Paris Diary

Abstract

Abstract Sergei Eisenstein's Paris Diary, a fragment of which is presented here for the first time in translation, traces two months of the filmmaker's sojourn in Paris between December 1929 and February 1930. It captures the singular way in which he interwove theoretical reflections with free associations, political remarks, and random observations. Containing drawings and notes, these pages also bear witness to significant encounters with the biologist and micro-cinematographer Jean Painlevé, the ethnographer Georges-Henri Rivière, and, the subject of speculation for many decades, the philosopher and cultural theorist Georges Bataille. Critical discussions of Surrealism, including Luis Buñuel's and Salvador Dalí's film Un chien andalou, are also reported. The diary's fragmentary notes and metamorphic associations perform Eisenstein's transposition of experimental Surrealist techniques, such as free association, onto his own autotheoretical writing.