Eisenstein on the comic (1)

November 27, 1943

The Comic.

Le Roi Dagobert

Exhausted from thirty-two nights of shooting, I collapsed. I am resting.

I take up my favorite work.

La chasse à travers les livres…

Cette fois-ci c’est the question, why is King Dagobert’s culotte à l’envers.

This question emerged during my pursuit of the question, [what do] à rebours, à l’envers [mean] in the domain of the commonly risible.

To simultaneously explain what lies further behind this first, well-known couplet.

Luckily, I somehow dragged the collection “Images d’Epinal—Rondes et Chansons” (bought in Moscow on October 10, 1940) here, to Alma-Ata.

Here is the first couplet in its entirety:

Le bon roi Dagobert

Avait sa culottes à l’envers;

Le Grand Saint Eloi

Lui dit: « O mon roi!

Votre Majeste

Est mal culotte »;

« C’est vrai,—lui dit le roi, —

Je vais la remettre à l’endroit ».

The theme of à l’envers appears not to be immediately present in the rest of the song, the syuzhet of the song, however, turns out to consist in its entirety of the relationship between du Bon Roi and du Grand Saint Eloi, arriving at a crescendo towards the end (couplet #16):

Quand Dagobert mourut,

Le Diable aussitôt accourût;

Le Grand Saint Eloi

Lui dit: « O mon roi!

Satan va passer,

Faut vous confesser »;

« Hélas,—dit le bon roi,—

Ne pourrais-tu mourir pour moi? »

And there we have it! [English in the original] The theme here is the substitution of the king… with the pauper (although in this case the pauper's role is played by le Grand Saint Eloi).[i] That is, le roi Dagobert belongs to that never-ending series on the subject of the substitution of the king (see here also [?] and all the cases enumerated in Frazer and [Olga] Freidenberg’s The Poetics of Syuzhet and Genre).

And… our Ivan the Terrible. Twice.

Historically. The dark story with Simeon Bekbulatovich.

And in the screenplay. I took a lot of care so the theme of substitution would not enter the screenplay in a straightforward manner. But it did crawl in “sideways”: the murder of Vladimir who is wearing the king's clothes is a direct reconstruction of this mythical situation as well as of a past form of everyday life (an interesting ricochet-like appearance, which does not pass by way of the straightforward theme—the historical fact; even more interesting is that other “inventions” such as this one—father and son, matriarchy-patriarchy, etc.—without a doubt also relied on a similar formula).

The first couplet of “Roi Dagobert” appears as though it were a tuning fork for reversibility as such, as an unavoidable urge [English in the original] (Wilson Disher, “Clowns & Pantomimes” is to be compared with bisexual cross-dressing, le Pape des Fous. And similarly, on the principle, the idea, the forms, and the very necessity of … Messe Noire—cf. “Imago”, IX Band, 1923, Heft 1: R. Löwenstein, “Zur Psychoanalyse der Schwarzen Messen”).[ii]

[From: Sergei Eisenstein, Metod, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Muzei kino, 2002), 377-9.]

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[i] Apropos, the saint in the Epinal image  is portrayed as … an artisan, in an apron with pincers and bellows (a blacksmith), wearing only a Jewish miter with a cross over his sufficiently Jewish profile.

[ii] Materials; by no means, however, also the interpretations of mister-psychoanalysts!!!!!