Friday, December 14, 2012

eisenstein on the comic (8)


February 2, 1947
Alma-Ata

On behalf of oneself!
But it is possible to bring it about, and just as exposed here without [a] psychoanalytic touch [English in the original], and necessarily “in the form of a column”.
The topic: a new domain of aesthetics always repeats in a new dimension, on a new level—in a new quality—the basis of the phenomenon that appears in it.
We saw [English in the original]: 1) the technical phenomenon of movement in cinema, which gave us the basic principle [English in the original] of the aesthetics of (silent [cinema])—montage.
2) The example of sound cinema, where the technical phenomenon in the photographic element, translating the outlines [nachertanie: tracing, inscription] into sound, gave us the basis of aesthetics: audio-visual commensurability of sound and visual representation.
The same holds for art as such: the basis of its “work” and aesthetics has to be the principle of …  transfer [perenos]—of the metaphor (in all of its nuances—from juxtaposition to the image, i.e. from the moment of the discernment of similarities to the moment of fusion into a new representation).
For transfer—Übertragungonto artistic material (syuzhet, color, composition and whatnot [English in the original]) of that which we do no express in our lives, is the very principle of art. Replacement (Ersatz) of something with other means (dramatization from the play of passions of “real” personalities to an interplay [English in the original] of color/paint abstracted from them). Allegory is at the heart of art’s purposiveness and facticity. (Poe’s “Lenora”—an allegory of real-life Elisabeth, Jane and Francis, etc.). The actor “carries” the image of the role, etc.
Such is the (psycho-)“technical” basis of the phenomenon of artistic activity; and from here transfer becomes the basis of all aesthetic methodology of art!
Great! [English in the original]

Still to be put into the column:
The golden section
Thoughts on what happens when space is bound (a cage—magnified [English in the original] to the level of the organism as a whole)
Atom—a fragment from the painting of the movement of worlds and celestial bodies (or vice versa), which is already a verbal image, but—with the introduction of electro-physics—also reality.
And the unity of entire systems.


[From: Sergei Eisenstein, Metod, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Muzei kino, 2002), 386-7.]

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