Sergei Eisenstein, Neurocinematics, and Embodied Cognition: A Reassessment

In a recent study, the film scholar Luis Rocha Antunes offers a corrective to Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum by pointing out that it is the viewer's experience rather than the medium that constitutes its "message."¹ It is not solely the material properties of the medium and stylistic features that determine what the viewers will make of the film but rather the interplay between form and perception. Relying on neuroscientific discoveries, Antunes points out that our brain compensates for the missing sensory information; thus, a purely audiovisual input from the film results in a multisensory experience, activating the neural networks involved in the perception of motion, balance, spatial orientation, texture, temperature, and pain without the actual external physical stimuli.² These perceptual inferences are automatic and preconscious. Furthermore, the micromotions of the spectators' bodies, such as the turning of one's head to pursue a target rushing across the screen, are not an irrelevant by-product of film viewing but rather a significant source of sensory experience that contributes to the interpretation of film sequences.³

Antunes's approach, which shifts emphasis from pure form toward the analysis of somesthetic experience of the viewer, recalls Sergei Eisenstein's famous assertion that the spectator is the endpoint and the ultimate goal of the montage of film attractions.⁴ From his earliest manifestos of 1923–1924 onward, the director stressed that form was "effective" if it delivered "a series of blows to the consciousness and emotions of the audience."⁵ In processing these "blows," the spectators in Eisenstein's model were not an inert, passive receptacle of screen stimuli but instead were passionately involved cocreators of the film experience. Throughout his career, he explored the artistic strategies that animated spectators' bodies, guided their attentive gaze, orchestrated syntheses and counterpoints between various sensory channels in their perception, and led them through the stages of emotional and intellectual transformation. Eisenstein's texts, documenting these experiments, anticipate many of the research questions that are currently driving the rapprochement between film scholarship and cognitive neuroscience, and this ancestry is readily acknowledged by contemporary leaders in this interdisciplinary field.⁶ At the same time, Eisenstein's views are bound by his historical moment and the sources he drew on, many of which distance him from today's emergent paradigm. It would be a mistake to neglect this context while depicting him as a precursor of contemporary applications of neuroscience to aesthetics—as someone who intuited the future path of research despite the lack of the brain scanning technologies we have today.

The goal of this essay is to clarify the original context and thrust of Eisenstein's arguments. In particular, I focus on two crucial questions in contemporary neurocognitive discussions of cinema: the issue of spectators' embodied simulation of screen events in light of the theory of "mirror neurons" and the issue of the multisensory processing of film images. My analysis is prompted by two recent publications. The first publication is Maria Belodubrovskaya's rethinking of Eisenstein's film attractions along the lines of neuroscientific theories of embodied simulation, which she posits as a challenge to Tom Gunning's influential interpretation of attractions as thrilling yet self-aware formal flourishes geared at Verfremdungseffekt.⁷ The second publication is Antunes's argument dismissing Eisenstein's evocations of synesthesia as cerebral, deliberate visual metaphors, relying on high-order cognitive deciphering rather than the automatic "low-order syntheses" (as in Antunes's own neuroscience-based principle of multisensory film experience).⁸ In essence, these two interpretations of Eisenstein's legacy are diametrically opposed, with Belodubrovskaya insisting on the director's invocation of "low-level, precognitive psychic and bodily responses" and Antunes denying him this power.⁹

My contention is that Eisenstein's approach is at once more protean and more radical than contemporary researchers contend; it is at once more archaic (in the sense of being rooted in nineteenthand early twentieth-century psychology and aesthetic theory) and more forward-looking (that is, anticipating and confronting the limitations of contemporary neuroaesthetics). His sharp, nontrivial articulations have much to offer to today...