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    Eisenstein On Disney PDF

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    Dinu

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    Disney as a Utopian Dreamer Oksana Bulgakowa Eisenstein’s essay on Walt Disney forms part of his unfinished book ‘Method, which examines the connection between the practice of art and archaic forms of thought.’ With his interest in archaic struc- 1 _ Eisenstein’ essay on tures, Eisenstein followed the same path as T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Seen. ail or Ezra Pound, Aby Warburg. He began the book in Mexico in 1932 San see Problemysintezov and worked on it until his death. The formalized structures of archa- _\uteshestenothure, es ic thinking were regarded as a reservoir for the artistic devices: pars _ Renschesbash (ockos Nevke, pro toto—and the close-up; sympathetic magic—the function of the 1985, 208-2e4;in English, see landscape; participation—actors’ experience; the reading of tracks by eeminen Dry ey a hunter—constructing the plot of a detective story. Shakespeare, Bach, (Calcutta: Seagul 1986). Anew Dostoevsky, Joyce and Disney were analyzed according to his mod- German varsiaion oncon el. Nobody before had placed the creator of Mickey Mouse in such text published in 2008 by Po- “heavy” context. tepalerene ed d Chsane Eisenstein’s starting point is neither Disney’s synaesthesia nor his Thigis assed on manuscripts perfect rhythm. Rather, Eisenstein begins with eloquent descriptions _(September71,1840-June 16, of the unstable stability achieved by Disney in his creation of plastic Mercier iicetne and An form. This property of unstable stability, which Eisenstein admired for Moscow [RGAU} fond 1923, opis its irresistible attractiveness, is paradoxical because of the way Dis- 754029 chranenieh 31.372, ney’s forms seem to exist in a continuous state of self-dissolution. In an analysis of Disney’s animated drawings, Eisenstein shows how this plasmatic property (one shared by the elements of origins—water, fire, air and sand) functions within a form strictly delineated by a line’s con- tour. The line is the form’s limit, but in Disney's work this line is con- stantly in motion: stretching, extending itself, dancing. This continu- ous movement animates the line-drawing, lending it a certain plasticity. As a result, Disney’s work does not take metamorphoses as a topic or even as an object of representation, rather, metamorphosis is a proper- ty of his form, which embodies the essence of art, here understood as a deeply mythological activity. The “animated cartoon” is traced back to anima and animation, the life and the movement of things, i.e. bringing things to life by making them move, In this respect, constructivists are no less archaic than symbolists. Disney’s ducks and mice create a modern animal epic, leading Eisenstein towards animistic beliefs, totems and myths of origin. This strengthened his conviction that relations between humans and nature still followed an archaic model, one deeply rooted in ritual. Thus, when fighting or hunting, man devours the animal or is devoured by him, he copulates with the animal or he disguises himself as an animal. In all of these forms, there is a palpable sense of an original unity of opposites, a unity which creates the ecstatic moments experienced in the passage from one state to another. This passage can instill horror or can bring, about laughter. Disney’s comic bestiary confronts the uncanny ani- Animism ne ee mals of Edgar Allen Poe, Comte de Lautréamont and D.H. Lawrence, but also Eisenstein’s own ecstatic cows and oxen, which copulate like mythical beings. The bulls of the corrida, which both die and kill, take the place of Jesus in Eisenstein’s Mexican drawings, his film-bull res- urrected as the God of the seasons’ return, Thanks to Disney, Eisen- stein became aware of his own bestiary, which he now saw as reveal- ing modernity’s mythological monstrosity. His battleship now seemed like a mechanical man-fish, the fleet a mythological whale threatening to swallow the Potemkin, the bull appearing in the form of a tractor. Eisenstein believed that he could draw borders between horror, ecstasy and laughter, separating the mythological from the rational—in life as well as in art. Where the pre-logical meets the rational, past and present collide and the archetypes of an archaic, classless society meet modernity’s fantastic visions. It is precisely at this point that utopias appear. Eisen- stein regarded nineteenth-century utopias as an archive of collective dreams, in which technical progress and social development coincide. Socialism draws on these dreams, which Eisenstein wanted to analyze using the examples of Campanella, More, Cabet, Jules Verne, Fourier, Sue and Disney. One of the reasons for the resonance of Disney’s work Eisenstein saw in the promise of freedom within the relationship of people to natures this provides Eisenstein with the transition to Fouri- et. Fourier conceived labor according to the model of children’s games that was not oriented on value production, but rather on “improved nature.” His utopian vision—with humanity and nature in alliance, with humans neither themselves exploited nor exploiting the environ- ment—is a countermovement to industrialization, which subordinated nature to humans and humans to machines. Eisenstein placed his text on Disney in the anthropological section of his extensive book. Here the body is presented as a direct source for art but also as its material, with the skin seen as a surface for paint- ing, tattoos as the first self-portraits, and the abdomen presented as the original form for architecture and ceramics. Bodily fluids and excre- tions (blood, urine, excrement) are the basis of the color scale. As a model for structure, Eisenstein suggests this fluid body rather than the skeleton; form is analyzed for its plasmatic, polymorphous qualities. Disney emerges as the central object of analysis because his work unites animism and totemism with plasmatic qualities of form, synaesthetic perceptions of sound and color, and perfect visual rhythm. Eisenstein ultimately explains the impact of Disney’s work by its utopian promise of liberation from ossified form, the way it offered the possibility of a state of eternal becoming. Here Eisenstein discovered a deep longing for freedom, which would allow a fresh reimagining of relations be- tween human and nature, and even perhaps their reformation. ‘Oksana Bulgakowa Ww Disney Sergei Eisenstein’ 1. From: Sergei Eisenstein, Disney, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa, trans Dustin Condren (Berlin: PotemkinPress, 2010) I ‘The animals in “Merbabies” substitute for other animals: fish become mammals. In Disney's opus in general, animals substitute for humans. The tendency is the same: displacement, combination, an idio- syncratic protest against metaphysical inertness established once and for all. It interesting that such a “flight” into animal skins and the anthro- pomorphic qualities of animals seem to be characteristic of many differ- ent epochs. This is most sharply visible in the very inhumanness of the systems of social government or philosophy, be it during the epoch of American-style mechanization of daily life and behavior or during the epoch... of mathematical abstraction and metaphysics in philosophy. It’ interesting that one of the brightest examples of such a rebirth of the animal epic is, as a matter of fact, the century in which meta- physics was first systematized...the nineteenth century. Or more accu- rately, the eighteenth century which moved under the banner of over- coming the seventeenth. ‘That which Rousseau had fought for, with open polemic and slo- gans, had been spoken of before him by the artistic images and form of La Fontaine’s works. “He defended his animals from Descartes, who had made them into machines. He does not allow himself to philosophize like the educated doctors, but humbly asks permission and in the manner of a meek recommendation he tries to devise a soul to be used by (a Pusage) rats and hares...” And that’s not all: “Like Virgil he feels for the trees and does not exclude them 2 _Hippolye Adolphe Taine, from the general picture of life. ‘Plants breathe,” he said, At the [2fertneetses fables as8) very time when artificial civilization sheared the trees of Versailles _tyo-eo,tisenstein vanslated into cones and geometric bodies, he wanted to preserve freedom ‘hs text ini Russian for their greenery and their sprouts...”* Soulless geometrism and metaphysics engender here, as an antithesis, a sudden rebirth of universal animism. Animism, wherein thoughts and feelings for the interconnectedness of all elements and kingdoms of nature wandered blindly, long before science solved the puzzle of this configuration with its sequences and stages. Objective examination of the surrounding world took hold. Animism m8 i i 3 Pera Atasheva (1800-1985), Soviet journalist, Elsenstein's lavdul wife he married her in 1934, but they never lived to- gether, was editing a volume fon American animated cartoon for the series ofthe publishing house “iskusstvo" on American film directors. The volumes on (DW. Griffith 1944) and Chaplin (i946}—withEisenstein’scon- ‘ributions-—were published but this one never appeared, 4 Marked nearby and deleted Endymion the embodiment of sunset and sleep. In Greek my- thology Hyperion—a ttan, the son of Gala and Uranus, a"shin- ing’ god, often identified with Helios although he does not ‘throw himself nto the fie tis possible that Eisenstein is con- Flating the heroes of two difer- ent works by Hélderlin, Hyperion and Empedokles. The hero of the tragedy The Death of Emo

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