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  • On Eisenstein
  • James Lastra
The Cinema of Eisenstein. David Bordwell. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pp. 316. $65.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

As David Bordwell notes in The Cinema of Eisenstein, we typically encounter the filmmaker through his incarnation as “The Exemplary Modernist.” On this account Sergei Eisenstein’s films not only presage familiar Art Cinema strategies in the work of Akira Kurosawa, Robert Bresson, and Michelangelo Antonioni, but also the more formally radical innovations of Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Stan Vanderbeek (260–61). Formal anticipation aside, in what ways might Eisenstein truly be considered exemplary of modernism? Given the rarity with which film is addressed seriously in surveys of modernism, it is worth exploring the vision of modernism such an exemplification implies.

Perhaps the most succinct and influential statement of Eisenstein’s modernism is offered by Annette Michelson, whose “Film and the Radical Aspiration” stirringly set the terms for discussing vanguard film movements in the 1960s and after. Michelson, in Bordwell’s words, “looked back to a historical moment in which formal experimentation fused with a commitment to social transformation . . . [she] believed that Eisenstein’s commitment to the double-edged radicality of the modernist project could inspire contemporary artists” (262). If, as she suggests, film is central to the very project of modernism, it is distressing to note just how mechanical, uninspired, and, indeed, how rare writing about modernist film has become. While Eisenstein’s work has consistently repaid close examination with ever more complex understandings of film form, theory, and spectatorship, such attention is rarely granted to the films Michelson optimistically suggested as his successors.

Even within the comparatively specialized field of film studies, these films remain largely unknown, poorly understood, and virtually untaught. When such works are taught, too often they are discussed in a reductive and superficial manner, typically serving as foils to Hollywood and valued solely for the fact that they reject or contest its norms. While such observations are no doubt true, they tend to trivialize movements sorely in need of interest and rejuvenation. Given the economic situation of independent film production and distribution, such ignorance has an impact of much greater magnitude than in other arts, generating a destructive cycle of neglect and ignorance. The stakes involved in naming Eisenstein as the model of the modernist film project are especially fraught since the values implied in such a decision help determine the availability of entire bodies of radical film. One unanticipated result of applying the “Eisenstein standard” has been to make it easier than ever to remain ignorant of experimental film forms, which can uniformly be praised (read “dismissed”) as “transgressive” or “deconstructive” without serious engagement. Yet no films are quite so simple, nor any filmmaker as easily domesticated as the many ham-fisted appropriations of Michelson’s argument would suggest—least of all, Eisenstein. [End Page 163]

“Why add to the mound of Eisenstein literature?” (xi) asks David Bordwell. The answers are as predictable as they are correct. First, he is central to nearly every era’s and every country’s conception of what film is or might be. “Around the world, when filmmakers learn their craft, they study Eisenstein.” Second, given the recent translations of previously unavailable essays, and the circulation of new versions of several of his films, it is time for a “straightforward introduction to his accomplishments” (xi). According to the latter standard, Bordwell’s The Cinema of Eisenstein is a major achievement. Powerfully and lucidly written, it tackles, or rather embraces, the ¦uvre of the man who can justifiably be said to have changed the course of cinema.

Bordwell’s picture of Eisenstein will no doubt disappoint some, but even the book’s critics will inevitably find themselves situating their own arguments against his; there is simply no comparable English-language work that so carefully and thoroughly deals with the breadth and complexity of Eisenstein’s output. In fact, given a fair and careful reading, even those critical of Bordwell’s work will likely be convinced of the book’s importance, if not necessarily its centrality. This book could confirm the fear that Bordwell’s theoretical work is nearing its end and that, given an...

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