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EISENSTEIN'S GENERAL LINE:
THE OLD AND THE NEW,
OR MODERNISM AS META-POLITICS
OLEG GELIKMAN
The film, strange formation reputed to be normal, is no more normal than
the society or the organism. All of these so-called objects are the result of
the imposition and hope for an accomplished totality. . . . The film is the
organic body of cinematographic movements.
—J.-F. Lyotard
We were created by the revolution. … Without it, many of us would have
become decadents.
—Victor Shklovsky
The identification of Sergei Eisenstein with the concept of "montage"
at times obscured the full scope of historical motivations that had driven
the transformations in his practice from The Battleship Potemkin (1924) to
Que Viva Mexico! (1931). Under Western eyes, Eisenstein often appeared
to be a solitary master unveiling an absolute vision of his medium. Though
this undoubtedly was one outcome of his experiments, his film-making,
technical though it was, has also generated narrative allegories beyond and
above his professed ideological commitments. To bring out the
significance of this conflict between theme and technique for our
understanding of Eisenstein's innovations, in what follows I will analyze
The General Line (1926-28), a film that was interrupted by the making of
October (1927), and eventually released, albeit in censored form, as The
Old and the New (1929). Quickly withdrawn from circulation in 1930, the
film faded from collective memory and ended up eclipsed by Eisenstein's
later works. Yet, in his intense theoretical reflections of the 1940s,
Eisenstein continued to prize and interrogate the discoveries and innovations
that marked the prolonged gestation and execution of his "agricultural
film."
Far from being coerced or reluctant tributes to the October Revolution,
films such as The Old and The New, October and Que Viva Mexico!
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152
Eisenstein’s General Line
present Eisenstein's distinctive understanding of the Revolutionary Event.
To borrow a phrase from Andrei Platonov, another esoteric Communist of
the era, Eisenstein identified revolution with a "resurrection of the
collective body of the people." However, within weeks after Eisenstein's
modernist quest for organic politics found an explicit expression in The
Old and The New, Stalin's Great Fracture was to render such "romanticisms"
heterodox and obsolete. Hence, the elegiac, sublime irony infusing
Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico!, a film the director completed while
traveling outside the Soviet Union in 1931. This film echoes the syncretic
Communism of The Old and The New, and elaborates the vision of
reconciliation between pre-history and modernity first announced there.
While Eisenstein's modernism was political through and through, it
was not of a conformist or ideological sort. Eisenstein was neither an
opportunist, nor a literalist. He earnestly subscribed to the precepts of
materialism and dialectics, but the art-historical theories and cinematographic
practices he derived from them were consistently idiosyncratic. In the
eyes of contemporaries, the discrepancy between Eisenstein's avowed
loyalty and the deviance of his works often assumed comical features:
thus, alluding to the destruction of the Tsar's wine cellars in the finale of
October, Victor Shklovsky described Eisenstein's portrayal of the storming
of the Winter Palace as the "battle with the tableware" ("Konetz barocco,"
Blue folder). In a recurrent pattern, the more orthodox Eisenstein tried to
become, the more resistance his experiments in film form generated.
Aversion to the ideological task at hand clearly was not an issue (in 1935,
Eisenstein had no qualms about working on transforming one of the most
nauseating fabrications of Stalin's propaganda, the martyrdom of thirteen
year old Pavlik Morozov at the hands of his kulak grandfather, into a
motion picture).1 Rather, the obstacle inhered in Eisenstein's production
process. Instead of faithfully broadcasting the party line ("expressing what
we need to be expressing"2 as he eloquently put it in 1935), his "pathos
compositions" would re-code the official theme, often without Eisenstein
becoming fully aware of the distortion or rushing to minimize it through
polemical interventions or post hoc theoretical rationalization.
The reasons for this consistently faithful infidelity to the ideological
task at hand are deeper than isolated missteps or miscalculations:
Eisenstein was perfectly capable of fixing those. It has to do with the fact
that his method already included a politics, and thus could not be practiced
apart from it. Eisenstein's politics was a mytho-poetic politics of
Modernism, a meta-politics centered on the image of the "wild body"
which has either gone missing (and so must be mourned) or remains latent
(and so must be actualized). The decadence detected in ornament by Adolf
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Oleg Gelikman
153
Loos was never so total as to forestall a decisive intervention via
geometrical architecture; and the revolution that Eisenstein embraced was
never complete enough to stop him from "amplifying" it further.3 Whether
we like it or not, this central investment into the remaking of history by
constructing a "libidinal apparatus" for the concentration, amplification
and release of the repressed psychic forces places the Russian director
alongside other political modernists such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis
and Ernst Jünger. But because Eisenstein encountered and generated
different obstacles to his modernist project, his itinerary has other lessons
to teach than theirs.
Eisenstein's Modernism and the Aesthetics of Force
The work of art is a kind of violence.
—Sergei Eisenstein
Cinema, for all its overt reliance on industrial technology, has been a
great boon to mimetic interpretation of art, pressing the imitation view to
the limit with Dziga Vertov's claim to capture "life unawares." Eisenstein,
on the other hand, consistently denied any mimetic basis for art, cinematic
art included:
Art for me has never been" art for art's sake. Nor was it a creation of
something that does not resemble the world—"my own world." But never
did it have as its task the "reflection"[mirroring] of the existing world. I
always had the following task—through the means of impact—to act upon
feelings and thoughts, to influence the psyche, to form the consciousness
of the spectators in the desired, needed, known direction.4
He was not only anti-Vertov, but also an anti-Bazin. He claimed that
even the shot represents a distortion of the object because the camera
frames it from a point of view. He attacked Béla Balázs who placed the
camera's relation to the depicted object at the center of his theory of
cinema and claimed that the Hungarian critic had forgotten about the
scissors.5 For Eisenstein, the shot was a primordial instance of montageconstruction. The director argued that the separation between them was a
theoretical carry-over from mimetic aesthetics and called for the
elimination of the dualism between the shot and montage in practice.6 The
baroque expressionism of the late Ivan The Terrible was there from the
start.
Characterizing Eisenstein's philosophy of art, Noël Carroll comes to
the conclusion that his aesthetic is animated not by the Differentiating but
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154
Eisenstein’s General Line
by the Exemplifying impulse.7 In other words, rather than seeking to
incarnate the specific possibility of cinema as a medium (like Vertov, Jean
Epstein, etc.), he understood film as a signifying structure that exemplifies
the fundamental laws controlling production and circulation of art-forms,
art-works and art-theories. Film does not bring about a collapse of the
Beaux-Arts; nor does it circumscribe the essence of its medium as a way
of setting itself in opposition to the competing mediums of theater, poetry
or painting. Rather, in exploring the possibilities specific to its medium,
cinema brings to visibility the general laws that have always governed the
production of art as the site of the communication of affect. Eisenstein's
cinema leads to the museum, and the recent publication of Eisenstein's
magnum opus Grundproblem—a sprawling examination of the recurrence
of the compositional law of ecstasy across artifacts drawn from a dizzying
array of national traditions—confirms this diagnosis beyond anyone's
expectations. While the collapse of the Bolshoi theater in the final shot of
Man with a Movie Camera suggested the destruction of the Pantheon,
Eisenstein spent his entire life constructing one; for Andre Malraux, it was
photography that enabled the materialization of his "imaginary museum";
for Eisenstein, it was cinema—at least, cinema as he practiced it—that
retrospectively illuminated the laws of art.
Eisenstein's modernism, therefore, did not spring from the marriage of
the technophilia and mimesis typical of the avant-garde filmmakers of his
generation. He placed cinematography in a different lineage and conceived
of it as a hyper-theatrical presentation: a stage in the development of
theater which, for the sake of the fundamentally theatrical goal of
immersion, dispensed with the traditional apparatus of theater (stage, plot,
acting technique) and replaced it with a more effective one: "In other
words, cinema is today's phase of theater.”8 Speaking of his path to
filmmaking, he attacks the literalism of the notion that the first time he
utilized film was when projecting a short film of Glumov's diary in the
staging of Nicolai Ostrovsky's The Wise Man.9 Eisenstein argued that the
structure of the play was already cinematographic; in other words, it was
held together by the movement of ideas and the attitude of parody rather
than by the re-appearance of the same characters in the continuous timespace or the semantic unity of the plot. The fact that one bit of the
spectacle happened to be a strip of celluloid projected on a screen is
incidental to the inauguration of the cinematic composition. As Aristotle
claimed that tragedy is a whole regardless of performance or reception
(Poetics 1462a12), in the same vein Eisenstein claimed that his staging
(mis-en-scene) of Ostrovsky's The Sage and Tretyakov's Gas Masks was
already cinematographic, even if neither play became a film.
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Oleg Gelikman
155
Cinematography, for SE, did not signify a conversion of a technological
possibilities into new aesthetic actualities (an incarnation of the "optical
unconscious" crucial to the avant-garde) or the decisive triumph of
mimesis (S. Kracauer's "conquest of physical reality"). Rather, it
represented the emergence of the theater of immersion whose laws he set
out to discover, exploit and theorize. His project, therefore, was not to
represent or "reflect" reality, but to theatricalize it, to extract and refashion
the material of experience in order to maximize the force of the
impressions the audience is to receive.
At the core of Eisenstein's anti-mimetic and anti-technicist project we
find the aesthetics of force, the determination to blast any ready-made
signifying structures in order to refashion them into the vehicles of the
mythic "renewal of life." Vsevolod Meyerhold, co-director of The Wise
Man, remarked that once Eisenstein was finished directing the play, there
was nothing left of the play but "rags and bones.”10 Eisenstein will
transpose the same merciless approach to his filmmaking practice proper.
Speaking of the relationship between the script and directing, the director
directly attacks the notion that the screenplay constitutes a dramatic unity:
"The screenplay is not a play. A play is a self-sufficient value [=unit] and
[exists] outside of its theatrical presentation. The screenplay, on the other
hand, is a shorthand record [stenogramma] of the emotional movement
that desires realization in the accumulation of visual figures....Screenplay
is a bottle needed only in order to explode the cork and [allow] the wine of
the temperament to flow, foaming, into the eager throats of those on the
receiving end.”11 The transition from the theme to the screenplay to the
screen is not a visualization of the existing dramatic structure reflecting
recognizable social or psychological datum; rather, it is a continuum of the
intensification of the affective charge of the material that reaches its
apogee at the stage of editing. In Eisenstein's presentation, each stage in
the filmmaking process involves a decisive re-figuration of the previous
narrative arrangement.
While Eisenstein maintains that this process of transposition via
montage construction "realizes" the theme, in fact it creates a considerable
tension between the ostensible subject matter and the film that "embodies"
it: the charges of formalism that the Soviet authorities leveled at his films
show that this discrepancy was evident even to less discerning of his
viewers. For precisely the same reason, Eisenstein's films cannot be
dismissed as propaganda, since this accusation would once again presuppose
that his works had successfully complied with their ideological task.
Instead, one faces a system of tensions between the allegorical and the
affective construction of the same thematic material, a continuum of re-
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156
Eisenstein’s General Line
inscriptions held together by a higher-order narrative archetype (romance,
utopia or myth) whose presence Eisenstein would nonetheless consistently
deny. Thus, the task of reading Eisenstein's films cannot be limited to
identifying which thesis of the Bolshevik ideology he transmuted into
pathos; we must also identify what type of meta-narrative had to emerge in
order to hold together the conflicting strata antagonized by his method.
This the line of questioning pursued by the analysis of The Old and The
New in the next section.
Forced Obsolescence: From The General Line
to The Old and The New (1926-1929)
In the preceding section I indicated that Eisenstein's method acted as
somewhat of a curse, destining the director to be a prime example of the
artist "left helplessly behind by [his] expression, which outstripped his
psychology."12 While pretending to be a merely technical realization of the
extrinsic theme, his method introduced a second-order thematic archetype
whose presence Eisenstein would either deny or diminish by claiming that
it "realizes the task assigned." But the discrepancy between Eisenstein's
claims of thematic fidelity and the bewilderment or censorship his films
consistently met shows that his works tended to create a considerable
tension between theme and pathos rather than weld them into an
indissoluble unity as Eisenstein liked to claim.13
The thematic instability in question manifests itself in the spectrum of
critical reactions to Eisenstein's The Old and the New. It is commonly seen
as propaganda for collective farms featuring some technically audacious
flourishes such as the extensive use of the 28 millimeter wide-angle lens,
pastoral dream sequences and intellectual montage. But there are some
interesting exceptions to this view. In La Ressemblance informe, Georges
Didi-Hubermann assimilates the film to the ethnographic surrealism
promoted by the group of scholars and artists affiliated with the
Documents magazine and Georges Bataille in particular.14 In contrast,
Annette Michelson argues for the film's historical fidelity to the situation
of Soviet agriculture in the 1920s: "The General Line is, in its
representation of the collectivization campaign and its preconditions,
extraordinary precise, to the point of statistical exactness"15 Recently,
Jacques Rancière inquired at length into the meaning of the revulsion that
the film is apt to provoke in today's audience. While his meditation is
entitled "Eisenstein's madness," he ends it on a strangely nostalgic note.
Referring to one of the film's stranger vignettes in which, in order to
revitalize a broken-down tractor, the female heroine engages in a sort of
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Oleg Gelikman
157
socialist striptease, Rancière writes: "Marfa's lovingly torn skirt doesn't
just refer us to a century of revolutionary illusions that have faded into the
background. It also asks us what century we ourselves live in to derive—
our Deleuzes in our pockets—from the love affair upon a sinking ship
between a young woman in first class and a young man in the third."16 Our
hypocrisy seems to be the object of Rancière's indignation: we claim
allegiance to the intensities (hence, Deleuzes in our pockets), but choose
re-processed emotions of the Titanic over the mad pathos of Eisenstein's
works.
Historical fidelity was never high on Eisenstein's list of aesthetic
priorities. In the midst of the intense debate on the relation between the
dramatic film and the documentary chronicle, he shocked all the
participants by calling for the "contempt for the material.”17 and for the
expulsion of the "living man" from film.18 The Odessa steps sequence is a
fabrication allegedly born out of the vertigo experienced by the director.19
He retained interest in the stairs as vehicles of pathos throughout his
career. In October, Kerensky will be forced to ascend the grand staircase
in the Winter Palace repeatedly, without ever reaching the top—a
marionette of history condemned to persist in a useless commotion. The
same film opens with the demolition of the statue of Alexander III, the
father and predecessor of Nicholas II – the tsar whom the February
revolution toppled. The actual demolition took place in 1918 in Moscow,
the city which put up fierce resistance to the 1917 Bolshevik coup that
Eisenstein was invited to commemorate. One can see why Eisenstein's
films consistently attracted the charge of "formalism"—instead of
representing "the past as it was," they theatricalize it with little regard for
chronology, geography or vraisamblance. The director once described his
method as "staged chronicle.”20 It is a description that points to the
contradiction whose emotive and aesthetic resources he never stopped
exploiting.
Unlike Battleship Potemkin and October, The Old and The New was a
film meant to reflect the problematic present, rather than to memorialize a
heroic past. It was to be dedicated to the exposition of the struggle for
socialism in the countryside. The relationship between Eisenstein's method
and his material was further complicated by the unforeseeable
developments in the Party politics. The director and Grigorii Alexandrov
began shooting their agricultural film under the screenplay title "The
General Line" in the Fall of 1926, three and a half years before the
beginning of Stalin's collectivization. In 1927, the filming was interrupted
by the making of October, made urgent by the impending celebration of
the October coup d'état (perevorot, as it was referred to at the time). By
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158
Eisenstein’s General Line
the time Eisenstein's film was released, long overdue, in the spring of
1928, the October perevorot got re-baptized into the Great October
Revolution. Eisenstein's crew returned to finish The General Line during
the summer of the same year.
The original script of "The General Line" was composed in the
summer of 1926. It relied on the notion of the gradual transition from
individual to collective forms of agriculture sketched out by Lenin in 1923
and implemented within the pluralist framework of the New Economic
Policy. For the purposes of contrast, the film makes allusions to Trotsky's
"left-wing" notion of the "industrialization" of agriculture, but does so in a
purely utopian fashion. As a result of this deft compromise between the
two extremes of the Party politics, the word "collective farm" (kolkhoz)
does not appear in the film even once. Instead, it describes the formation
of a cooperative (designated by an archaic, pre-revolutionary word artel' )
and presents the agriculture of the future as a factory whose architecture
evoked bold constructivist designs.21 However, by the time Eisenstein
returned to filming in the summer of 1928, the ideological landscape in
Moscow had changed in a radical and unforeseeable fashion. Stalin
managed to expulse Trotsky from the Party and marginalize Nicholai
Bukharin, the main architect of the New Economic Policy. By unleashing
the rhetoric contrasting "left" and "right" deviations with his own, reliably
infallible, yet remarkably nebulous "general line," Stalin succeeded in
defeating his opponents, consolidating his control of the Party and clearing
the road for the complete take-over of the state apparatus. As a result,
Eisenstein's film found itself entrapped by the unpredictable shift in Party
politics, for no one could have foreseen which one of the "leaders"
(Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev or Stalin) would win in the war of
succession triggered by Lenin's death in 1924. Nor could have Eisenstein
imagine that the three years after he wrote the script, the "general line"
would become synonymous with Stalin's rising autocracy rather than with
a compromise between warring factions within the Party.
In the attempt to "adjust" the film to the radical changes in political
climate, Eisenstein shot additional scenes in the Spring of 1929. But it was
too late to alter the overall conception. The film thus became obsolete both
in style and in substance before its release. According to Eisenstein, it was
Stalin who suggested that the film's title should be The Old and the New
rather than The General Line 22 Stalin indicated what the general line was
to be several weeks after the film's premiere in the October of 1929. In
December of that year, he announced his plan of "total collectivization" of
agriculture and called for the "liquidation of the kulak as a class." The next
nine weeks unleashed a human catastrophe that, as Solzhenitsyn put it in
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Oleg Gelikman
159
The Gulag Archipelago, broke the back of Russia. In 1930, Eisenstein's
rhapsodic film was withdrawn from theaters as ideologically deviant. The
director was in Hollywood at the time.23
Comforting though it is to look back at The Old and the New as a
faithful representation of collectivization, this view does not cohere either
with the circumstances of the film's production or Eisenstein's view of his
filmic practice. But does not the film, as Jacques Rancière implies, capture
the spirit of collectivization, if not its confusing letter? Does it not transmit
the mad enthusiasm of the Romantic stage of the Revolution?
The answer to this question depends on the difference between the
film's theme and its text, i.e., on what the film has made out of the
revolutionary spirit. As I argued above, Eisenstein's position is plagued by
the antagonism between, on the one hand, the stress on the generative,
creative capacity of montage compositions leading to the dismissal of the
fidelity to the "anecdote" (i.e., historical specifics that do not "fit" the
compositional image) as "fetishistic" and counterproductive; and, on the
other hand, assertions that his pathos constructions do nothing but
"amplify" the original theme. In other words, while Eisenstein's poetics is
generative, creative and anti-mimetic, his aesthetics—or, rather, his
aesthetic ideology—is deterministic and reproductive.24 No doubt the
excessive nature of Eisenstein's films, the fact that they show too much to
function as propaganda, is one of the effects of this deep antagonism at the
heart of the director's enterprise. At the very least, it also means that the
textual, narrative meaning of his films do not pre-exist them, but they
inhere in the dynamics of their construction. In "The Fourth Dimension in
Cinema," an essay presenting the technique of the polyphonic or
"overtonal" editing used in The General Line, Eisenstein argues that the
meaning of a montage composition is not revealed until the end, since the
sense—or, in my terms, the second-order narrative archetype—is not
readable until the final accent or a "reading indicator" retroactively unveils
the meaning of the preceding sequence.25 This dynamic view implies that
the meaning of the initial polyphonic sequences can be re-actualized later
on in a new sense, "in the direction of a new dominant," to use Eisenstein's
terminology. Rather than communicating dramatic units fixed in the
reader's imagination (exposition, collision, denouement), the form of
Eisenstein's film grows through the oscillation between the polyphonic
construction and retroactive re-inscription that unveils new layers of
sense in what has already been shown. Unlike D.W. Griffith's parallel
montage, which narrates by showing recognizable dramatic situations,
Eisenstein's composition proceeds by the re-inscription and juxtaposition
of the previously constructed meanings, i.e., by retroactively "molding"
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160
Eisenstein’s General Line
a synchronic idea out of diachronic flow of images. And this is why it may
be best to start deciphering the narrative meaning of The Old and the New
departing from the film's ending.
The Old and the New as a Narrative Allegory
In the finale of The Old and the New, we are greeted with an image of
the "machine in the garden" variety. On a country road that seems to
belong in Ivan Turgenev's novel an encounter takes place. A sleepy
peasant, a child by his side, is returning home, comfortably reclining in the
back of a carriage languidly pulled forth by his hardworking horse. His
repose is interrupted by the approach of a tractor traveling in the opposite
direction. The carriage stops, and so does the tractor. Behind the wheel,
there is a leather-clad operator sporting oversize goggles and a pilot's hat.
Figure 1. Beyond the Human: Marfa's Final Avatar.
Who is it? A close-up of the leather helmet and goggles do not
definitively reveal the identity of the stranger. The peasant struggles to
guess who or what he is dealing with. His face mouths words we do not
hear (The Old and the New is a silent film and no sound score was
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Oleg Gelikman
161
recorded at the time of production). Is it Marfa, a destitute peasant woman
he once knew? Without removing the goggles, the tractor operator smiles
widely, exuding confidence and resolve (See Figure 1). The screen is then
flooded with the close-ups of Marfa's face taken from the five novellas
that make the film: Marfa declaring that "one cannot live like this any
longer"; Marfa rejoicing at the sight of the cream streaming out of the milk
separator; Marfa learning that her bull died after having been poisoned by
the kulaks. The montage sequence seems at once to recall, re-enact and
project Marfa's metamorphosis from a peasant woman into an unsexed
leather-clad pilot-racer-driver. Rather than encapsulating a life already
lived, this rapid stream of images seems to chart a course of life not yet
accomplished. One can't tell where these images are to be located—in
Marfa's consciousness or in the diegetic narrative space of the film itself.
Next we see her out of the tractor, no longer wearing her pilot hat or the
goggles. An inter-title appears: "This is how the borders between the city
and the countryside get erased." The male peasant embraces Marfa who
gently resists his bear hug. The film ends.
What is the meaning of this ending?26 On the face of it, it seems
grotesquely literalist—Marfa's surrender to the peasant symbolizing the
unification of the city and the countryside. It also seems to be a concession
to cinematic convention that contradicts the narrative momentum of the
film. Combining elements of the epic, chronicle, comedy and supernatural,
The Old and the New purposefully excluded private lives of its characters
from consideration and allowed Marfa to elevate herself from despair to
joy through the mediation of progressive social structures (by joining the
milk cooperative) rather than through love or marriage. Moreover, the film
has consistently coded the male as the force of inertia, skepticism,
resistance to or obstruction of the new: the film opens with two brothers
dividing up their father's estate by sowing the house in two; the rowdy
peasants knock Marfa on the ground when she defends the cooperative
cashbox against them (J. Rancière characterized this scene as a "gang
rape”)27; the male bureaucrat delays the delivery of the much needed
tractor to Marfa's village; etc. Does the finale curtail the film's argument
for the superiority of the new fraternal order over the patriarchy of the old
Russia? How to correlate the power of self-transformation conveyed by
the ecstatic stream of Marfa's faces with the restoration of the couple, a
symbol of the proper order? If the film is the allegory of the replacement
of the archaic national culture by the futuristic-universal technical one, it
seems that this scene inverts the narrative momentum, creating a bathetic
complementarity of pathos and comedy in which the radically utopian
slogan ("erasure of the border between the city and the countryside")
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162
Eisenstein’s General Line
becomes ludicrous because illustrated by the hackneyed image of the
embracing couple.
The futuristic coda to The Old and the New powerfully recalls the
ending of another monument of the times, Leon Trotsky's Literature and
Revolution (1923). In particular, Marfa's magical metamorphosis into the
unisex, leather-clad ecstatic self proclaiming victory over time—one
possible meaning of the stream-of-close-ups montage—instantiates the
Promethean rhetoric favored by Trotsky and taken to truly delirious
heights by the members of the Proletarian Culture (Proletkult), an
association of artists that served as Eisenstein's home base in 1922-24.28
Before it became ubiquitous Soviet catchphrase, the "unification of the
country and the city" was also Trotsky's particular obsession—a
geographical expression of his vision of the socialist culture of the future
as total mobilization of population in the service of the erasure of the
national culture by the dynamic, harmonious, "American" technocracy:
It is not enough to consolidate, i.e. to shift to the factory-style production,
isolated branches of today's agriculture, such as production of butter,
cheese-making....It is necessary to consolidate the agriculture itself, to tear
it away from current fragmentation and, in place of today's pitiful picking
in the soil, install scientifically -based wheat- and rye "factories,", cow and
sheep "factories" etc. The industrialization of agriculture means the
elimination of the current crucial contradiction between the country and
the city, and therefore , between the worker and the peasant: measured by
their role in the country's economy, living conditions, level of culture, they
must become so close to one another that the very border between them
disappears.29
Eisenstein's film seems to be dominated by Trotsky's project to
industrialize rather than collectivize agriculture. The film opens with a
parable, in which two brothers divide the estate of their father by sowing
their hut in two. This absurd episode concludes with a montage of the
fields cut up into smaller and smaller lots by rapidly multiplying fences, a
visual effect recalling stop-motion animation or time-lapse photography
(Figures 2 and 3). This montage works as a striking visual analogue to
Trotsky's idea of the perniciousness of the "current fragmentation" of
agriculture.
The remarkable "Marfa's dream" sequence features another reference
to the technicist vision of the future and Trotsky's idea of the "cow
factory" in particular. As the dream unfolds, the pagan phantasmogoria of
cosmic fertility fades into a visit to a utopian cattle breeding facility.
Specially-designed sets feature a constructivist, glass-steel-and-concrete
architecture, attendants in while lab coats, and the first glimpse of the
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Oleg Gelikman
163
tractor in the film. In the middle of the sequence, corpulent pigs
energetically lunge into an overflowing river, and swim blissfully until,
much to our bewilderment, moving steel grates lift their carcasses from the
boiling tank for the purpose of the joyful transformation into bacon.
Eisenstein runs this bizarre cycle several times, as if to convince us that
nature itself shall willingly join in the process of "consolidation" outlined
by Trotsky; and thus, in the future Eden of consolidated agriculture, there
shall be no room for guilt or disgust.30
Figures 2 and 3: Eisenstein's visualization of the fragmented nature of traditional
agriculture. The screen is split as well, amplifying the audience's sense of the
irrationality of the depicted.
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164
Eisenstein’s General Line
As if foreshadowing the juxtaposition of the tractor and idyllic
countryside in Eisenstein's film, in the same speech Trotsky proclaimed
that "the machine does not oppose the countryside. The machine is the tool
of the contemporary man in all realms of life. The contemporary city is
transient. But it won't dissolve in the old countryside. On the contrary, the
village will raise itself to the level of the city. This is the main task. The
city is transient , but it shows the future and points the way. While today's
countryside is totally in the past. That is why its aesthetics is archaic, from
the museum of folk art. . . . With the help of the machine, the Socialist
human being wants and will command nature in all of its manifestations,
including the grouses and the sturgeons."31
Declarations such as these make it obvious that Trotsky's socialism
aimed not so much at the improvement of the existing economic
conditions as at the production of the new earth, new bodies and new
forms of life. In the operatic conclusion to his landmark Literature and
Revolution, he charted the trajectory of this process. It leads from
oppressive, chaotic darkness to the reign of transparency and proceeds by
the expulsion of the unconscious.32 In his version of "Wo Es war, soll Ich
werden" ("Where the Id was, Ego shall be"), humankind first removed the
unconscious from politics by replacing monarchy by parliamentary
democracies, and then the latter by the "thoroughly transparent Soviet
dictatorship." In the same vein, socialist planning purges the blind forces
of the market from economic relations. As an expanding vortex, this
exorcism of the unconscious gradually engulfs all spheres of existence,
ultimately leading to the emergence of a new biological type—a
"superman, if you like."33 At that stage of the revolution, the psyche turns
against the "unconscious, elemental, subterranean" milieu which
previously dominated it: "The humankind will not stop prostrating before
god, tsars and capitals in order to willingly bow to the dark laws of
heredity and blind sexual selection.”34 In The Old and the New, this
triumph over nature through manipulation of genetics was supposed to be
the subject of an entire novella. As late as April 1928, the script still
speaks of the scientists-magicians who "perfected the chickens, cows,
rams, guinea pigs, horses, rabbits, pigs and cats the same way one perfects
an automobile " and a certain "Bashkir sheep" whose udder has been
modified to be twice her size.35 But, probably due to Trotsky's precipitous
fall from grace, this storyline was never filmed and thus does not figure in
the released version of the film.
In unison with Eisenstein's own assertions about the transformative
power of cinema, Trotsky too called on the arts to lend his anthropogony
"a beautiful form" and prophesied a beneficent physiological mutation as
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Oleg Gelikman
165
well as the emergence of the "theatrically dynamic" forms of everyday
life. Apparently, weight loss was also part of the plan:
Human being will become incomparably stronger, smarter, thinner. His
body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his
voice more musical, [and] the forms of everyday life will acquire a
dynamic theatricality. The average human will rise to the level of
Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. Over this mountain range, new peaks will rise.36
Trotsky and the artists of the Proletkult circle imagined history on the
model of the psyche dominated by the unconscious. They defined the
revolution as the invention of the "libidinal apparatuses"—the Soviet
dictatorship, socialist economy, the arts of theater—that effect the
alchemical transmutation of the archaic, national, traditional, organic
forms of development into the unlimited, exponential growth of human
powers. Eisenstein's early defense of the conceptual, non-mimetic,
audience-centered cinema rehearses this heady rhetoric with striking
fidelity:
I assert that I am certain that the future belongs to the plot-less form of
[cinematic] presentation without characters; but this future will arrive only
with those conditions of social order which will enable the all-around
development and all-around expulsion of one's nature, application of one's
energy to action, and the humankind will no longer need the satisfactions
of the fictive energetic activities delivered to him by all types of spectacle
[i.e., theater, cinema, circus, etc.] which differ only with respect to how
they cause them.37
What is at stake in Eisenstein's resistance to the mimetic tendencies of
early cinema in Griffith or Vertov alike, in his destruction of the naturalist
mis-en-scene, and his syntagmatic interpretation of montage as a
generative mechanism rather than channel for communicating information,
therefore, is not aesthetic dissatisfaction with sentimental plots or
philosophical differences about the indexical status of the photographic
image, but also the production of a new body of the people, i.e., insuring
that the film makes a contribution to the "expulsion" of the old, i.e.
organic, chaotic, disorganized body. Like Trotsky at the end of Literature
and Revolution, Eisenstein interpreted the revolution in anthropological
rather than political terms, i.e., as restructuring of the "wild body" of the
people through the discipline imposed by the "scientific" apparatus.
Meditating on the "expressive movement" in 1924, Eisenstein claims that
the actor's body should become an arena of class struggle metaphorized
through the conflict between the lips and the head; the savagely distorted
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166
Eisenstein’s General Line
faces of Eisenstein's actors, thus, are not masks of emotion, but samples of
the body caught in the struggle for proper distribution of energy.38
The fact that the human body appears at once reified by the tradition
and yet open to unlimited intensification or that the machine stands as the
vanishing mediator between the old and the new indicates that, in Trotsky
and Eisenstein alike, we are dealing with a virulent form of modernist
ideology. But the ending of the film seems perverse, since it celebrates
Marfa's metamorphosis into a socialist super-human only to hand her back
to the peasant in traditional, folkish outfit. The dramatic logic of this
contradicts the Promethean pathos incarnated by Marfa: instead of
transcending the fictive satisfactions of romance, she seems to finally yield
to them. Rather than a concession to convention or oversight on
Eisenstein's part, the forced symbolism of the final kiss refers the viewer
back to the conflict at the heart of the film. It concerns the mythic question
of how the renewal of life is to take place—by the elimination of the
traditional culture or by means of a syncretic repetition of the archaic
rituals in new forms. In what follows, I will argue that while ostensibly
adhering to the creed of his Proletkult days, in The Old and the New
Eisenstein has already began to fashion his trademark theory of
"regression" as the royal road of art and the answer to the riddle of its
psychic appeal. Rather than a fulfillment of the official task or a static
manifestation of the Proletkult ideology, the film functions as the site that
elaborates Eisenstein's heterodox vision of revolution as a miraculous
event of integration of the anarchy of spontaneous life and the rational
power of the technical civilization.
The Ritual and the Spectacle: Eisenstein's Separator
In 1940-1945, Eisenstein would give a very revealing title to his
retrospective discussion of the central montage sequence in The Old and
the New—"The Separator and the Holy Grail." The stark juxtaposition of
the sacred and the profane recalls the central conceit of the film: rather
than extolling the "organizing role of the party," the director chose to
present the transformation of agriculture as a cosmic contest between
conflicting forms of belief, ritual and ways of life. It was Eisenstein
himself who, already in 1928, drew the parallel between the separator's
bowl and the sacral function of the Holy Grail 39; moreover, as a surviving
photograph shows, the parallel between the religious ceremony and the
function of the separator had been somewhat of a running gag already on
the set of the film (Figure 4). Yet the terms he chose to phrase this parallel
enact an ambiguous transfer of affect from the religious to the technological
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Oleg Gelikman
167
vessel: "Let the eyes of our audience catch fire before the tin of the
collective farm's separator!"40
Figure 4. With the milk separator as a prop, Sergei Eisenstein performs a mock
baptism on the newly born son of his unlikely peasant star, Marfa Lapkina.
In the film, the separator sequence follows the one featuring the
Russian Orthodox procession that occurs in the middle of a drought. The
purpose of the procession through the dusty, burnt-out fields is to solicit
rainfall. The priests, wearing robes overflowing with luxurious ornament,
lead the mass of the peasants dwarfed by the gigantic icons in silver
frames. The faces of the divinities—The Mother of God and the child
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168
Eisenstein’s General Line
Christ—look up to the mercilessly empty sky. Eisenstein orchestrates and
amplifies the downward movement of the collective body: one after
another, peasants "dive" under the icons, genuflect, cross themselves, and
then lie prostrate on the ground. To symbolize the notion of religion as
alienation of the real powers of man, he repeatedly zooms in on the torso
of a man with one leg, gliding onward on his four-wheeled cart. Finally,
the mutilated body of humanity reaches its destination—the site of the
communal prayer. The priests perform the liturgy in the middle of the
fields; a storm seems to be gathering and the peasants again prostrate
themselves on the ground. The scene darkens and a few drops of rain fall.
But then the "accidental cloud" dissipates, and the merciless sunlight
beams down upon the bodies of the exhausted humanity. The peasants
suspect "cheating" and launch menacing gazes in the direction of the
priests. The Mother of God icon surveys the scene of the embarrassment
of her healing powers with stoic equanimity.
Figure 5. The impotence of the old Gods.
Combining the sensory, motor, and auditory clues, this synaesthetic
sequence images forth the materialist critique of religion. Following
Feuerbach, here Eisenstein presents religion as an illusory attempt to
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Oleg Gelikman
169
exercise mastery over nature, a compound of magic thinking and ritual that
has been exploited for the purposes of class domination—hence, the
portrayal of the priests as cunning impostors and manipulators, shown to
be hiding the barometer underneath the cloth. Imaginative and kinetic in
execution, the sequence offers nothing but the standard clichés of Soviet
anti-religious propaganda. Dispensing with narrative transition, Eisenstein
uses the skepticism aroused by the failed prayer to link up the Orthodox
procession scene with the unveiling of the milk separator. The question the
film is posing is the following one: Will the peasants accept the new god
in place of the old one? Is the separator another defunct deity or a veritable
miracle? The separator's bowl is filled with milk, and Vasya, a young,
robust member of the cooperative, begins to rotate the giant handle in a
circular motion. Cutting from face to face, Eisenstein's camera makes the
peasants engage in the war of the gazes with the three members of the cooperative. Their hardened skepticism contrasts with Marfa's eager
expectation. Will the milk thicken? In a semi-parodic (and somewhat
bawdy) reference to The Battleship Potemkin's guns, Eisenstein makes the
"barrel" of the separator rotate slightly so as to aim directly at the film
audience. The scene continues to play up and exploit for dramatic
purposes the ambiguity of the separator: does it signify the elimination of
all ritual as defunct, ineffectual, manipulative, weapon of class domination
or for the emergence of the new type of ritual which reconciles rather than
antagonizes, integrates rather than differentiates? Crosscutting between the
milk swirling in the separator's bowl, the gazes of the audience and the
circular motions of Vasya's torso, Eisenstein presses the sequence to its
ecstatic conclusion: as the freshly-battered milk begins to drip from the
separator, Marfa's places her hands underneath and splashes the milk all
about her. The pantheistic identity of milk and water asserted in her
childish gesture is then amplified by the montage of water jets erupting
skyward (Figures 6 and 7). Then the screen becomes a blackboard. To
signify the explosion in the cooperative's membership, Eisenstein makes
the numbers on the screen grow, the increase in their size mirroring the
rise in the numerical value. "The number of the members has grown,"
clarifies the inter-title concluding the scene.
On the level of ideology, the scene enacts a dream of the spontaneous
conversion of the masses to the cause of progressive forms of agriculture.
In the Proletkult modernist imaginary, this conversion is to be mediated by
the presentation of the machine as a surrogate deity. While, in the
preceding sequence, the God of the Orthodox Church failed to produce
rain, the separator yields an abundant flow of freshly-battered cream.
Similarly, the downward movement of the previous sequence (the exhausted
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170
Eisenstein’s General Line
peasants shuffling under the weight of the icons, diving under them in
order to pray, finally, finding themselves prostrate on the ground during a
momentary sandstorm) is negated by the upward surge of the water jets
"ecstatically" transformed into the fireworks (in order to signify the
ecstatic transcendence Eisenstein wanted to have the jets hand-colored; the
idea was never realized). In the separator montage, the sky, rather than
being a mute addressee of impotent prayers, becomes a surface on which
the evidence of earthly abundance is to be inscribed; rather than being the
residence of the transcendent, elusive source of grace, it functions as a
backdrop for the abundance generated on earth.
Figures 6 and 7: The milk separator erupts skyward.
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Oleg Gelikman
171
But this anarchist vision of the spontaneous transfer of religious affect
is not the whole story. The second-order narrative archetype deftly
conjured and re-inscribed by this montage composition is that of the
pastoral. In addition to the climactic substitution of milk for water, the
pastoral metaphor dating back to Antiquity41, the presence of the genre is
also signaled by the unmotivated play of light reflections on the faces of
the peasants.42 The charm of water reflections resides in the schema of
nature as play rather than hostile force; the key attraction of the upward
water jets is the intimation of physical force as a vehicle of emancipation
capable of negating the universal bondage of gravity; the jets also convey
the notion of endless abundance. Recalling these pastoral yearnings,
Eisenstein's intellectual montage transfigures them. The ideas of play,
emancipation and abundance are no longer vague projections into the
natural phenomena. Rather, Eisenstein makes them correspond to events
enabled by the machine: the separator concentrates the natural energies
and then releases them for the benefit of wonder-struck humanity. The
vortex is the icon of this movement of concentration, and the eruption of
battered milk stands for the dialectically opposed movement of release,
liberation from the prior stage of existence signaled by the water's upward
escape from the power of gravity and the increase in the number of the
members of the cooperative.
Figure 8. The milk vortex.
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172
Eisenstein’s General Line
In Eisenstein's pathos-construction, the separator is not so much a
modern solution to a specific problem (how to store milk before the age of
refrigeration), but a marvel and a creator of a new social unit. In a sort of
utopian grotesque, Eisenstein makes the separator into a libidinal machine
that unbinds the vital forces dispersed among individuals from the prior
configurations that hold them captive. Thus, it magically overcomes the
peasant skepticism regarding joining the cooperatives; it defeats their
doubts about the efficacy of the machines; it even utilizes our attachment
to the pastoral images of nature so as to reveal their prophetic significance
as anticipations of the abundance that rational agriculture is capable of
creating. Rather than separating, Eisenstein's separator unifies. It reaffirms
the power of the spectacle to forge a new collective body, to overcome the
pre-existing differences by submitting organic and inorganic bodies to a
single rhythm. What interests Eisenstein more than anything is the
metabolic capacity of the spectacle to take over where the ritual no longer
works, to re-validate the spontaneous, archaic impulses and yearnings by
reinserting them into the new and alien contexts. He made this program
plain enough in the 1930 lecture that was meant to introduce The General
Line to the French audience, but ended up replacing the screening:
Earlier, in the times of the domination of religion and sorcery, science
was simultaneously an emotional element and the element that spiritually
absorbed human beings. Then there came about a separation, and now
exists a cerebral philosophy, pure abstraction and pure emotion.
We must return to the old, but not to primitivism, which had religion at
its base, but to the synthesis of the emotional and spiritual components.43
In sharp contrast to the technocratic rhetoric of Trotsky and Proletkult,
Eisenstein's film is held together by a different narrative of revolutionary
modernity. Eisenstein's revolution does not aim to create new human
beings, but to liberate them from their past by submitting its rituals to reenactment via parody and pathos; his vision of revolution is not that of the
abolition of the past or a giant leap forward. Rather, it consists in the
experience of simultaneity between different historical epochs, a playful
encounter between the archaic and modern forms of consciousness
pregnant with pathos and comedy at once. Beginning with 1930s, Eisenstein
will insist that this guided re-creation of pathos is an event of integration
of the lower, primordial sensory thinking with the higher intellectual
functions; that in owning the affect conveyed by the cinematographic
sequence, the spectator is operating "in accordance with his individuality,
in his own fashion, based upon his own experience, from the depths of his
imagination, from the fabric of his associations, from the presuppositions
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Oleg Gelikman
173
of his character, temperament and social belonging."44 Thus, the separator
sequence offers the first intimation of Eisenstein's later theory of the
artwork as the site of the performative integration of the archaic, "sensory"
thinking and abstract argument, a sort of triumphant re-living of the victory
of culture over nature displaced into an overarching narrative allegory that
revives our infantile omnipotence in order to give it a new meaning.
Toward the end of the film, Eisenstein recalls this logic of the
"revolution as the metabolic surrogate" one last time when he makes Lenin
"replace" the Mother of God (Figure 9). In contrast to the impotence of
the Mother of God icon stressed in the procession sequence (see Figure 5
above), in this scene Lenin presides over the magical resurrection of the
broken tractor (achieved by the sacrifice of Marfa's skirt mentioned by
Rancière). The parallel between the two episodes is stressed further when
the tractor passes under the Lenin "icon," just like the peasants in the
procession were "diving" under the icons. But this time the magic works:
the tractor proceeds to the village inn in order to hijack the peasants'
carriages and, for the sake of demonstrating the superiority of the tractor,
to pull all of them uphill at once. This sequence is Eisenstein at his most
heterodox—not only did he frame Lenin as a religious icon, but, by
surrounding him with Greek red-figure vase paintings, aligned Lenin's
ideas about cooperation with the return of ecstatic agricultural cults.
Figure 9. Mother's Replacement: Lenin as the New Agricultural Deity
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174
Eisenstein’s General Line
Conclusion: Eisenstein's Myth,
or an Orpheus in Petrograd
As I have tried to show, The Old and The New is a remarkably
heterogeneous creation. The historical circumstances the director could not
have foreseen conspired to insure that already at the time of its release The
Old and The New became a wistful echo of an ecstatic future that decayed
as the film was being made. As a result, we can neither dismiss it as
avant-garde agitprop nor assign stable documentary value to it. It is true
that the topic of agriculture was handed down to Eisenstein from above.
But it ended up furnishing him with a thematic alibi for articulating the
esoteric essence of his modernism, namely, his identification of
modernism with the creation of the integrated Body and the abolition of
sequential, chronological Time.
Rather than translating any pre-determined vision of socialist agriculture,
in The Old and the New Eisenstein's compositional methods led him to
produce a phantasmagoria of re-birth, a diagram of renewal to be achieved
by the synthesis of the formerly misdirected religious affect and technology.
In this heterodox synthesis, technology does not suppress the religious
anarchism of the masses, but redirects it, inaugurating the life of
fulfillment and abundance. In The Old and the New, Eisenstein began to
abandon his earlier program of "re-plowing the psyche of the audience."45
This crucial turn from the violent mechanicism of his Proletkult days to
the organicism of the collective body will find an even more forceful
expression in the unfinished Que Viva Mexico (1931).46 In that film, he
will once again assert the simultaneity between pre-history and revolution,
tradition and transformation and celebrate the capacity of the spectacle, the
Day of the Dead, to take over the metabolic functions of rituals. In the
1940s, Eisenstein will continue to pursue the notion of regress as renewal
in his theoretical studies of the pre-history of montage. The path of
synthesis first opened up during the tumultuous filming of The Old and the
New will eventually resurface as the director's credo: "It is correct that
precisely in Orpheus—the singer and the father of the arts—that this
synthesis [of Apollo and Dionysus] takes place. (This 'schema' validates
itself everywhere!)."47 Eisenstein is no doubt thinking about Orpheus's
descent into the Hades and the death-defying power of his eloquent pleas
for Eurydice's resurrection and return. And thus, having fashioned himself
a mythic persona in the bravura modernist fashion, Eisenstein remains—an
Orpheus in Petrograd.
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