Eisenstein and Horror

Abstract

‘Eisenstein and Horror’ places Eisenstein’s unfinished work, Method (2002 [1932–46]) in dialogue with key concepts that have been brought to bear on cinematic horror: ambivalence, excess, affect, and abjection. It argues that in Method, Eisenstein, largely through the astounding range of his examples, de-emphasizes the difference between narrative and non-narrative in favor of a broader compositional perspective that can only strengthen accounts of horror as reflex, and of self-referential horror. In Method, Eisenstein develops the idea that foundational structures of art (metaphor, metonymy, pars pro toto, and rhythm) are also those of thinking: thinking in art and life proceeds along, and undoes, associative pathways of similarity and contiguity that are variously calculable and unpredictable. In building its argument, this article offers an extremely condensed, but intensive reading of Method.