Eisenstein and Hollywood/ 爱森斯坦与好莱坞

Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000).

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It has been argued that “the mass” as a coherent visual phenomenon can only inhabit the simulated, indefinite space of the cinema screen. Cinema creates an imagined space where a mass body exists that can exist nowhere else. “No reality could stand the intensity of the mass shown in cinema,” writes the Russian philosopher Valerii Podoroga. He describes Eisenstein’s film images of the crowd of people as a composite form, a “protoplasmic being in the process of becoming,” a “flow of violence” that fills the screen, with close-ups of faces overwhelmed by shock, extending the human countenance to the “limit of its expressivity.” Even more than the civil war newsreels of 1918-1921, Eisenstein’s feature films—Strike (1924), Potemkin (1926), October (1927)—gave an experience of the mass that became the reference point for future meaning. At a time when Western directors were filming the crowd as a negative image, Eisenstein glorified the mass as an organic force. In 1927 Walter Benjamin (to whom Podoroga is indebted) described Eisenstein’s cinema mass as “architectonic” in character: “No other medium could transmit this turbulent collective.”

When later Soviet generations “remembered” the October Revolution, it was Eisenstein’s images they had in mind. The particular characteristics of the screen as a cognitive organ enabled audiences to see the materiality not only of this new collective protagonist, but also of other ideal entities: the unity of the revolutionary people, the idea of international solidarity, the idea of the Soviet Union itself. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the Soviet experience would have been possible without cinema, and Lenin turned out to be more right than he could have anticipated when he called cinema, of all the arts, “for us” the most important. (147)

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Hollywood created a new mass figure, the individualized composite of the “star.” It can be argued that, like Eisenstein’s protoplasmic mass, this new being could only exist in the super-space of the cinema screen. The star, quintessentially female, was a sublime and simulated corporeality…. If the Soviet screen provided a prosthetic experience of collective power, the Hollywood screen provided a prosthetic experience of collective desire. (148)

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