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Eisenstein, the Glass House and the Spherical Book

From the Comedy of the Eye to a Drama of Enlightenment


Oksana Bulgakowa

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Crystal Palace

 

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Crystal Palace (interior)

 

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)  


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Bruno Taut The Glass House 1914

 

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The trait that Benjamin considered revolutionary had been frightening to Evgeny Zamyatin, the author of the anti-utopian novel We. In it, the city of the future is composed entirely of glass buildings allowing for total surveillance. The novel was published in English translation in 1925 and caused a huge scandal in the Soviet Union, eventually leading to the author’s emigration from Russia.

Meanwhile, different architects – German Mystics, Italian Fascists, American Rationalists, French Constructivists and Russian Communists – were creating their glass buildings and discovering that this material could support conflicting ideologies. Like the architects, some film directors were inspired by the possibilities of glass. This brings us to Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealised project, The Glass House.

In March 1926, Eisenstein came to Berlin to attend the premiere of The Battleship Potemkin. The film had difficulties with censorship; the German premiere was postponed and the director found himself in Berlin with much time on his hands. Dimitri Marianoff, Albert Einstein’s son-in-law and an employee of the Soviet trade mission, put Eisenstein in contact with Berlin’s artistic circles and introduced him to film celebrities.

Eisenstein visited Fritz Lang on the Metropolis set – Eternal Gardens, a glass dome. Eisenstein discussed the advantages of an ‘unchained’, mobile camera with the cameramen Karl Freund and Gunther Rittau. While they explained its advantages to Eisenstein, Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife and the film’s scriptwriter, explained to him its central concept. Metropolis, a vision of a city in the year 2000, inspired Eisenstein to create a film about a glass tower.

 

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.

 

  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.  

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El Lissitzky Cloud-Iron 1925

 

4. V. S. [Sergei Eisenstein], ‚Novaia klientura gospodina Korb’zu’e’, Sovjetskii ekran, No 46 (1928), p. 5.

 

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Le Corbusier Cité du Refuge 1929-33

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Frank Lloyd Wright Glass Tower 1930

 

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:

 

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Eisenstein storyboard

5. Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 36/37 (1997/98), p. 229.

  I’ve spent ten days being depressed. Now I’m starting to get better. It seems that I may be liquidating a whole bunch of my neuroses forever. For three days I have sat through high-speed psychoanalysis with one of the most renowned doctors in the States (the editor of The Psychoanalytic Review), my good friend Dr Stragnell. Very interesting. We have uncovered fifty per cent of my ‘doubt’ complex – this is, of course, my sore spot. We have been applying a scientific method – this isn’t the usual quack treatment. The latest hysterical depression (during my present fortunate circumstances!) upset me so much that I decided to root out the guilty group of neuroses (without touching the others). My decision happened to coincide with Dr Stragnell’s arrival (sometimes I’m lucky). It’s very interesting to see how my doubt obsession developed and who and what are guilty. Imagine, Pearl! I will no longer need constant affirmation! To hell with it all! I will be able to do everything! (5)  

6. The script and the excerpts from the diaries were first published by Naum Kleiman, Iskusstvo kino, No 3 (1979), pp. 94-114; and in French by François Albera and Valérie Posener, Faces. Journal d'architecture (Genf), numéro 24 (Summer 1992), pp. 43-52. Some pages and drawings were reproduced by Jay Leyda & Zina Vernow, Eisenstein at Work (New York: Pantheon 1982), pp. 43-46. I published a more complete version of the script, combined with excerpts from Eisenstein’s diaries, in Eisenstein und Deutschland, pp. 17-38, based on Eisenstein’s archival files (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art [RGALI], fond 1923, inventory 1, file 66, inventory 2, files 1103-1107, 1109, 1114).

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André Kertész Distortions 1928

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El Lissitzky PROUN

7. Cf. François Albera’s analysis of Eisenstein’s film project, ‚Formzerstörung und Transparenz’, in Eisenstein und Deutschland, pp. 123-142.

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Joost Schmidt

 

Eisenstein’s enthusiasm for psychoanalysis was also reflected in his screenplay. But, despite this, the script was never finished. It exists as a storyboard in Eisenstein’s archive in Moscow. (6) The idea is parallel to similar Utopian projects that Eisenstein developed at the end of the ‘20s: the filming of Karl Marx’s Capital, the adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the writing of a Spherical Book in which he aspired to change film theory.

The first version of script (1926-7) unfolds a drawn storyboard of an experimental abstract movie, with the mobile camera and an elevator serving as the protagonists: the elevator moves between planes, floors and ceilings, modifying the view of the observer (i.e., the camera). The camera alone is capable of seeing this building, with its blind inhabitants. The transparency of the structure, the change and changeability of viewpoints, creates the basic principle of visual dramaturgy, which becomes the narrative structure. Eisenstein defined it as a comedy of situations that are treated literally as various positions of the camera and its constantly changing points of view.

Eisenstein’s notes attest to his great interest in working with glass as a material. Various possible optical effects appearing within a glass cube or glass sphere are mentioned in these notes: frosted glass; driving a nail into the glass with the resulting cracks; water games reflected in the glass; the testing of different lenses and glass textures. Eisenstein experimented with abolishing the sensation of hardness and weight. He wanted light to dissolve the materiality of glass. This is akin to the experimental photographs of the Bauhaus, André Kertész’s Distortions (published in 1928), Moholy Nagy’s kinetic installations, or a series of pictures with glass objects taken by the Soviet artist Alexander Rodchenko.

In the first version of the script, only the camera (unlike the characters) was able to ‘see’. Inside, a husband was incapable of seeing his wife’s lover; well-fed people could not see those who were starving. In other words, vision and the possibility of looking at things from different angles were the prerogatives of the mechanical camera. Eisenstein defined this genre as the ‘comedy of and for the eye’. He wanted to blur the lines between up and down, inside and outside. The Glass House became a kind of outlet for his theoretical ruminations about camera and film in general. The camera as an eye, as an X-ray machine; the house as model for a new cinematic space – The Glass House blows up the system of cinematic representation, liberating objects from the force of gravity. Objects and bodies float in this glass space. The logic of a space that does not have fixed points of reference recalls the space of Lissitzky’s PROUN (Project for the Affirmation of the New). That project utilised shifting axes and multiple perspectives to convey the idea of rotation in space. The space of Eisenstein’s Glass House is non-hierarchical; distance and the sensation of time are abolished (night becomes day, as in a green house).

This had been attempted in film before (and would be again), either as an optical deception or as a trick, in fairy tales or in animated cartoons (Mickey chasing ghosts, Fred Astaire dancing on walls). In Dali and Buñuel’s L’Age d’or (1930), the Secretary of State commits suicide and falls on the ceiling. In René Clair and Francis Picabia’s Entr’acte (1924), a dancer is filmed through the transparent floor. In Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926), the floor is rendered transparent in order to visualise the hero’s trauma. (7)

Eisenstein takes this as a challenge. He conceived polycentric pictures with polyfocal perspectives that are presented simultaneously because – due to the transparency of the building – all views are present at the same time (from the front, above, below), and all figures are caught in various views. The director confronts the spectators with all these views; now, cinematic space is not assembled as a montage space bridging the breaks and gaps. The experimental space is naturalised, acentric – with rotating figures, figures that are floating in space – without the force of gravity. Windows, walls, ceilings, floors do not limit the image; the distinction between above and below, near and far, inside and outside are removed and the view is open. This destroys the centred form, with perspective and symmetry that is assigned to a fixed viewer. The opaque materials such as carpets and doors limit the transparency, but float in space as fragments of Suprematist constructions as Eisenstein defined them.

 

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Fritz Schleifer

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Eisenstein 'recovery of sight'

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Mikhail Eisenstein's buildings

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Eisenstein 'Suprematist elements'

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A Suprematist Door

 

 

 

However, as soon as the capacity of sight is tied not to a machine but to a human being, the comedy is transformed into drama. In 1927-8, Eisenstein changed the story and personalised the vision. He assigns to different characters different ways of seeing. A clash of these different ways of seeing leads to the unfolding of the narrative. The first character endowed with this the gift of vision is the Poet, whom Eisenstein sees as a kind of Messiah. The Poet’s willingness to pass his ability to see to other people (in order to render opaque relationships transparent) leads inevitably to a series of crimes (blackmail, murder and suicide). All these horrors – which result from the sudden discovery of the transparency of walls – are paradoxically predicated upon the opacity of relationships (adultery, denunciation, slander and spying). The gift of vision turns out to be dangerous, invariably leading to disaster. The Poet becomes insane. The comedy of the eye is overshadowed by the theme of recovery of sight, and thus the comedy of the eye is transformed into a ‘drama of enlightenment’.

Once in Hollywood, Eisenstein conceived his idea as a three-way conflict between an Architect (the building’s creator), a crazy Poet, and a Robot (a new figure introduced into the script). He placed this Robot between the characters of the Architect and Poet. This results in a radical re-evaluation of the plot. The Architect constructs the Glass House and gives it to humanity. But the inhabitants are not able to see it. The Poet opens people’s eyes and perishes from his own gift. The Robot, perfect citizen of the new civilisation, destroys the house. When, at the end, he removes his mask, we see that the destroyer is the Architect himself.

In the final version, the heroes are presented as opposites and projected onto Old and New Testament prototypes: the Poet is viewed both as a virtual Adam and as a new Jesus. The old Architect becomes imbued with the features of God the Father, the Poet acquires the features of God the Son, and the Robot turns out to be a kind of Holy Ghost. But since the Robot turns out to be the Architect in disguise, Eisenstein dissolves the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, tracing this Trinity back to a dichotomy (God the Father versus God the Son) that held an autobiographical significance. Eisenstein himself was a failed architect who created a doubled Oedipal self-portrait. He identified both with the Architect and the Poet (the son who rejects his father’s creation). Eisenstein’s father was an architect whose Art Nouveau buildings the son mocked. Eisenstein tellingly called The Glass House his own private Mystery Play. In his final version of the screenplay, the comedy of the eye and the drama of recovered sight were subsumed by the tragedy of two Utopian dreamers. One is the Architect who designs an ideal house, the other the Poet who doubts the validity of that functional model.

This conflict should firstly be understood within the context of the clash between two architectural Utopias of Eisenstein’s age, both Utopias of glass architecture. One was advanced by the German architect Bruno Taut and his group ‘Die gläserne Kette’ (The Glass Chain). Taut’s ideas about glass architecture were inspired by the writings of Paul Scheerbart (died 1915), a German science fiction author. The members of the Glass Chain group aimed at bringing inhabitants of the glass buildings closer to the cosmos. In contrast to the traditional static and restricted view in conventional buildings, the inhabitants of the Glass House would be spectators of the infinite, cosmic panorama and the gigantic theatre of nature, due to the transparent character of glass walls with no limits.

 

8. Mikhail Iampolski. ‘Mifologiia stekla v novoevropeiskoj kul’ture’, Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie. Moskva: Sovetskii khudozhnik, vypusk 24 (1988), pp. 314-348. His English essay on the topic is different from the Russian version; cf. ‘Transparency Painting: from Myth to Theatre’, in Alla Efimova & Lev Manovich (eds.), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1993).

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Botanic Garden Berlin: Tropical Greenhouse 1906-7

9. H. M. Wingler, Das Bauhaus. Weimar - Dessau - Berlin und die Nachfolge in Chicago seit 1937 (Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Rasch & Co und DuMont Schauberg, 3. Auflage, 1975), pp. 166-177.

10. Hyacinthe Dubreuil, Standards (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1929); L'example de Bata. La libération des initiatives individuelles dans une entreprise géante (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1936). Cf. Thilo Hilpert, Die funktionelle Stadt. Le Corbusiers Stadtvision. Bedingungen, Motive, Hintergründe (Braunschweig: Vieweg 1978 [Bauwelt Fundamente 48]), pp. 263 ff.

 

 

 

Architecture was, for Taut and his followers, a kind of new religion. Mikhail Iampolski attributes the genealogy of Eisenstein’s project to this source, and interprets the script as a comment on Taut’s glass cosmogony. (8) God the Father designs the house like a Paradise (that is why the image of a Glass House is that of a greenhouse). Afterwards, the myth is transferred to its spiritual phase: the Messiah transmits his vision to the others and it releases hate, intrigues and murder. The disaster is completed by the Architect, who destroys the Glass Cathedral – and thus the Utopia. The project could be considered as a response to this concept. The dwellers of this Glass House are by no means such good spectators as those conceived by Taut. Eisenstein’s heroes are initially blind but, when they recover sight, the result is horror.

At the same time, Eisenstein’s project was also a sarcastic response to the Utopian Glass House theories of Constructivist and Functionalist architects. Both groups dreamed of placing the biological instincts of individuals under strict control by means of rational organisation of architectural space. Nikolai Ladovsky’s laboratory in Russia analysed the perception of architecture as a dynamic interaction between space and its users. The Bauhaus theoreticians involved Gestalt psychologists in the discussion of these issues. (9) Le Corbusier suggested the notion of synchronic perception: the optical perception called forth by visual phenomena was overshadowed by what he called biological factors. However, it had nothing to do with biology; it referred to sociology and behavioral models. The very term biology was taken by Le Corbusier from his friend, sociologist Hyacinthe Dubreuil (1883-1971), who had studied Ford’s factories, as well as those of the Czech industrialist Tomas Bata (1876-1932). (10) According to Dubreuil, all the worker’s movements in a building are prescribed and determined by the way the architect has organised space.

Le Corbusier, who was fascinated by the time-and-motion studies at Ford’s factories, wanted to achieve the same goal in an individual space: private apartments, houses and hotels. La machine à habiter, Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living’, is a first step on the road to prescribing certain movements and behavior to human beings. Life is organised by the architect in an authoritarian way. By the late ‘20s, this authoritarian approach to spatial structure was abolished; psychological studies discovered that Ford’s system was not sufficiently effective, because it eliminated the individual’s creative drives and initiative. It turned out that factory labour should rather be viewed as a process of play and interplay, whereby the worker faces constantly changing goals. The architect had to take this variability of decisions and the relative autonomy of an individual into his calculations.

 

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Mart Stam Van Nelle factory 1927

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Walter Gropius Office Building Berlin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But organising space became a politically important issue. The Dutch architect Mart Stam (1899-1986) constructed a tobacco factory in Rotterdam with glass walls. It was understood as the way of creating social transparency: everything is transparent, everyone can be seen and can see; the office of the director is transparent and can be seen by the workers, and vice versa. Le Corbusier commented: ‘No more proletarians or bourgeois, only the hierarchical scale wonderfully organised!’ The European Constructivists firmly believed that glass walls would simplify communication and render social structures transparent – that social upheavals could and should be replaced by a revolution in architecture.

In his Glass House project, Eisenstein clearly refers to these ideas of correct spatial organisation of social behavior. His protagonist, the Architect, attempts to regulate biological processes by means of spatial forms, whereas his antagonist, the Poet, symbolises the anarchical nature of the Individual. The wall does not teach people to see, nor does it make the existing social hierarchy any more harmonious. His heroes destroy the new visual space into which they have been placed. When Eisenstein unfolds the drama of revolt within the ideal glass building, he subjects the Utopian ideas of Constructivist theoreticians to a skeptical treatment. The Constructivists thought they could convert people into submissive participants, or actors in the theatre of modern life. The Glass Chain architects hoped to equip people with a new vision in an attempt to create intelligent, sophisticated spectators. Eisenstein lets his heroes destroy this ideal building. They are not prepared for the new roles of either spectators or participants in the spectacle of modern life. Primordial instincts prevail over the new architectural space.

The final result is neither a cosmic spectacle nor regulated behavior. What remains is a psychoanalytical drama of a son’s rebellion against his father. But it is not just an autobiographical scenario, and does not only refer to Utopian spatial concepts. It may also be a commentary on the larger Soviet project: Socialism. The paradigm works on a number of levels, from the personal to the philosophical, psychological, political and ideological. It strongly recalls Dostoevsky’s ‘Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ and Notes from the Underground, or Trotsky’s Utopia to make not only the social structure, but also human unconscious transparent. In a broader sense, Eisenstein’s project could be seen as a comment on the project of the Enlightenment, or of modernity.

The Glass House took vision as its central theme – both the perfect vision of the film medium, as well as the voyeurism of humans. At the final script stage, Eisenstein returned to the ancient tradition of inner vision by allowing only the Poet to ‘see’. He thereby destroyed his own film, since film was the medium of ‘new vision’ par excellence! If the film’s plot was based on the danger of vision, and on the value of inner enlightenment, then how was the medium itself supposed to be effective? It may have been inevitable that Eisenstein would eventually abandon the project.

But, at the same time, the project enabled Eisenstein to conceptualise a totally new approach to the creation of film theory: his Spherical Book. He refused to utilise a traditional form for producing theoretical texts such as manifesto, book or scriptwriting/filmmaking manual. He intended to write not a two-dimensional but spherical book: his ideal reader would not simply read one essay after another, following a linear narrative, but instead perceive the whole book simultaneously. The essays were to be arranged in clusters, each oriented in a different direction, but circling around one common theme – in this case, montage. Only the shape of a sphere could assure this mutual reversibility. Eisenstein wrote in his diary on August 5, 1929:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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)  

 

 

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.

 

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