Beyond vision – Sergei M. Eisenstein’s aesthetic theory and modernity in the early twentieth century
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Abstract
This dissertation unfolds a discussion on the interrelations within modernity, cinema, vision and Eisenstein. The collision of rationality and irrationality at the turn of twentieth century has been reflected in modernist art, music and cinema have been technically supported by experimental science and psychology, and meanwhile thematically and sensually inspired by primitive and occult culture. This contradiction of modernity and primitiveness, rationality and irrationality, has been represented by cinematic mechanism and its content. Cinema like a brain, the organ of sensuality and intelligence, reflects the paradoxes in modernity, and itself contains the contradiction, like the visible and the invisible that artists, scientists, philosophers all tried to critically decipher it in their own perspectives. The multitude and contradictory perspectives of modernity, cinema and vision were all centralized on Eisenstein who lived in and has been influenced by the era. His theories and films fructified the practices of these perspectives and represented cinema’s ability to negotiate the paradoxes of modernity.“Beyond vision” found in Sergei M. Eisenstein’s films and theories, has emerged with a tendency in the so-called pre-war classical cinema, the invisible activities of both body and brain, rationality and irrationality, sensuality and intelligence as all the paradoxical traits of modernity. “Beyond vision” is thus to question seeing as the only form of experiencing cinema and witnessing human’s activities involved in cinema. Rather than see moving images, cinematic experience is a process of brain abstracting movement to transition and operating the multisensorial reception and intellectual conception of the spectators. Eisenstein instead developed a genealogy of the representational forms, media and techniques, from which cinema inherits those of movement, color and sound. The history of cinema started in 1895, but vision of movement, vision of color, vision of sound, vision of affect started earlier than visual images or reformed outside cinema. “Beyond vision” is an attitude of media archaeology which focuses on the historiography of a medium beyond itself and its time period.