected Writings Vol. 2 (Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 209. |
(In Moscow I lived in a hotel, in which almost all the rooms were occupied by Tibetan Lamas who had come to Moscow for a congress of Buddhist churches. I was struck by the number of doors in the corridors which were always left ajar. What had at first seemed accidental began to disturb me. I found out that in these rooms lived members of a sect who had sworn never to occupy closed rooms. The shock I had then must be felt by the reader of Nadja.) To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need. (1) |
2. Eisenstein’s project
was not intended to be a film version of Zamyatin’s novel, as some scholars
have suggested. 3. Diary, January 13, 1927; cf. O. Bulgakowa (ed.), Eisenstein und Deutschland [Eisenstein and Germany] (Berlin: Henschel, 1998), p. 17.
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The Glass House was intended as a polemical response not only to Lang’s film, (2) but also to Bruno Taut and Mies van der Rohe’s glass architecture. Van der Rohe proposed to build a glass tower on Berlin’s Friedrichstraße in 1921. Eisenstein envisioned his own glass palace as an architectonic image of America. He thought an American author like Upton Sinclair might write the script. (3) When Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks arrived in Moscow on July 1926 and invited Eisenstein to direct for United Artists, (a company they had started with Griffith and Chaplin), Eisenstein offered them his project about new forms of architecture, life and art: The Glass House. He asked Albert Williams, an American journalist in Moscow, to contact Sinclair – who expressed in a letter to Williams his doubts that Fairbanks would ever produce such a film. |
4. V. S. [Sergei Eisenstein], ‚Novaia klientura gospodina Korb’zu’e’, Sovjetskii ekran, No 46 (1928), p. 5.
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Eisenstein speaks about the idea to Le Corbusier, who arrives in Moscow in the autumn of 1928 in order to erect a new building there. Eisenstein showed him about forty minutes from the unfinished film The General Line: the episode with the experimental farm built by the Constructivist architect Andrej Burov, which was influenced by the Le Corbusier Style. Marfa sees this modernist farm in a dream, like the heroine of Chernyshevsky’s novel. Eisenstein recounted his conversation with Le Corbusier in an article: ‘Le Corbusier is a great fan of cinema, which he considers to be the only contemporary art along with architecture. Le Corbusier said, "It seems to me that in my creative work I am thinking the way Eisenstein is thinking as he creates his movies".’ (4) The Glass House developed as an architectural project based on two mythologies: that of the skyscraper with its hierarchical structure; and of transparency, bound to the material of glass. Eisenstein saw it as a response to Metropolis, which presented a symbolic vision of social hierarchy. (That is why he wanted to work with Sinclair, who became famous for his studies of class stratification.) But, during the same period, Eisenstein referred to the experiments with glass architecture in different circles: the German Expressionist architects from the Glass Chain around Bruno Taut, and Constructivists like El Lissitzky. Eisenstein pasted a clip from New York Magazine from June 1930 with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Glass Tower into his diary and wrote: ‘This is a glass sky scraper that I invented in Berlin.’ In his project, Eisenstein’s perception of America merges with his perception of Germany. In his notes, Eisenstein referred to the project both by its English and German titles; he would alternate between Das Glashaus and The Glass House. The Glass House was the very first project Eisenstein proposed to Paramount when he signed the contract with Jesse Lasky and came to Hollywood. Here he worked on the script until May 1930. He discussed the idea with Chaplin and the Paramount boss B.P. Schulberg (a great admirer of Dostoevsky). A glass factory in Pittsburgh would produce the glass structures for the film. The studio assigned the gangster movie writer Oliver H. P. Garrett (City Streets [1931], Scandal Sheet [1931], Manhattan Melodrama [1934]) to the job but he, too, had little luck developing Eisenstein’s idea. Like all of his other projects in Hollywood, The Glass House remained on the drawing boards – but, unlike all the others, not because of the objections of producers. Eisenstein himself could not explain what happened, or why his work on the script stopped. He had to turn to a psychoanalyst, Gregory Stragnell (whom he had met at Chaplin’s house), and spend a large amount of money trying to understand what was keeping him from finishing the script. These psychoanalytic sessions upset Eisenstein’s collaborator Ivor Montagu, who managed Eisenstein’s money like a thrifty housewife. On June 17 1930, Eisenstein wrote to Pera Atasheva: |
11. Cf. Sergej Eisenstein. Drei Utopien – Architekturentwurfe zur Filmtheorie, pp. 31-32. On the Spherical Book, cf. pp. 31-108. |
It is very hard to write a book. Because each book is two-dimensional. I wanted this book to be characterised by a feature that does not fit under any circumstances into the two-dimensionality of a printing element. This demand has two aspects. First, it supposes that the bundle of these essays is not to be regarded successively. In any case, I wish that one could perceive them all at the same time, simultaneously, because they finally represent a set of sectors, which are arranged around a general, determining viewpoint, aligned to different areas. On the other hand, I want to create a spatial form that would make it possible to step from each contribution directly into another and to make apparent their interconnection … Such a synchronic manner of circulation and mutual penetration of the essays can be carried out only in the form (...) of a sphere. But unfortunately, books are not written as spheres ... I can only hope that they will be read according to the method of mutual reversibility, a spherical method - in expectation that we will learn to write books like rotating balls. Now we have only books like soap-bubbles. Particularly on art. (11) |
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Some sections of the book were written, but published as separate articles. What then was lost? Montage is analysed in this cluster of essays in the context of different systems: music, Japanese theatre, Japanese hieroglyphics, linguistics, reflexology, dialectics. As a consequence of the linear process of publishing and reading these texts, however, we can no longer perceive the permanent change in viewpoint and the framework of discussion-and-analysis that seemed so important to Eisenstein at the end of the ‘20s – in other words, the most essential characteristic of the project which makes it stand out the background of theory formation then, and still today. Eisenstein’s Spherical Book project responded to the fragmentation of sciences into separate fields of study – one of the consequences of modernity. His book was a radical attempt to locate a non-existent unity in the shifting from one level to the next, reinterpreting the incompatible segments and using them in diverse ways. I believe that the problems raised by Eisenstein’s Glass House project, which I have described within a historical framework, still have a great deal of relevance to today’s discussions. And not only as an early version of a Big Brother (Orwell’s or reality television’s) – allowing us to place the project in the framework of surveillance and control in our society, the development of the techniques of surveillance from Bentham’s Panopticon to video cameras everywhere, from Lang’s Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960) to Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Phillip Noyce’s Sliver (1993), from fear to the desire to be observed. |
12. I am referring to his theoretical project Methode. This vast manuscript (more than 2500 pages), written in four languages (Russian, German, English and French, with some passages in Italian), attempted to provide a model for description and analysis of nearly all art practices and forms. In the book, Eisenstein understands the structure of a work of art as isomorphic to the structure of multi-layered consciousness, thus implying the unity of the logical and the prelogical, the conscious and the unconscious, or (in Eisenstein’s terms) rational and sensual mental activities. He reduced his former ambition to create a total theoretical system to a universal model of analysis, with which all phenomena could be described, structured and understood (cave painting and Cubism, seventeenth century’s Japanese graphics and American film, ornament and music counterpoint, acting methods and plot construction in Spanish plays, Shakespeare’s dramas, the circus and music, Dostoevsky’s novels and Disney’s animated cartoons). But his main point of interest was to understand the genealogy of modernism (and film, which was for Eisenstein its quintessence), looking into the art of the nineteenth century and analysing its form (or form in general) as the trace of some basic structures of human consciousness. The form of the manuscript is based on the principle of montage of quotations and fragments, very similar to Benjamin’s Arcades – the two projects show a stunning similarity in their approach. Naum Kleiman published a two-volume version of this manuscript: Metod (Moskva: Muzei kino, 2002). I have completed another edition to appear in four volumes (Germany, PotemkinPress, 2006). |
The most productive moment in the script for me is Eisenstein’s ‘story of the eye’. Different concepts of the changed paradigm of perception, from Benjamin and Bataille to Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Jonathan Crary, have tried to conceptualise the new vision of a new subject of modernity, problematising how subject could be made adequate to a constellation of new events, institutions, apparatuses. What is striking in Eisenstein’s story of the eye is its radicalism. On the one hand, he doubts that the modern subject is ready for this reconfigured perception but, on the other hand, his film suggests – in its first stage as a high comedy – a more sublime version of the apparatus’ vision, going far beyond the new constellations connected to mobility, panoramic or kaleidoscopic vision, and so forth. He adds rotation and floatation in space, loss of gravity. He naturalises the Cubist pattern. Eisenstein’s comment on the project of modernity and a Soviet Utopia has a strong autobiographical inclination. Does he see himself as a Poet who is afraid of his inner vision, or an Architect who is afraid of his creation? There would always be at least two different interpretations of his role in the landscape of Stalinist culture. The production story associated with the script shows us, in an ideal way, the problematic relationship between literacy and visuality. The ‘sublime vision’ collapses at the moment when Eisenstein had to adapt it to narrative. Narrative is a linear construction that could not be brought together with the materialised multi-layered-ness of the visual space. Only hypertext would be an appropriate form for this; such a text would reconfigure the reader, forcing him to follow the cross connections. From this point on, Eisenstein starts to write his texts as hypertexts, thus making them extremely difficult to publish. (12) Thus his theoretical suggestion of a Spherical Book. In the beginning of the century, the idyllic world of holistic systems had broken down. Fundamental transformations in the natural sciences led to a fragmentation into single sciences. Totality is dismissed as Utopia. The variety of different types of discourse describes the work of art in all its aspects. Eisenstein’s Spherical Book was a product of this time, one which tried to overcome this discursiveness. His model is the most radical attempt to find a totality which does not exist, and can only be achieved in permanent change from one level to another, based on reinterpretation and a variable use of incompatible sectors. But this is also a possible suggestion for an interdisciplinary approach, integrating sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, communication theory, musicology and other disciplines into film studies. This text, translated and edited by the author, is an abridged and modified version of a chapter from her Sergej Eisenstein. Drei Utopien – Architekturentwurfe zur Filmtheorie [Sergei Eisenstein – Three Utopias: Architectural Drafts for a Film Theory] (Berlin: PotemkinPress 1996), pp. 109-125. |
© Oksana Bulgakowa and Rouge 2005. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |
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