Eisenstein, the Glass House and the Spherical Book
From the Comedy of the Eye to a Drama of Enlightenment
Crystal Palace
The symbolic vocabulary of transparency was developed in the
Crystal Palace (interior)
1. Walter Benjamin, Surrealism, in
Selected Writings Vol. 2 (Harvard
University Press, 2003), p. 209.
The trait that Benjamin considered revolutionary had been
Bruno Taut The Glass House 1914
This brings us to Sergei Eisensteins unrealised project, The Glass
Thea von Harbou, Langs wife and the films scriptwriter, explained
Oksana Bulgakowa
In 1851, visitors to the Great Exhibition in London saw an
architectural sensation: Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace. Enthusiasm
and scepticism accompanied the invention of this Glass House. In
1863, Nikolai Chernyshevsky took the Crystal Palace as inspiration
for the house of the future that the heroine of his novel What Is To
Be Done? saw in a dream, a materialisation of a Utopian vision of a
Socialist community. But already, only one year later in 1864, Fedor
Dostoevsky published a response to the euphoric reception of the
Glass House in Notes from the Underground, where the main character
is repulsed by, and mocks, the building as a glass chicken coop. But
the real question was: could we deal with transparency?
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and correlated with light,
glass, crystal, water and nakedness in contrast to stone, veiling
and deception. The transparency of nature was seen in contrast to
the opacity of the social world; but it was unclear where to place a
human being. Modernity was fascinated with the idea of transparency.
According to German architect Bruno Taut, a glass building would
establish other relationships between people and the universe,
modifying their visual perception and habits. The Constructivists
hoped a transparent building would help in the creation of
transparent relationships and destroy the distinction between public
and private. Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1929 essay on Surrealism:
(In Moscow I lived in a hotel, in which almost all the rooms
were occupied by Tibetan Lamas who had come to Moscow for a
congress of Buddhist churches. I was struck by the number of
doors in the corridors which were always left ajar. What had
at first seemed accidental began to disturb me. I found out
that in these rooms lived members of a sect who had sworn
never to occupy closed rooms. The shock I had then must be
felt by the reader of Nadja.) To live in a glass house is a
revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an
intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need. (1)
frightening to Evgeny Zamyatin, the author of the anti-utopian novel
We. In it, the city of the future is composed entirely of glass
buildings allowing for total surveillance. The novel was published
in English translation in 1925 and caused a huge scandal in the
Soviet Union, eventually leading to the authors emigration from
Russia.
Meanwhile, different architects German Mystics, Italian Fascists,
American Rationalists, French Constructivists and Russian Communists
were creating their glass buildings and discovering that this
material could support conflicting ideologies. Like the architects,
some film directors were inspired by the possibilities of glass.
House.
In March 1926, Eisenstein came to Berlin to attend the premiere of
The Battleship Potemkin. The film had difficulties with censorship;
the German premiere was postponed and the director found himself in
Berlin with much time on his hands. Dimitri Marianoff, Albert
Einsteins son-in-law and an employee of the Soviet trade mission,
put Eisenstein in contact with Berlins artistic circles and
introduced him to film celebrities.
Eisenstein visited Fritz Lang on the Metropolis set Eternal
Gardens, a glass dome. Eisenstein discussed the advantages of an
unchained, mobile camera with the cameramen Karl Freund and
Gunther Rittau. While they explained its advantages to Eisenstein,
to him its central concept. Metropolis, a vision of a city in the
year 2000, inspired Eisenstein to create a film about a glass tower.

2. Eisensteins project was not intended
to be a lm version of Zamyatins novel,
as some scholars have suggested.
3. Diary, January 13, 1927; cf. O.
Bulgakowa (ed.), Eisenstein und
Deutschland [Eisenstein and Germany]
(Berlin: Henschel, 1998), p. 17.
El Lissitzky Cloud-Iron 1925
4. V. S. [Sergei Eisenstein], Novaia
klientura gospodina Korbzue,
Sovjetskii ekran, No 46 (1928), p. 5.
Le Corbusier Cit du Refuge 1929-33
Frank Lloyd Wright Glass Tower 1930
The Glass House was intended as a polemical response not only to
Langs film, (2) but also to Bruno Taut and Mies van der Rohes
glass architecture. Van der Rohe proposed to build a glass tower on
Berlins Friedrichstrae in 1921. Eisenstein envisioned his own
glass palace as an architectonic image of America. He thought an
American author like Upton Sinclair might write the script. (3) When
Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks arrived in Moscow on July 1926
and invited Eisenstein to direct for United Artists, (a company they
had started with Griffith and Chaplin), Eisenstein offered them his
project about new forms of architecture, life and art: The Glass
House. He asked Albert Williams, an American journalist in Moscow,
to contact Sinclair who expressed in a letter to Williams his
doubts that Fairbanks would ever produce such a film.
Eisenstein speaks about the idea to Le Corbusier, who arrives in
Moscow in the autumn of 1928 in order to erect a new building there.
Eisenstein showed him about forty minutes from the unfinished film
The General Line: the episode with the experimental farm built by
the Constructivist architect Andrej Burov, which was influenced by
the Le Corbusier Style. Marfa sees this modernist farm in a dream,
like the heroine of Chernyshevskys novel. Eisenstein recounted his
conversation with Le Corbusier in an article: Le Corbusier is a
great fan of cinema, which he considers to be the only contemporary
art along with architecture. Le Corbusier said, "It seems to me that
in my creative work I am thinking the way Eisenstein is thinking as
he creates his movies". (4)
The Glass House developed as an architectural project based on two
mythologies: that of the skyscraper with its hierarchical structure;
and of transparency, bound to the material of glass. Eisenstein saw
it as a response to Metropolis, which presented a symbolic vision of
social hierarchy. (That is why he wanted to work with Sinclair, who
became famous for his studies of class stratification.) But, during
the same period, Eisenstein referred to the experiments with glass
architecture in different circles: the German Expressionist
architects from the Glass Chain around Bruno Taut, and
Constructivists like El Lissitzky.
Eisenstein pasted a clip from New York Magazine from June 1930 with
Frank Lloyd Wrights Glass Tower into his diary and wrote: This is
a glass sky scraper that I invented in Berlin. In his project,
Eisensteins perception of America merges with his perception of
Germany. In his notes, Eisenstein referred to the project both by
its English and German titles; he would alternate between Das
Glashaus and The Glass House.
The Glass House was the very first project Eisenstein proposed to
Paramount when he signed the contract with Jesse Lasky and came to
Hollywood. Here he worked on the script until May 1930. He discussed
the idea with Chaplin and the Paramount boss B.P. Schulberg (a great
admirer of Dostoevsky). A glass factory in Pittsburgh would produce
the glass structures for the film. The studio assigned the gangster
movie writer Oliver H. P. Garrett (City Streets [1931], Scandal
Sheet [1931], Manhattan Melodrama [1934]) to the job but he, too,
had little luck developing Eisensteins idea.
Like all of his other projects in Hollywood, The Glass House
remained on the drawing boards but, unlike all the others, not
because of the objections of producers. Eisenstein himself could not
explain what happened, or why his work on the script stopped. He had
to turn to a psychoanalyst, Gregory Stragnell (whom he had met at
Chaplins house), and spend a large amount of money trying to
understand what was keeping him from finishing the script. These
psychoanalytic sessions upset Eisensteins collaborator Ivor
Montagu, who managed Eisensteins money like a thrifty housewife. On
June 17 1930, Eisenstein wrote to Pera Atasheva:
Ive spent ten days being depressed. Now Im starting to

Eisenstein storyboard
5. Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 36/37
(1997/98), p. 229.
6. The script and the excerpts from the
diaries were rst published by Naum
Kleiman, Iskusstvo kino, No 3 (1979),
pp. 94-114; and in French by Franois
Albera and Valrie Posener, Faces.
Journal d'architecture (Genf), numro
24 (Summer 1992), pp. 43-52. Some
pages and drawings were reproduced
by Jay Leyda & Zina Vernow, Eisenstein
at Work (New York: Pantheon 1982), pp.
43-46. I published a more complete
version of the script, combined with
excerpts from Eisensteins diaries, in
Eisenstein und Deutschland, pp. 17-38,
based on Eisensteins archival les
(Russian State Archive of Literature and
Art [RGALI], fond 1923, inventory 1, le
66, inventory 2, les 1103-1107, 1109,
1114).
Andr Kertsz Distortions 1928
get better. It seems that I may be liquidating a whole
bunch of my neuroses forever. For three days I have sat
through high-speed psychoanalysis with one of the most
renowned doctors in the States (the editor of The
Psychoanalytic Review), my good friend Dr Stragnell. Very
interesting. We have uncovered fifty per cent of my
doubt complex this is, of course, my sore spot. We
have been applying a scientific method this isnt the
usual quack treatment. The latest hysterical depression
(during my present fortunate circumstances!) upset me so
much that I decided to root out the guilty group of
neuroses (without touching the others). My decision
happened to coincide with Dr Stragnells arrival
(sometimes Im lucky). Its very interesting to see how my
doubt obsession developed and who and what are guilty.
Imagine, Pearl! I will no longer need constant
affirmation! To hell with it all! I will be able to do
everything! (5)
Eisensteins enthusiasm for psychoanalysis was also reflected in his
screenplay. But, despite this, the script was never finished. It
exists as a storyboard in Eisensteins archive in Moscow. (6) The
idea is parallel to similar Utopian projects that Eisenstein
developed at the end of the 20s: the filming of Karl Marxs
Capital, the adaptation of James Joyces Ulysses, and the writing of
a Spherical Book in which he aspired to change film theory.
The first version of script (1926-7) unfolds a drawn storyboard of
an experimental abstract movie, with the mobile camera and an
elevator serving as the protagonists: the elevator moves between
planes, floors and ceilings, modifying the view of the observer
(i.e., the camera). The camera alone is capable of seeing this
building, with its blind inhabitants. The transparency of the
structure, the change and changeability of viewpoints, creates the
basic principle of visual dramaturgy, which becomes the narrative
structure. Eisenstein defined it as a comedy of situations that are
treated literally as various positions of the camera and its
constantly changing points of view.
Eisensteins notes attest to his great interest in working with
glass as a material. Various possible optical effects appearing
within a glass cube or glass sphere are mentioned in these notes:
frosted glass; driving a nail into the glass with the resulting
cracks; water games reflected in the glass; the testing of different
lenses and glass textures. Eisenstein experimented with abolishing
the sensation of hardness and weight. He wanted light to dissolve
the materiality of glass. This is akin to the experimental
photographs of the Bauhaus, Andr Kertszs Distortions (published
in 1928), Moholy Nagys kinetic installations, or a series of
pictures with glass objects taken by the Soviet artist Alexander
Rodchenko.
In the first version of the script, only the camera (unlike the
characters) was able to see. Inside, a husband was incapable of
seeing his wifes lover; well-fed people could not see those who
were starving. In other words, vision and the possibility of looking
at things from different angles were the prerogatives of the
mechanical camera. Eisenstein defined this genre as the comedy of
and for the eye. He wanted to blur the lines between up and down,
inside and outside. The Glass House became a kind of outlet for his
theoretical ruminations about camera and film in general. The camera
as an eye, as an X-ray machine; the house as model for a new
cinematic space The Glass House blows up the system of cinematic
representation, liberating objects from the force of gravity.
Objects and bodies float in this glass space. The logic of a space
that does not have fixed points of reference recalls the space of
Lissitzkys PROUN (Project for the Affirmation of the New). That
project utilised shifting axes and multiple perspectives to convey
the idea of rotation in space. The space of Eisensteins Glass House
is non-hierarchical; distance and the sensation of time are
abolished (night becomes day, as in a green house).
This had been attempted in film before (and would be again), either
as an optical deception or as a trick, in fairy tales or in animated
cartoons (Mickey chasing ghosts, Fred Astaire dancing on walls). In
Dali and Buuels LAge dor (1930), the Secretary of State commits
suicide and falls on the ceiling. In Ren Clair and Francis

El Lissitzky PROUN
7. Cf. Franois Alberas analysis of
Eisensteins lm project,
Formzerstrung und Transparenz, in
Eisenstein und Deutschland, pp. 123-
142.
Joost Schmidt
Fritz Schleifer
Eisenstein 'recovery of sight'
Mikhail Eisenstein's buildings
Eisenstein 'Suprematist elements'
Picabias Entracte (1924), a dancer is filmed through the
transparent floor. In Hitchcocks The Lodger (1926), the floor is
rendered transparent in order to visualise the heros trauma. (7)
Eisenstein takes this as a challenge. He conceived polycentric
pictures with polyfocal perspectives that are presented
simultaneously because due to the transparency of the building
all views are present at the same time (from the front, above,
below), and all figures are caught in various views. The director
confronts the spectators with all these views; now, cinematic space
is not assembled as a montage space bridging the breaks and gaps.
The experimental space is naturalised, acentric with rotating
figures, figures that are floating in space without the force of
gravity. Windows, walls, ceilings, floors do not limit the image;
the distinction between above and below, near and far, inside and
outside are removed and the view is open. This destroys the centred
form, with perspective and symmetry that is assigned to a fixed
viewer. The opaque materials such as carpets and doors limit the
transparency, but float in space as fragments of Suprematist
constructions as Eisenstein defined them.
However, as soon as the capacity of sight is tied not to a machine
but to a human being, the comedy is transformed into drama. In 1927-
8, Eisenstein changed the story and personalised the vision. He
assigns to different characters different ways of seeing. A clash of
these different ways of seeing leads to the unfolding of the
narrative. The first character endowed with this the gift of vision
is the Poet, whom Eisenstein sees as a kind of Messiah. The Poets
willingness to pass his ability to see to other people (in order to
render opaque relationships transparent) leads inevitably to a
series of crimes (blackmail, murder and suicide). All these horrors
which result from the sudden discovery of the transparency of
walls are paradoxically predicated upon the opacity of
relationships (adultery, denunciation, slander and spying). The gift
of vision turns out to be dangerous, invariably leading to disaster.
The Poet becomes insane. The comedy of the eye is overshadowed by
the theme of recovery of sight, and thus the comedy of the eye is
transformed into a drama of enlightenment.
Once in Hollywood, Eisenstein conceived his idea as a three-way
conflict between an Architect (the buildings creator), a crazy
Poet, and a Robot (a new figure introduced into the script). He
placed this Robot between the characters of the Architect and Poet.
This results in a radical re-evaluation of the plot. The Architect
constructs the Glass House and gives it to humanity. But the
inhabitants are not able to see it. The Poet opens peoples eyes and
perishes from his own gift. The Robot, perfect citizen of the new
civilisation, destroys the house. When, at the end, he removes his
mask, we see that the destroyer is the Architect himself.
In the final version, the heroes are presented as opposites and
projected onto Old and New Testament prototypes: the Poet is viewed
both as a virtual Adam and as a new Jesus. The old Architect becomes
imbued with the features of God the Father, the Poet acquires the
features of God the Son, and the Robot turns out to be a kind of
Holy Ghost. But since the Robot turns out to be the Architect in
disguise, Eisenstein dissolves the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy
Ghost, tracing this Trinity back to a dichotomy (God the Father
versus God the Son) that held an autobiographical significance.
Eisenstein himself was a failed architect who created a doubled
Oedipal self-portrait. He identified both with the Architect and the
Poet (the son who rejects his fathers creation). Eisensteins
father was an architect whose Art Nouveau buildings the son mocked.
Eisenstein tellingly called The Glass House his own private Mystery
Play. In his final version of the screenplay, the comedy of the eye
and the drama of recovered sight were subsumed by the tragedy of two

A Suprematist Door
8. Mikhail Iampolski. Mifologiia stekla
v novoevropeiskoj kulture, Sovetskoe
iskusstvoznanie. Moskva: Sovetskii
khudozhnik, vypusk 24 (1988), pp. 314-
348. His English essay on the topic is
different from the Russian version; cf.
Transparency Painting: from Myth to
Theatre, in Alla Emova & Lev
Manovich (eds.), Tekstura: Russian
Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago,
Chicago University Press, 1993).
Botanic Garden Berlin: Tropical
Greenhouse 1906-7
9. H. M. Wingler, Das Bauhaus. Weimar -
Dessau - Berlin und die Nachfolge in
Chicago seit 1937 (Berlin: Verlag Gebr.
Rasch & Co und DuMont Schauberg, 3.
Auage, 1975), pp. 166-177.
10. Hyacinthe Dubreuil, Standards
(Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1929);
L'example de Bata. La libration des
initiatives individuelles dans une
entreprise gante (Paris: Editions
Bernard Grasset, 1936). Cf. Thilo
Hilpert, Die funktionelle Stadt. Le
Corbusiers Stadtvision. Bedingungen,
Motive, Hintergrnde (Braunschweig:
Vieweg 1978 [Bauwelt Fundamente
48]), pp. 263 ff.
But organising space became a politically important issue. The Dutch
Utopian dreamers. One is the Architect who designs an ideal house,
the other the Poet who doubts the validity of that functional model.
This conflict should firstly be understood within the context of the
clash between two architectural Utopias of Eisensteins age, both
Utopias of glass architecture. One was advanced by the German
architect Bruno Taut and his group Die glserne Kette (The Glass
Chain). Tauts ideas about glass architecture were inspired by the
writings of Paul Scheerbart (died 1915), a German science fiction
author. The members of the Glass Chain group aimed at bringing
inhabitants of the glass buildings closer to the cosmos. In contrast
to the traditional static and restricted view in conventional
buildings, the inhabitants of the Glass House would be spectators of
the infinite, cosmic panorama and the gigantic theatre of nature,
due to the transparent character of glass walls with no limits.
Architecture was, for Taut and his followers, a kind of new
religion. Mikhail Iampolski attributes the genealogy of Eisensteins
project to this source, and interprets the script as a comment on
Tauts glass cosmogony. (8) God the Father designs the house like a
Paradise (that is why the image of a Glass House is that of a
greenhouse). Afterwards, the myth is transferred to its spiritual
phase: the Messiah transmits his vision to the others and it
releases hate, intrigues and murder. The disaster is completed by
the Architect, who destroys the Glass Cathedral and thus the
Utopia. The project could be considered as a response to this
concept. The dwellers of this Glass House are by no means such good
spectators as those conceived by Taut. Eisensteins heroes are
initially blind but, when they recover sight, the result is horror.
At the same time, Eisensteins project was also a sarcastic response
to the Utopian Glass House theories of Constructivist and
Functionalist architects. Both groups dreamed of placing the
biological instincts of individuals under strict control by means of
rational organisation of architectural space. Nikolai Ladovskys
laboratory in Russia analysed the perception of architecture as a
dynamic interaction between space and its users. The Bauhaus
theoreticians involved Gestalt psychologists in the discussion of
these issues. (9) Le Corbusier suggested the notion of synchronic
perception: the optical perception called forth by visual phenomena
was overshadowed by what he called biological factors. However, it
had nothing to do with biology; it referred to sociology and
behavioral models. The very term biology was taken by Le Corbusier
from his friend, sociologist Hyacinthe Dubreuil (1883-1971), who had
studied Fords factories, as well as those of the Czech
industrialist Tomas Bata (1876-1932). (10) According to Dubreuil,
all the workers movements in a building are prescribed and
determined by the way the architect has organised space.
Le Corbusier, who was fascinated by the time-and-motion studies at
Fords factories, wanted to achieve the same goal in an individual
space: private apartments, houses and hotels. La machine habiter,
Le Corbusiers machine for living, is a first step on the road to
prescribing certain movements and behavior to human beings. Life is
organised by the architect in an authoritarian way. By the late
20s, this authoritarian approach to spatial structure was
abolished; psychological studies discovered that Fords system was
not sufficiently effective, because it eliminated the individuals
creative drives and initiative. It turned out that factory labour
should rather be viewed as a process of play and interplay, whereby
the worker faces constantly changing goals. The architect had to
take this variability of decisions and the relative autonomy of an
individual into his calculations.
architect Mart Stam (1899-1986) constructed a tobacco factory in
Rotterdam with glass walls. It was understood as the way of creating
social transparency: everything is transparent, everyone can be seen
and can see; the office of the director is transparent and can be
seen by the workers, and vice versa. Le Corbusier commented: No
more proletarians or bourgeois, only the hierarchical scale
 wonderfully organised! The European Constructivists firmly believed
that glass walls would simplify communication and render social
structures transparent that social upheavals could and should be
replaced by a revolution in architecture.

In his Glass House project, Eisenstein clearly refers to these ideas

of correct spatial organisation of social behavior. His protagonist,
Mart Stam Van Nelle factory 1927 the Architect, attempts to regulate biological processes by means of
spatial forms, whereas his antagonist, the Poet, symbolises the
anarchical nature of the Individual. The wall does not teach people
to see, nor does it make the existing social hierarchy any more
harmonious. His heroes destroy the new visual space into which they
have been placed. When Eisenstein unfolds the drama of revolt within
the ideal glass building, he subjects the Utopian ideas of
Constructivist theoreticians to a skeptical treatment. The
Constructivists thought they could convert people into submissive
participants, or actors in the theatre of modern life. The Glass
Chain architects hoped to equip people with a new vision in an
attempt to create intelligent, sophisticated spectators. Eisenstein
lets his heroes destroy this ideal building. They are not prepared
for the new roles of either spectators or participants in the
spectacle of modern life. Primordial instincts prevail over the new
architectural space.

The final result is neither a cosmic spectacle nor regulated

behavior. What remains is a psychoanalytical drama of a sons
rebellion against his father. But it is not just an autobiographical
scenario, and does not only refer to Utopian spatial concepts. It
may also be a commentary on the larger Soviet project: Socialism.
The paradigm works on a number of levels, from the personal to the
philosophical, psychological, political and ideological. It strongly
recalls Dostoevskys Legend of the Grand Inquisitor and Notes from
the Underground, or Trotskys Utopia to make not only the social
structure, but also human unconscious transparent. In a broader
sense, Eisensteins project could be seen as a comment on the
project of the Enlightenment, or of modernity.
Walter Gropius Ofce Building Berlin

The Glass House took vision as its central theme both the perfect
vision of the film medium, as well as the voyeurism of humans. At
the final script stage, Eisenstein returned to the ancient tradition
of inner vision by allowing only the Poet to see. He thereby
destroyed his own film, since film was the medium of new vision
par excellence! If the films plot was based on the danger of
vision, and on the value of inner enlightenment, then how was the
medium itself supposed to be effective? It may have been inevitable
that Eisenstein would eventually abandon the project.

But, at the same time, the project enabled Eisenstein to

conceptualise a totally new approach to the creation of film theory:
his Spherical Book. He refused to utilise a traditional form for
producing theoretical texts such as manifesto, book or
scriptwriting/filmmaking manual. He intended to write not a two-
dimensional but spherical book: his ideal reader would not simply
read one essay after another, following a linear narrative, but
instead perceive the whole book simultaneously. The essays were to
be arranged in clusters, each oriented in a different direction, but
circling around one common theme in this case, montage. Only the
shape of a sphere could assure this mutual reversibility. Eisenstein
wrote in his diary on August 5, 1929:

It is very hard to write a book. Because each book is two-

11. Cf. Sergej Eisenstein. Drei Utopien
Architekturentwurfe zur Filmtheorie, pp.
31-32. On the Spherical Book, cf. pp.
dimensional. I wanted this book to be characterised by a
feature that does not fit under any circumstances into the
two-dimensionality of a printing element. This demand has
two aspects. First, it supposes that the bundle of these
essays is not to be regarded successively. In any case, I
wish that one could perceive them all at the same time,
simultaneously, because they finally represent a set of
sectors, which are arranged around a general, determining
viewpoint, aligned to different areas. On the other hand,
I want to create a spatial form that would make it
possible to step from each contribution directly into
another and to make apparent their interconnection Such
a synchronic manner of circulation and mutual penetration
of the essays can be carried out only in the form (...) of
a sphere. But unfortunately, books are not written as
spheres ... I can only hope that they will be read
31-32. On the Spherical Book, cf. pp.
31-108.
existent unity in the shifting from one level to the next,
The most productive moment in the script for me is Eisensteins
12. I am referring to his theoretical
project Methode. This vast manuscript
(more than 2500 pages), written in four
languages (Russian, German, English
and French, with some passages in
Italian), attempted to provide a model
for description and analysis of nearly
all art practices and forms. In the book,
Eisenstein understands the structure of
a work of art as isomorphic to the
structure of multi-layered
consciousness, thus implying the unity
of the logical and the prelogical, the
conscious and the unconscious, or (in
Eisensteins terms) rational and sensual
mental activities. He reduced his
former ambition to create a total
theoretical system to a universal model
of analysis, with which all phenomena
could be described, structured and
understood (cave painting and Cubism,
seventeenth centurys Japanese
graphics and American lm, ornament
and music counterpoint, acting
methods and plot construction in
Spanish plays, Shakespeares dramas,
the circus and music, Dostoevskys
novels and Disneys animated
cartoons). But his main point of
interest was to understand the
genealogy of modernism (and lm,
which was for Eisenstein its
quintessence), looking into the art of
the nineteenth century and analysing
its form (or form in general) as the
trace of some basic structures of
human consciousness. The form of the
manuscript is based on the principle of
montage of quotations and fragments,
according to the method of mutual reversibility, a
spherical method - in expectation that we will learn to
write books like rotating balls. Now we have only books
like soap-bubbles. Particularly on art. (11)
Some sections of the book were written, but published as separate
articles. What then was lost? Montage is analysed in this cluster of
essays in the context of different systems: music, Japanese theatre,
Japanese hieroglyphics, linguistics, reflexology, dialectics. As a
consequence of the linear process of publishing and reading these
texts, however, we can no longer perceive the permanent change in
viewpoint and the framework of discussion-and-analysis that seemed
so important to Eisenstein at the end of the 20s in other words,
the most essential characteristic of the project which makes it
stand out the background of theory formation then, and still today.
Eisensteins Spherical Book project responded to the fragmentation
of sciences into separate fields of study one of the consequences
of modernity. His book was a radical attempt to locate a non-
reinterpreting the incompatible segments and using them in diverse
ways.
I believe that the problems raised by Eisensteins Glass House
project, which I have described within a historical framework, still
have a great deal of relevance to todays discussions. And not only
as an early version of a Big Brother (Orwells or reality
televisions) allowing us to place the project in the framework of
surveillance and control in our society, the development of the
techniques of surveillance from Benthams Panopticon to video
cameras everywhere, from Langs Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960) to
Coppolas The Conversation (1974) and Phillip Noyces Sliver (1993),
from fear to the desire to be observed.
story of the eye. Different concepts of the changed paradigm of
perception, from Benjamin and Bataille to Wolfgang Schivelbusch and
Jonathan Crary, have tried to conceptualise the new vision of a new
subject of modernity, problematising how subject could be made
adequate to a constellation of new events, institutions,
apparatuses. What is striking in Eisensteins story of the eye is
its radicalism. On the one hand, he doubts that the modern subject
is ready for this reconfigured perception but, on the other hand,
his film suggests in its first stage as a high comedy a more
sublime version of the apparatus vision, going far beyond the new
constellations connected to mobility, panoramic or kaleidoscopic
vision, and so forth. He adds rotation and floatation in space, loss
of gravity. He naturalises the Cubist pattern.
Eisensteins comment on the project of modernity and a Soviet Utopia
has a strong autobiographical inclination. Does he see himself as a
Poet who is afraid of his inner vision, or an Architect who is
afraid of his creation? There would always be at least two different
interpretations of his role in the landscape of Stalinist culture.
The production story associated with the script shows us, in an
ideal way, the problematic relationship between literacy and
visuality. The sublime vision collapses at the moment when
Eisenstein had to adapt it to narrative. Narrative is a linear
construction that could not be brought together with the
materialised multi-layered-ness of the visual space. Only hypertext
would be an appropriate form for this; such a text would reconfigure
the reader, forcing him to follow the cross connections. From this
point on, Eisenstein starts to write his texts as hypertexts, thus
making them extremely difficult to publish. (12)
Thus his theoretical suggestion of a Spherical Book. In the
beginning of the century, the idyllic world of holistic systems had
broken down. Fundamental transformations in the natural sciences led
to a fragmentation into single sciences. Totality is dismissed as
Utopia. The variety of different types of discourse describes the
work of art in all its aspects. Eisensteins Spherical Book was a
product of this time, one which tried to overcome this
discursiveness. His model is the most radical attempt to find a
totality which does not exist, and can only be achieved in permanent
change from one level to another, based on reinterpretation and a
variable use of incompatible sectors. But this is also a possible
montage of quotations and fragments,
very similar to Benjamins Arcades the
two projects show a stunning similarity
in their approach. Naum Kleiman
published a two-volume version of this
manuscript: Metod (Moskva: Muzei
kino, 2002). I have completed another
edition to appear in four volumes
(Germany, PotemkinPress, 2006).
suggestion for an interdisciplinary approach, integrating sociology,
psychology, anthropology, linguistics, communication theory,
musicology and other disciplines into film studies.
This text, translated and edited by the author, is an abridged and
modified version of a chapter from her Sergej Eisenstein. Drei
Utopien Architekturentwurfe zur Filmtheorie [Sergei Eisenstein
Three Utopias: Architectural Drafts for a Film Theory] (Berlin:
PotemkinPress 1996), pp. 109-125.
Oksana Bulgakowa and Rouge 2005. Cannot be reprinted without
permission of the author and editors.