Haptic visuality, sensation and politics in Eisenstein’s film theory

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyse the convergences between haptic visuality and Sergei Eisenstein’s film theory, in particular his ideas on rhythm, sensorial thought, organic unity, pathos and ecstasy in order to consider the extent to which they constitute the core of a ‘cinema of sensation’ that, for Eisenstein, serves a very important political drive. Simultaneously positioned at the core of avant-garde criticism of traditional models of representation on the one hand, and political revolutionary ideas on the other, cinema appears, to Eisenstein, as a privileged space in which to bring the representative imagery dominant in ‘bourgeois societies’ into question and to put art at the service of the Revolution. My intent is to assess how Eisenstein combines avant-garde aesthetic aims and experimental film practices with the goals of politically engaged creations. This combination is achieved through the exploration of a haptic use of images that prefigure a ‘cinema of sensation’. This article therefore takes the form of a double analysis: on the one hand, it examines the relationship between haptic visuality and Eisenstein’s film theories; on the other, it questions how haptic visuality plays a fundamental role in harmonising the apparently opposite vectors of aesthetic avant-garde and materialistic political drives.