Tangential Points: Aleksandr Bogdanov and Sergei Eisenstein Revisited

Pia Tikka

doi:10.2478/csj-2021-0005

Abstract

Abstract In the newly founded Soviet Union, Aleksandr A. Bogdanov and Segei M. Eisenstein, each in his own way, struggled to make sense of the world by means of the most recent findings in the sciences. Both were driven by a desire to describe the universal laws of organization that would embrace the dynamics of the human mind and society, mutually, in arts and sciences. Bogdanov, a leading theoretician of political, economical, cultural, and educational revolution, is today also recognized internationally as one of the pioneering systems scientists of the early twentieth century. Eisenstein began to establish an international reputation thanks to the originality of his films and his eclectic theoretical writings that have remained a rich source of continuing discoveries for film scholars. I propose that both of these thinkers, in their own right, and by way of their common synergy, can contribute to a systemic understanding of today’s complex world and its cultural reflections.

Highlights

Especially my book Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense (2008) and my book chapter‘Tracing Tektology in Eisenstein’s Holistic Thinking’in Alexander Bogdanov Revisited (2009), I put forward the hypothesis that Eisenstein’s later montage theoretical ideas had to be influenced by Bogdanov’s systemic ideas that he cultivated as one of the principal ideologists in the Proletkult, an educational institution created for the working class in 1917
According to the Director of the Eisenstein Museum Naum Kleiman (2007), Eisenstein was not interested in politics, and his break with the Proletkult may have been owing more to professional than to political considerations. He was not alone in his exasperation with the leadership of the Proletkult: in his response published in Kinonedelia (1925, No 10) he refers to a group of fellow artists of the Proletkult Theatre who had resigned at the same time as himself (Eisenstein 2006: 7)
I have suggested parallels between Eisenstein’s theory of montage and Bogdanov’s application of tektological ideas to separate fields of sciences (Bogdanov 1980: xvi). Eisenstein insisted that his montage theory constituted the organizational principle of cinema and that of the entire domain of the arts, and even that it expressed universal organizational laws that would govern the arts and the sciences

Summary

Introduction

Especially my book Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense (2008) and my book chapter‘Tracing Tektology in Eisenstein’s Holistic Thinking’in Alexander Bogdanov Revisited (2009), I put forward the hypothesis that Eisenstein’s later montage theoretical ideas had to be influenced by Bogdanov’s systemic ideas that he cultivated as one of the principal ideologists in the Proletkult, an educational institution created for the working class in 1917. Eisenstein left a vast quantity of published and unfinished essays, scripts, films, book projects, drawings, cartoons, notes, and newspaper and magazine clippings spiced with eccentric humour and paradoxes (Bohn 2003; Nesbet 2003; Bulgakowa 1998) Anything that he found intellectually stimulating for his figurative thinking, as he terms his cinematic method, he made a note of. While it has been recognized that the contemporary scientific discoveries influenced the theoretical evolution of Eisenstein’s montage thinking from the more mechanistic constructions to his elaborated organic-dynamic systems, I found the only hint of a linkage between Eisenstein and Bogdanov in film studies in David Bordwell’s book The Cinema of Eisenstein (1993: 35–37, 135–136; Tikka 2008: 69). It seems that the Russian-speaking research community previously neglected inquiring into Bogdanov’s possible theoretical influence upon Eisenstein’s theoretical thinking, a task taken up by the scholars of this Issue

Exploring the Influence of Bogdanov

Eisenstein in the Proletkult

Conclusion

Commentary by Nadezda Grigoryeva

Authors information