research plan

The centrality of the comic and of laughter in Eisenstein’s work is itself part of a larger problem: a new relationship between force and form, the dynamic conception of form. This relationship cannot be explained in terms of beauty (form without force), nor can it be conceptualized in terms of the sublime (force as destructor of form). There is a new idea of aesthetic experience that Eisenstein is constructing. It is perhaps close to what has more recently, in view not of Eisenstein's but rather of Elie Faure’s idea of cinema, been called plasticity. The possibility of form to exist through its explosions and also to be something received and not merely something stable and imposing. It is only to make this dynamic plasticity of form intelligible that Eisenstein plunges into the history of laughter, comedy, and popular art.

The new way of relating the working of force and the changeable persistence of form responds to two demands Eisenstein places on cinema. To make the sensible material of cinema expressive of thought (materialization of ideas). To liken cinema to the historical break of the great Revolution and to figure the sudden rupture in historical time. In other words: on the one hand, sensible form needs to be able to sustain and give itself over to the force of thought, which by definition exceeds it; on the other hand, the figures of cinema must register in the form of their consistent disfigurement the appearance of revolutionary time, the dislocation of sudden and absolute change. To say the least, this is a paradoxical idea of form. A thoroughly dynamized form, under whose difficulty Eisenstein tortures both cinema and himself.

But it is also a truly liberating conception. Behind it, Eisenstein – holding hands with Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse – affirms a direct link between the intellectual capacity of art and the indisputable existence of the popular proletarian masses.