Sergei Eisenstein Neurocinematics and E

Sergei Eisenstein, Neurocinematics,
and Embodied Cognition:

A Reassessment
Ana Hedberg Olenina
In a recent study, the film scholar Luis Rocha Antunes offers a cor-
rective to Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum by pointing out that
it is the viewer’s experience rather than the medium that consti-
tutes its “message.”1 It is not solely the material properties of the
medium and stylistic features that determine what the viewers will
make of the film but rather the interplay between form and per-
ception. Relying on neuroscientific discoveries, Antunes points out
that our brain compensates for the missing sensory information;
thus, a purely audiovisual input from the film results in a multi-
sensory experience, activating the neural networks involved in the
perception of motion, balance, spatial orientation, texture, tem-
perature, and pain without the actual external physical stimuli.2
These perceptual inferences are automatic and preconscious. Fur-
thermore, the micromotions of the spectators’ bodies, such as the
turning of one’s head to pursue a target rushing across the screen,
are not an irrelevant by-product of film viewing but rather a signifi-
cant source of sensory experience that contributes to the interpre-
tation of film sequences.3
Antunes’s approach, which shifts emphasis from pure form
toward the analysis of somesthetic experience of the viewer, recalls
Discourse, 43.3, Fall 2021, pp. 351–382.

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352 Ana Hedberg Olenina
Sergei Eisenstein’s famous assertion that the spectator is the end-

point and the ultimate goal of the montage of film attractions.4
From his earliest manifestos of 1923–1924 onward, the director
stressed that form was “effective” if it delivered “a series of blows
to the consciousness and emotions of the audience.”5 In process-
ing these “blows,” the spectators in Eisenstein’s model were not
an inert, passive receptacle of screen stimuli but instead were pas-
sionately involved cocreators of the film experience. Throughout
his career, he explored the artistic strategies that animated spec-
tators’ bodies, guided their attentive gaze, orchestrated synthe-
ses and counterpoints between various sensory channels in their
perception, and led them through the stages of emotional and
intellectual transformation. Eisenstein’s texts, documenting these
experiments, anticipate many of the research questions that are
currently driving the rapprochement between film scholarship
and cognitive neuroscience, and this ancestry is readily acknowl-
edged by contemporary leaders in this interdisciplinary field.6
At the same time, Eisenstein’s views are bound by his historical
moment and the sources he drew on, many of which distance him
from today’s emergent paradigm. It would be a mistake to neglect
this context while depicting him as a precursor of contemporary
applications of neuroscience to aesthetics—as someone who intu-
ited the future path of research despite the lack of the brain scan-
ning technologies we have today.
The goal of this essay is to clarify the original context and
thrust of Eisenstein’s arguments. In particular, I focus on two cru-
cial questions in contemporary neurocognitive discussions of cin-
ema: the issue of spectators’ embodied simulation of screen events
in light of the theory of “mirror neurons” and the issue of the
multisensory processing of film images. My analysis is prompted
by two recent publications. The first publication is Maria Belodu-
brovskaya’s rethinking of Eisenstein’s film attractions along the
lines of neuroscientific theories of embodied simulation, which
she posits as a challenge to Tom Gunning’s influential interpre-
tation of attractions as thrilling yet self-aware formal flourishes
geared at Verfremdungseffekt.7 The second publication is Antunes’s
argument dismissing Eisenstein’s evocations of synesthesia as cere-
bral, deliberate visual metaphors, relying on high-order cognitive
deciphering rather than the automatic “low-order syntheses” (as in
Antunes’s own neuroscience-based principle of multisensory film
experience).8 In essence, these two interpretations of Eisenstein’s
legacy are diametrically opposed, with Belodubrovskaya insisting
on the director’s invocation of “low-level, precognitive psychic and
bodily responses” and Antunes denying him this power.9

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Eisenstein, Neurocinematics, Embodied Cognition 353
My contention is that Eisenstein’s approach is at once more pro-

tean and more radical than contemporary researchers contend; it
is at once more archaic (in the sense of being rooted in nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century psychology and aesthetic theory) and
more forward-looking (that is, anticipating and confronting the
limitations of contemporary neuroaesthetics). His sharp, nontrivial
articulations have much to offer to today’s authors conceptualiz-
ing spectators’ simulation of screen events, particularly with regard
to the much-debated dichotomies of art versus life, passive versus
constructive perception, and “low-level” automatic responses ver-
sus abstract-symbolic cognitive inferences. Studying his legacy in
the twenty-first century may help forge new more productive—and
less reductionist—paths in neuroaesthetics.
Immersion, Simulation, and the “Art versus Life” Debate
Belodubrovskaya’s 2018 essay explaining Sergei Eisenstein’s theory

of embodied spectatorship on the basis of the theory of mirror neu-
rons is among the most lucid and thought-provoking recent works
calling for a reevaluation of the director’s theoretical legacy along
the lines of neurocognitive discoveries. While her emphasis on the
visceral solicitation of the viewer in Eisenstein’s ideologically laden
film structures is insightful and persuasive, her overall position-
ing of the director’s theoretical legacy raises questions, which are
important to clarify for anyone seeking a nuanced understanding
of his conception of spectatorship. Considering these questions
may also bring us closer to solving some of the most controversial
issues in contemporary theories focused on the viewers’ embodied
engagement with the film medium.
Positioned squarely within the camp of constructivist cog-
nitive film studies, Belodubrovskaya’s essay attempts to wrestle
Eisenstein’s notion of film attractions away from its long-term
association with self-reflexive experimental film aesthetics. Belo-
dubrovskaya suggests that Eisenstein’s methods of impacting the
viewer anticipated the spectacular violent style of action narratives
in contemporary Hollywood in that he “tapped into preconscious
and automatic responses” rather than encouraging “conscious”
critical reflection.10 In advancing this argument, Belodubrovskaya
contests Tom Gunning’s influential appropriation of Eisenstein’s
term “attraction” to describe the early prenarrative “cinema of
instants,” in which the viewers’ experience of screen events, such
as the Lumière brothers’ train appearing to rush headlong into
the movie hall and Edwin Porter’s train robber firing a shot as if

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he were aiming straight at the camera, provided stand-alone thrills

without being integrated into a larger story. According to Gun-
ning, these screen events, like Eisenstein’s attractions, first and
foremost drew attention to the formal and technical possibilities of
cinema as a medium, creating a moment of critical distance instead
of occasioning the viewers’ wholesale absorption into the fictional
world and emotional identification with characters. In contrast,
Belodubrovskaya foregrounds the immersive dimension of Eisen-
stein’s film attractions, arguing that the director’s primary goal
was activating the spectators’ mirror neurons—avant la lettre—and
eliciting the sensorimotor simulations of the perceived actions in
their brain. Such involuntary, automatic mimicking of salient ges-
tures, expressions, or movement vectors is a preconscious reaction,
enabling a vicarious reliving of film situations. This foundational
preconscious element of film experience, Belodubrovskaya argues,
is perfectly compatible with the higher-level cognitive inferences
and emotional allegiances involved in narrative comprehension.
She acknowledges that the spectator’s response to a film may be
“modular”—that is, combining a mismatched array of precogni-
tive, self-directed emotions (such as vicarious sensations of pain
and aversion, based on the character’s bodily display), high-order
cognitive appraisals of the situation (e.g., social emotions, such as
pity and admiration, and applying one’s knowledge of genre con-
ventions and sociocultural norms to evaluate the meaning of the
narrative situation), and even self-awareness (being embarrassed
at one’s own sentimentality). Within this array, Belodubrovskaya
insists on the primacy of the “felt body’ responses” for the spec-
tator’s pleasure.11 Eisenstein, she contends, systematically tapped
into this power of cinema when he configured his “impactful con-
structions with authoritarian implications,” and “the less conscious
the audience was of his psychological manipulations, the better.”12
His interest in the visceral solicitation of the audience was driven
by the question of why, in Belodubrovskaya’s words, “audiences
respond to fiction as if it were reality.”13
What is at stake in this interpretation is the issue of the viewer’s
agency and autonomy as well as the nature of aesthetic experience
as such. The first issue that requires clarification is the mechanism
of the sensorimotor simulation and its role in the overall experi-
ence of film events as well as the extent to which the theory of mir-
ror neurons—and its historic precursors in Eisenstein’s times, such
as the theories of Einfühlung (empathy), emotional contagion,
and psychomotor induction—can explain the spectators’ engage-
ment with film images. Second, while Belodubrovskaya is correct in
drawing attention to the embodied simulation, which was indeed

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a crucial element of Eisenstein’s film theory, it is misleading to say

that the director expected his viewers to respond to film events as if
“it were reality.” This phrasing expresses a narrow bias of the cogni-
tive-constructivist film theory, which insists that human perception
functions in exactly the same way in real-life situations and in deci-
phering images onscreen.14 What this seemingly commonsensical
point of view masks is the ongoing learning—the adaptation and
habituation of our perceptual apparatus to the regime of medi-
ated presentation, with all of its culturally specific forms of sense
making (e.g., storytelling patterns, editing style, genre conven-
tions, allusions, etc.) and experiential parameters (the darkness of
the screening hall, mobile or stationary viewing, solo or collective
spectatorship, largeness of the screen, the ability to fast-forward,
the temptation to flip the channel, etc.). The reason why the term
“reality” is also misleading, when speaking about Eisenstein’s spec-
tators, is that his meticulously structured productions presupposed
the viewers’ involvement in a happening, or a magic ritual, where
the rules of everyday life did not quite apply: for him, the theater
and the movie hall were spaces of visceral provocation, shattered
perceptual clichés, and intellectual transformation.
Eisenstein’s attractions presuppose the viewers’ reaction to a
kind of augmented reality, to hijack a contemporary term: take,
for instance, the apotheosis of The Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets
Potemkin, 1925), when the nose of the rebel ship “protrudes” out of
the screen as a symbol of revolutionary triumph and a kinesthetic
prompt for the audience to either embrace or be squashed by this
crowd-diving giant (figure 1).
To be sure, this augmented reality of Eisensteinian attractions
is not intended to become a substitute for the actual physical world,
nor does it purport to hide the technological scaffolding and the
formal techniques upholding the viewers’ enticement. Rather, it is
a product of both the viewers’ embodied simulation and imagina-
tion, guided by the unfolding screen drama. The looming men-
ace of the battleship becomes palpable because of the dynamic
low-angle point of view and also because of the dramatic buildup
leading to this finale. Arguably, the energizing kinesthetic effect is
stronger when one watches the film on a large screen rather than
on one’s phone and when one sympathizes with the rebel sailors’
desperation and unexpected relief as the punitive squadron of
the Imperial Russian Navy all of a sudden lowers its guns and hails
them as brothers. Perhaps during the film’s theatrical run in 1926,
the mock-immersive three-dimensional decor of Moscow’s movie
theaters, which marked a symbolic entrance into the spectacle,
also served to prime the audience, fueling their imagination and

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Figure 1. A climactic moment in the drama The Battleship

Potemkin. Image source: The Battleship Potemkin, dir. Sergei
Eisenstein. DVD. New York: Kino Lorber, 2007.
inciting them to “see” the film image of the ship as if it were “com-
ing off” the screen (figures 2 and 3).15
In a 1935 lecture, Eisenstein compared the experience of
spectatorship to the actor’s double consciousness—the feeling of
incarnating a character while retaining a sense of the self.16 The
ritual of putting on costume and makeup, he noted, initiates a
transition when the alter ego begins to emerge inside the actor’s
mind. In the same way, Eisenstein surmised, the spectators’ percep-
tion always remains dual: they may become absorbed by the screen
events, but they never cease to register these events as artful and
play-like. Extending Eisenstein’s analogy, one may say that his goal
was to lay bare the process by which the cinema’s alternative real-
ity affects the spectator as with an artificial costume, which entices
one to discover a new self, a new mode of sensing, behaving, and
emoting. As an experimental filmmaker, Eisenstein explored the
shape of this “costume”: the structure of experience that unusual
cinematic forms called for, the associations they inspired, the types
of movements they dictated. Crucially, he believed that biological
mechanisms of perception were intertwined with sociocultural
predispositions and that spectatorship was an active lesson-seeking
behavior. In an often-quoted passage, he defined the aesthetic cat-
egories of “form” and “content” as concatenations of “sociophysi-
cal” prompts activating the audience’s cognition: “The principle

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Figure 2. An advertise-
ment for The Battleship
Potemkin in Moscow’s
Metropole cinema,
January 1926. Image
courtesy Eizenshtein-
Tsentr. My gratitude
to Naum Kleiman and
Vera Roumiantseva
for helping me locate
this photograph.
Figure 3. The staff of the first Goskino movie theater in Moscow dressed in
navy uniforms for the screening of The Battleship Potemkin in 1926. Image
courtesy Eizenshtein-Tsentr.

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of the organization of thought is in actual fact the ‘content’ of a

work. A principle that materialises in the sum total of sociophysi-
cal stimulants and for which form serves as a means of disclosure
[obnaruzhenie].”17
Content and form in this definition are profoundly inter-
related, with the former guiding the process of cognition and the
latter serving, in a performative manner, for parsing out and sign-
posting that same process. It is worthwhile to pause over Eisenstein’s
emphasis on the function of form as disclosure (obnaruzhenie) of
content, a word that may also be translated as “discovery,” with an
obvious implication of finding the artwork’s and one’s own class
consciousness. Eisenstein argues that the structure of an artwork
(i.e., a sequence of cues that are simultaneously physical and social)
guides the audience toward a certain conscious realization. This
realization may concern the sensory ingredients of a certain expe-
rience (e.g., the rhythm of editing referencing an agitated “heart-
beat” when showing the battleship Potemkin’s engine) or a certain
ideological attitude toward the represented phenomena and one’s
own civic position (e.g., the ecstasy of experiencing solidarity with
the collective, unified by one righteous effort).18
Eisenstein’s emphasis on disclosure—on making the cinematic
form palpable, thrilling, and iconoclastic—was what prompted
Tom Gunning to describe the attractions in his films as staging an
“exhibitionist confrontation.”19 In Gunning’s view, this confronta-
tion was the opposite of diegetic absorption. Belodubrovskaya’s
problematizing of this dichotomy is well taken. Yet the value of
Gunning’s interpretation lies in his subtle negotiation between the
visceral, enactive pleasures of film experience and the situational
awareness of the spectators (i.e., their media savviness, cultural
habits, and capacity for critical reasoning). Furthermore, Gun-
ning’s perspective on Eisenstein is better equipped to account for
his avant-garde tactics of defamiliarization and his targeted play
with our sensory perception, cognitive-symbolic inferences, and
emotional investments. Delving into Eisenstein’s legacy may help
us reimagine the very notion of the cinematic “narrative” as a com-
plex construction, which is happening in the viewers’ embodied
mind and emerges in reference to the prior embodied experiences
the audience has had in their sociocultural environment.

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Eisenstein’s Psychological Sources and the

Problem of Spectators’ Imitation
With regard to theorizing the psychophysiological underpinning of

embodied spectatorship, Eisenstein’s position was rather complex.
The idea that images activate kinesthetic empathy—or rudimen-
tary mimicking motions—was indeed a foundational tenet of his
film theory. In the director’s opinion, physical mimicry was a sine
qua non of emotional involvement as well as a measure of its inten-
sity. Eisenstein formulated this idea as early as the “The Montage of
Film Attractions” (1924), in which he asserted that “emotional per-
ception is achieved through the motor reproduction of the move-
ments of the actor by the perceiver.”20 This belief recurs in many of
his later texts. For instance, in the fall of 1928, Eisenstein and his
students at the State Institute of Cinematography planned to study
spectators’ reactions to “screen stimuli” empirically under the aus-
pices of the Laboratory for the Study of Mass Behavior and Mass
Psychotechnics of Moscow’s Polytechnic Museum.21 One of Eisen-
stein’s proposed objectives in this research plan was to establish
“the degree of the screen’s physical contagiousness,” and he sug-
gested that this goal could be accomplished, among other methods,
by recording the viewers’ changing facial expressions in response
to the actors’ “grossly expressive close-ups” (krupno-mimiruiushchii
krupnyi plan).22 In a 1937 essay, Eisenstein argued that William
James’s theory of emotions was useful in explaining the affective
and cognitive changes launched by the viewers’ subconscious imi-
tation of screen action: “by reproducing what he sees, he [the spec-
tator] transitions from the ‘unmotivated’ [bodily] positions evoked
purely by imitation to the required emotional state.”23 However, in
the same essay Eisenstein also observed that adult viewers typically
do not display the kind of all-encompassing emotional absorption
and imitative expressions that characterize child spectators. This
lack of overt bodily mimicry, in Eisenstein’s view, testified to the
rerouting of the nervous impulse, which could have resulted in the
motor discharge (i.e., in an imitative emotional expression), into
more mature cortical structures, resulting in a more “intellectual”
rather than “affective” attitude toward the presented film situation.
As I have argued elsewhere, spectators’ mimicry in Eisenstein’s
model was not simply a manipulative mechanism; he did not think
of viewers as passive puppets.24 All psychological sources he relied
on depicted the process of imitation not as a straightforward,
mechanical copying but rather as a complex individual reaction
shaped by the perceiver’s biological predispositions and behavioral
habits acquired within their cultural environment.

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Theodor Lipps’s turn-of-the-century theory of empathy (Ein-

fühlung), which Eisenstein cited in “The Montage of Film Attrac-
tions,” presented the spectators’ physical sensations of “feeling
into” the architectural shapes, graphic trends of visual compo-
sitions, and actors’ body language as a projection of the viewers’
own psychological state onto the object.25 Likewise, William
James had a complex view of the ideomotor effect (the notion
that seeing a certain dynamic shape or action, thinking or read-
ing about it, or otherwise making it the object of one’s awareness
elicits corresponding movements).26 James believed that every sen-
sory impression and conscious idea activates streams of nervous
impulses directed toward motor discharge, but this innervation
may be extinguished or rerouted by the arrival of new sensations
and ideas.27 James’s view of the mind and the nervous system
was that of a constant fluctuation: a person’s reaction to a cer-
tain stimulus could be instantaneously modified by the onslaught
of new sensations and conscious considerations. When reading
an action-packed novel with war scenes, we may feel our muscles
tense up, says James, but this fleeting affect will become fainter as
a “crowd of other representations” and unrelated thoughts pass
through our consciousness.28 The takeaway point from James’s
presentation is that the ideomotor effect may be a crucial compo-
nent of our embodied response to art, but it does not exhaust the
complexity of this response. The initial imitative impulse quickly
recedes to the background, leaving the stage open for further acts
of consciousness.
Another of Eisenstein’s influences, the Soviet reflexologist
Vladimir Bekhterev, also commented on mimicry and imitation,
particularly in the context of children’s psychology, hypnotherapy,
and interpersonal communication within crowds and organized
collectives. Bekhterev criticized Theodor Lipps for misleadingly
implying that subconscious imitation provides access to the other
person’s inner world. As Bekhterev pointed out, the perceiver’s
empathetic movements and all corresponding sensations are but
his own.29 The basis of empathy is analogy, not an absolute identi-
cal match. The Soviet scientist further stressed that the network
of unconditioned and conditioned reflexes characteristic of each
individual determines the form of his or her imitative reaction to
a stimulus. Primitive as it may appear, for Bekhterev mimicking
was a sentient reaction and an expressive act because it involved
processing the incoming stimulus and articulating a response to
it that somehow corresponded to the original input. The imitative
reaction was, in other words, as unique as the individual because
it was generated by the relay of the person’s reflexes (inborn and

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acquired behavioral patterns, that is, algorithms of engaging with

the environment).
Lev Vygotsky’s Psychology of Art, which Eisenstein read with
great care in the second half of the 1920s, likewise presented a
critique of Lipps’s theory of Einfühlung and an earlier nineteenth-
century notion that art transmits the author’s or characters’ emo-
tions directly to the viewer. “How joyless the mission of art would
be in our life,” Vygotsky remarked, “if it had no other task than
infecting many people with the feelings of one.”30 Lipps made a
step in the right direction when he described the spectator’s rela-
tionship with the object as a subjective projection.31 For Vygotsky,
the most valuable element in this formulation was highlighting the
work accomplished by the viewer’s mind thanks to the artworks’
sensory cues.32 Lipps’s view had a distinct advantage over earlier
models that emphasized the audience’s semiautomatic emotional
attunement to the artwork’s sensory stimuli. However, for Vygotsky,
Lipps did not go far enough in investigating the function of art
in organizing the perceiver’s emotions, attitudes, and expressions.
Vygotsky argued that if we look at genres that are typically cited as
the most obvious catalysts of the viewers’ visceral and emotional
responses—from military marches, known to raise the army’s spirit,
to erotic poetry, known to elicit sexual desire—we may notice a
deeper structuring impact on the audience’s behavior.33 These
genres not only occasion the arrival of specific psycho-physiological
reactions but also provide a framework for moderating powerful
affects. The military music may help overcome nervous and erratic
outbursts, and poetic love scenes infuse one’s ineffable experi-
ences with lyricism, rerouting the impulse to act upon one’s desire
into the realm of fantasy.34 Herein lies the cathartic function of art:
“art is the necessary discharge of nervous energy and a complex
instrument of balancing the organism and its environment in a
critical moment.”35 By interacting with art, the perceiver’s nervous
system acquires a coping mechanism, a protocol for extinguishing
unhelpful impulses and boosting the activity of the higher nervous
centers—those responsible for critical reasoning, imagination, and
the ability to model behavior strategies. The role of the higher
intellect is essential in this process. Art, Vygotsky stated, “is a central
emotion, an emotion realized primarily within the cortex. Art emo-
tions are intelligent emotions. Instead of manifesting themselves in
the clenching of the fists or in a tremor, they are realized primarily
in fantasy images.”36 If we compare a scream of terror in real life
and its presentation in a novel or a staged tragedy, it is obvious
that the real scream is going to be more alarming, more powerful
in terms of emotional “contagiousness.”37 But such a comparison,

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according to Vygotsky, misses the point: what people seek in art is

not just experiencing what the author or the character has gone
through but also suggestions on how to deal with the incompre-
hensible, distressing, or sublime aspects of existence. Art employs
devices—such as manipulating the rhythm of presentation, isolat-
ing details, suspending the denouement, and so forth—to shape
the audience’s perception of the content.38 The artistic form may
deliberately clash with the audience’s ordinary attitudes toward a
certain content, thus challenging it to see this content in a new
light. Vygotsky praised Marxist theorists’ definitions of art’s social
mission in “systematizing feelings” (Nikolai Bukharin), “concen-
trating life” (Anatolii Lunacharskii), and presenting an “antithesis
to life” (Georgii Plekhanov).39 Similarly, Vygotsky himself under-
scored the transformative power of art with regard to the perceiv-
ers’ psyche, their outlook on their own condition, and their ability
to engage with their social and natural environment.
As Julia Vassilieva has noted, Eisenstein valorized the intellec-
tual component of the aesthetic reaction, which was highlighted
by Vygotsky, as much as the film’s visceral and emotional impact.40
In fact, it may be more precise to say that the director did not see
the cognitive aspects of perception as divorced from the embod-
ied and affective ones—for him, they were united in a productive,
mutually stimulating, and dialectical way. Furthermore, under the
influence of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach to personal-
ity development, Eisenstein’s understanding of perception was
enriched by considerations that may be described as anticipating
semiotics, systems theory, and the theory of extended cognition.
Vygotsky and his collaborator, Alexander Luria, a close friend of
Eisenstein, maintained that each individual’s cognition develops
through interfacing with the material tools, symbols, and practices
available to the individual in her or his own culture. In Psychology
of Art, Vygotsky wrote that technologies are not simply prosthetic
extensions of human organs; together with these tools comes
an entire conceptual framework. Similarly, “art is a kind of an
extended, ‘socialized feeling,’ or a technique of feelings.”41 The
ongoing mastery of culturally specific concepts and instruments,
from early childhood onward, shapes the way in which the indi-
vidual perceives the environment and makes use of it. Vygotsky
and Luria’s view of cognition emphasized the functional, system-
atic integration of behavioral adaptations—a vision of the brain in
which neural networks are constantly renegotiated and modified
thanks to physiological changes (e.g., the maturation of the child’s
brain) and learning. Applying this perspective to the issue of film
spectators’ perception would entail recognizing its goal-oriented

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situated character, shaped by the perceiver’s life experience and

thirst for learning, that is, the potential to incorporate some ver-
sion of the symbolic representation into the perceiver’s own mode
of being in the world.
Spectators’ Agency, Autonomy, and the Dynamic Interaction

between the Low-Order and High-Order Brain Processes
Despite his infamous metaphors of cinema as a “fist” and “a trac-

tor ploughing the spectator’s psyche,” it would be uncharitable to
think of Eisenstein as a surreptitious manipulator of his audience.42
It is true that he thought of cinema as an art of persuasion, pred-
icated on immersion and embodied simulation, but at the same
time he also never failed to remind the audience of the deliberate,
constructed nature of the spectacle they are witnessing. Einstein’s
spectator was a participant in a radical experiment. This experi-
ment tested the perceptual and emotive power of artistic devices,
challenging the viewers to learn something new about themselves,
about cinema as a medium, and about the human condition. The
premises and findings of Eisenstein’s experiments as well as his
antibourgeois politics were presented to the public and meticu-
lously scrutinized in his essays, talks, and pedagogical workshops
at the State Institute of Cinematography. In Luria’s words, Eisen-
stein’s lifelong theoretical explorations were driven by the desire to
find out “what laws control expression and by what rules do latent
and unconscious elements become accessible to direct perception
and inner experience, what techniques can be used to convey most
powerfully and expressively the essence of an event, the internal
dynamics of a thought, the depth of an inner experience.”43
This investigative objective underlies many of Eisenstein’s the-
oretical texts and is explicitly formulated in his 1929 essay “How
Is Pathos Made?” (“Kak delaetsia pafos?”).44 The programmatic
text is based on Eisenstein’s lectures for an advanced directing
workshop at the State Institute of Cinematography. In the essay,
the director compares the audience’s absorption in the work of art
with the state of hypnosis. However, what he means by “hypnosis”
is unconventional: he describes it as a state of heightened atten-
tion and sensitivity to sensory stimuli, rather than a debilitating
lack of self-control, that renders one’s consciousness open to exter-
nal manipulation.45 Later in the essay he encourages his students
to study the techniques of entrancing the audience by looking at
Émile Zola’s novels, which Eisenstein deems exceptionally power-
ful in evoking “physiological and sensory” experience.46 The thrust

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of his approach highlights the audience’s sensory simulation of the

novel’s “material”:
We put our question bluntly:

What are the means by which the reading of his novels imparts an
almost physiological sensation of dying? Of being hungry, or sated. Of
sensual arousal. Of being drunk on beer, or on love. Eros. Thanatos.
Ecstasy or pathos.
In the course of our analysis, we rejected the neat, uncreative liter-
ary analysis in favor of a more barbarous and crude method.
We’ve allowed ourselves to interpret the expositions, descriptions,
and events in the novel literally.
That is, to consider them as facts and actual objects, rather than
literary creations.
As if we were actually surrounded by things described on paper.
We replaced a conditional stimulus—the word “warmth”—with an
unconditional one—warmth.47
After this “barbarous” equation of the sign with its sensory referent,
however, Eisenstein moves on to a metaphorical operation, encour-
aging the students to classify Zola’s various devices on the basis of
their dynamism:
Right off the bat, we have decided to focus on the quality of movement—
the dynamic state of the material—as its key marker.
In this way, highly diverse properties were brought to the common
denominator, based on one principle [i.e., dynamism].
Bright red color. High temperature. Energetically flexing muscles.
Thundering wheels. Abrupt terseness of short phrases. Intense evapo-
ration.
We were able to classify various situational descriptors, deliberately
combined by Zola, in a uniform manner based on their dynamism.48
What is striking about this methodology is Eisenstein’s duality with

regard to the question of whether or not the perception of artistic
representations is the same as in real life. On the one hand, Eisen-
stein insists that linguistic symbols launch a simulation process in
the reader’s brain, prompting a vicarious immersion into the sen-
sory richness of Zola’s fiction. On the other hand, the purpose of
the workshop is investigating the artificial, deliberate structuring of
the audience’s experience. Together with his students, Eisenstein
examines Zola’s choice of imagery and ingenuous use of sentence
length, repetitions, and prose rhythm to evoke relevant sensa-
tions in a performative manner. Presumably, it takes more than

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subconscious kinesthetic empathy to identify the dynamic value

of diverse textual elements, such as Zola’s mention of the color
red and his staccato syntax. In revealing the dynamic kernel within
diverse types of literary devices, Eisenstein seems to suggest that
there is an indivisible unity between the brain’s sensorimotor simu-
lation and its abstract-symbolic activity. The ability to generalize—to
classify “thundering wheels” and “intense evaporation”—under the
category of dynamic cues involves both the sensory memory trig-
gered by these words and the capacity to match, sort, and compare.
In cultivating his own and his audience’s awareness of the
artwork’s perceptual properties, its conceptual design, and its
potential for evoking affective and cognitive experiences, Eisen-
stein practiced the avant-garde principle of baring the device. In
his films, conspicuous, “eccentric” formal devices pressure the
viewer to question the representational traditions they are accus-
tomed to. His films deliberately invite the viewer to ponder how
perception works, how art can engage it, and what sociopolitical
and ethical conclusions the viewer is being enticed into drawing.
Arguably, the difference between propaganda and self-aware politi-
cal art lies precisely in this distinction: the exposure of means by
which the film delivers its rhetorical message. As Emma Widdis has
shown, in the 1920s leftist avant-garde artists of Eisenstein’s circle
found a practical application for Viktor Shklovskii’s theory of art
as defamiliarization (i.e., the practice of restoring the freshness of
sensory experience that had been obliterated by habit).49 Defamil-
iarization became a strategic, purposeful organization of the audi-
ence’s sensations with the goal of promoting a socialist worldview.
In the words of Sergei Tret’iakov, the art of the new epoch was to
serve as an “emotionalizer” and, simultaneously, as an “intellectual-
izer.”50 Under the Proletkult’s ideology, cultural producers were no
longer elite arbiters of taste but instead were an organic part of the
collective—eager to learn from the public and explore what art and
life could be like in this new progressive society.51 The public was
encouraged to become cocreators, artists, experimenters, critics,
and activists: the self-reflexive dimension of films served precisely
as this educational moment, revealing how art works perceptually,
emotionally, and conceptually.52
For his part, Eisenstein was keenly aware that even the most
viscerally evocative visual representations are not universal, and
therefore kinesthetic empathy alone cannot explain the full
range of the audience’s aesthetic experience. In the “Montage of
Film Attractions,” he underscored that “attractional calculation”
becomes feasible only in the case of a demographically homoge-
nous audience.53 The juxtaposition of the slaughtered bull and the

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massacred demonstration in Strike (1925) puzzled peasant specta-

tors, leading the director to conclude that the audience’s life expe-
riences and sociocultural background impact reception.54 Along
the same lines, he noted that the “sex-appeal” of a stereotypical
“American heroine-beauty” could be alienating rather than allur-
ing for representatives of the previously colonized and enslaved
minorities.55 When Eisenstein got a chance to study spectators’
reactions empirically at the Polytechnic Museum, his draft outlin-
ing the methodology of such studies stipulated that subject groups
had to be sociologically uniform with regard to class and occupa-
tion.56 Coupling sociology with biology, he also proposed taking
into account the viewers’ psychophysiological temperament using
categories such as “asthenic, pyknic, etc.”57 All of these stipulations
point to Eisenstein’s anticipation of divergent spectator responses.
Moreover, his plan proposes to mark the time of the viewer’s last
meal and the time of the day the viewer will be watching the film.58
This proviso suggests that Eisenstein was aware that even individual
perceptions of the same film may not be self-identical, depending
on the person’s fatigue and low blood sugar.
Eisenstein’s acknowledgment of all these factors moderated
his profound fascination with film’s ability to activate sensorimotor
and emotional circuits in the viewers’ nervous system. In this
respect, his position offers an interesting parallel with contempo-
rary debates surrounding the mirror neuron theory.
Eisenstein and Debates over the Mirror Neurons Theory
First identified in macaques, mirror neurons are neural networks

in the frontal cortex that fire both when the monkeys observe a
salient action, such as someone’s hand grabbing a nut, and when
the macaques perform this action themselves.59 This phenomenon
has been interpreted to suggest that mirror neurons enable “action
understanding” by automatically creating an “internal description”
of the action, a motor representation that imbues the visual stim-
ulus with first-person resonance.60 Explaining this mechanism of
action recognition, neuroscientists Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila
Craighero state that the automatic “motor representation of the
observed action corresponds to that which is spontaneously gen-
erated during active action and whose outcome is known to the
acting individual.”61 Although the human frontal cortex differs
significantly from that of monkeys, multiple studies point to the
existence of a mirror system in humans and make a case for recog-
nizing the fundamental role of sensorimotor simulation for human

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cognition. Researchers have documented the activation of the

parietal-motor cortex and increased electrical potential in specific
muscles corresponding to the movements that the person is per-
ceiving.62 The mirror mechanism has been called a “natural,” “low-
level” process that differs from “mentalizing” and abstract-semantic
inferences: although the latter also help the observer understand
others’ behavior, they do not provide that same “first-person grasp
of the motor goals and intentions of other individuals” that the
mirror system is able to offer automatically.63 Some researchers
argue for the mirror system’s critical role in subjects’ ability to rec-
ognize and empathize with emotional expressions, with implica-
tions for understanding autism.64 Additional evidence in favor of
the hypothesis that sensorimotor simulation is a key component of
cognition is provided by experiments involving language process-
ing. For instance, reading action verbs such as “lick,” “pick,” and
“kick” has been found to activate neural networks within the pre-
motor and motor cortices that are “directly adjacent to or overlap[]
with areas activated by actual movement of the tongue, fingers, or
feet.”65 Another study of sensorimotor simulation showed that corti-
cal areas responsible for color perception activated during “seman-
tic retrieval,” that is, when the subject had to perform tasks such
as matching the printed word “taxi” to the word “yellow.”66 This
study thus proposed that processing semantic properties of words
is based on a reenactment of modality-specific sensory experiences.
While these findings fit well with Eisenstein’s approach, it is
crucial to note that his theory also resonates with some contempo-
rary critiques of the mirror neuron theory. Mirror sceptics point
out that recognizing actions, empathizing with emotional expres-
sions, and processing words denoting color and movements could
be accomplished without (or only with a partial and peripheral
involvement of) sensorimotor simulation. The exact relationship
between this conceptual (abstract, amodal, nonmotor) process-
ing circuit and the sensorimotor reenactment remains unclear. In
one critical essay, neuroscientist Gregory Hickok reviews multiple
studies that established that patients with brain lesions exhibit dis-
sociation between action recognition and the ability to imitate
object-directed actions and pantomimes.67 For example, a patient
suffering from brain trauma that rendered her unable to produce
sign language motorically could still understand others’ signing.68
Hickok suggests that action understanding may thus be mediated
by a nonmotor conceptual representation. Another critical review
by Alfonso Caramazza and his colleagues points out that the design
of current mirror neuron experiments does not rule out the pos-
sibility that the mirror activity is a result rather than the cause of

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processes that occur in other nonsensorimotor neural networks,

processes that may actually be more central to action understand-
ing.69 Caramazza and his team further question whether we can
really draw a strict boundary line between “low-level” motor rep-
resentations (simulation) and “high-level” (abstract, amodal, non-
motor) representations.70 “Empirical findings,” the team argues,
“indicate a richer view” in which “action observation and under-
standing seem to be the outcomes of numerous processing stages
at different levels.”71
This position, which urges the scientists to investigate interac-
tions between the “high” and “low” levels instead of clearly demar-
cating them and prioritizing just one of them, likewise matches
Eisenstein’s theory of spectatorship. Recall, for instance, his insis-
tence that various types of montage may elicit motoric, emotional,
and intellectual responses from viewers and that these levels of
engagement are not mutually exclusive but instead are intercon-
nected.72 Another area where the critique of the mirror neuron
theory matches early twentieth-century ideas, resonating with
Eisenstein’s platform, is the charge that the mirror system is not,
strictly speaking, mirroring someone else’s behavior but rather is
activated thanks to processes within the observer’s own brain. As
such, the mirror system is the product of the individual’s own “task-
dependent sensory-motor associations.”73 Neuroscientist Caroline
Catmur and her team showed that it is possible to make the parietal
and motor areas fire in a “countermirror” manner by training the
subjects to perform a different action from the one they observe:
“The mirror properties of the mirror system are neither wholly
innate nor fixed once acquired; instead they develop through sen-
sorimotor learning. Our findings indicate that the human mirror
system is, to some extent, both a product and a process of social
interaction.”74 This perspective on the origins and functioning of
the mirror system is more compatible with Vygotsky’s and Luria’s
emphasis on learning and assimilation of sociocultural techniques,
which influenced Eisenstein.
Cinematic Narrative from the Standpoint of

Embedded and Extended Cognition
A comprehensive reevaluation of Eisenstein’s perspective on em-

bodied spectatorship from a contemporary standpoint would
require considering its place within the broader 4E+E model of cog-
nition, as Julia Vassilieva has proposed.75 The 4E+E model describes
cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended—and

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always coupled with emotions.76 Discussions of Eisenstein’s theory

in the context of the mirror neuron theory foreground the embod-
ied and enactive dimension of spectators’ experience. Yet, it may
be equally productive to recognize the ways in which the specta-
tors’ cognitive processes are embedded (contingent on the bodily
forms of knowing developed within specific sociocultural contexts)
and extended (emerging in relation to the material structures of
the external world, so much so that elements of cognitive process-
ing are off-loaded onto aspects of the environment—instruments,
architecture, data storage and retrieval devices, etc.).77
Recent developments in film theory seek to incorporate the
extended cognition thesis into reflections on embodied spectator-
ship. Thus, Steffen Hven proposes that when watching films, our
“cognition and consciousness are not confined to our brains but
extend to our bodies and the techno-mediated environment.”78
Drawing on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Gilles Deleuze’s
film philosophy, and the media anthropology of Christiane Voss
and Lorenz Engell, Hven proposes to reconceptualize the notion
of cinematic narration in terms of a “dynamic coupling of man and
media,” which generates the peculiar cinematic experience of a
fictional world.79 Narration, as Hven states, is not “a representation
of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind, but rather an enactment of
a world and a mind” in real time as the film unfolds.80 Crucially, this
enactment happens with reference to the history of prior interac-
tions with media. Further, each interaction contributes to forming
certain predispositions within our perceptual apparatus. In Hven’s
words, the “anthropomedial coupling extends beyond the partic-
ular mediated setting (film experience),” continuing “to define,
restrict, regulate, produce, or otherwise influence our rhythms and
perceptions,” cognitive habits, and emotions.81
This conception recognizes the mediated nature of the spec-
tator’s access to screen events as well as the educational, transfor-
mative influence of film experience on our brain’s neuroplasticity.
We may compare this perspective with Eisenstein’s theory that cin-
ematic structures electrify the audience, pushing its somatic, emo-
tional, and intellectual experiences beyond the habitual limits. In
the director’s monistic, materialist worldview, the cinematic form
was an interactive instrument that left new traces in the viewers’ ner-
vous system, effectively reshaping their perception and behavior.
His early theoretical platform reflected the zeitgeist of the 1920s,
echoing Alexander Bogdanov’s organization science (a precursor
to systems theory), the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism,
and the ideology of the Left Front of the Arts. From around 1928
onward, Vygotsky and Luria’s cultural-historical approach began

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to exert a formative influence on Eisenstein, inspiring him to dig

deeper into the origins of language and concept formation, writing
systems, drawing, and ritual practices. Interiorized cultural struc-
tures, he believed, become an integral part of the person’s cogni-
tion, exerting a powerful influence also on the systems of emotional
regulation and motor coordination in purposeful behavior.
In a 1943 essay, Eisenstein offers a vivid image for cinema’s
transformative impact on the spectator by comparing the film-
viewing experience to a construction site. Reminiscing about an
episode from his youth, when he served as a military engineer dur-
ing the Russian Civil War, he recalls the elation he felt while build-
ing a floating bridge together with his detachment (this makeshift
passage enabled the retreat of the Red Army in anticipation of the
enemy’s advance). Witnessing the grandeur of coordinated effort,
the future director felt himself part of a gigantic collective pro-
cess. He was enraptured by the sight of “measured time and space;
shifts in the motion of individual streams of the mass—nature and
humans fused together by the link of techne.”82 This vision of a
structure emerging before his eyes—a structure harnessing and
redistributing people’s energy as they overcome the environment’s
challenges and outmaneuver the military adversary—brings him
to the realization that cinema too is a form of spatialized thought:
“Goddamn, if this isn’t also the basis of the fusion of the diverse
objects of environment and people, of being and deeds, of move-
ment and time—in a film as such, and in the combination of its
fragments—the montage units—as well as in the unique feat of
spatial-temporal engineering, which constructs a most complex
mise-en-scéne in a crowd scene or the gestural design of a char-
acter before the camera.”83 This passage comes close to articu-
lating a vision of cinema as a form of distributed cognition. The
director’s creative solutions, welding the forces of organic and
inorganic nature, lay out a blueprint for the viewer. Meticulously
crafted spatial-temporal assemblages take the viewer through the
director’s treatment of various situations and phenomena. The
idea of the cinematic structure as a pathway of cues for the view-
ers’ embodied perception undergirds Eisenstein’s emphasis on the
design of movements of individuals and collectives in his films. The
research of Irina Schulzki on Eisenstein’s concept of “underlying
gesture” and Yuri Tsivian’s reflections on the “gestural” baring of
devices in his films demonstrate that the director thought of the
cinematic narrative as a series of kinetic states tied to emotional
and intellectual jolts.84
Returning to the issue of the relationship between the brain
processes responsible for sensorimotor simulation and those en-

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gaged in the abstract-symbolic appraisal, it is instructive to con-

sider the fact that Eisenstein thought of these aspects of cognition
in complementary rather than antagonistic terms. This vision of
cooperation and dynamic interplay escapes the attention of film
theorists, who prioritize only one of these aspects of cognition.
Thus, Antunes develops his notion of multisensory film experi-
ence in opposition to Eisenstein’s notion of synesthesia, presenting
the latter as dependent on metaphors and spectators’ conscious
“capacity to creatively generate meanings and associations of ideas,
or to enrich the experience of an artwork through associative im-
pressions.”85 In contrast, Antunes writes about the preconscious
process, which is not a prerogative of the gifted, imaginative mind
but instead is a basic perceptual mechanism whereby our brain
supplements the audiovisual input with missing multisensory per-
cepts. Our “vestibular sense,” Antunes says, is activated by the film’s
audiovisual prompts “before our actual conscious awareness is
able to recall multisensory memories or to imagine multisensory
events.”86 To illustrate, Antunes discusses Gus Van Sant’s “cinema of
walking” whereby continuous tracking shots filmed by a Steadicam
tap into the audience’s sense of balance and spatial orientation,
with the audiovisual stimuli provoking the activity of the spectators’
vestibular apparatus.87 For Antunes, this represents a more basic
and ubiquitous type of reaction than the synesthesia theorized by
Eisenstein and presented in his films, such as Eisenstein’s attempt
to convey the sound of a machine gun by juxtaposing a close-up
of the gunner’s face with images of a scattering crowd in a rapidly
edited sequence of October.88 This sequence, Antunes maintains,
requires a creative stretch of imagination: the filmmaker produces
a metaphor by inviting the audience to “associate the idea of the
rumbling sound to fast intercutting.”89
Antunes puts his finger on an essential feature of Eisenstein’s
aesthetics: the filmmaker’s refusal to slavishly re-create the bundles
of sensations as they appear “in nature” or in the representational
conventions of Western Realism.90 By rearranging and juxtaposing
multimodal sensory percepts—by orchestrating striking counter-
points between them—Eisenstein was forcing the viewer to feel and
interpret the represented phenomena in a new light. Antunes is
right that Einsteinian synesthesia involves a deliberate construction
of novel metaphors and concepts, but could it really be true that
processing them involves only the high-level abstract cerebration?
Eisenstein clearly intended his cinematic constructions to engage
the sensorimotor circuits along with the intellectual and emotional
ones. Thus, for instance, that same sequence of the gunman shoot-
ing demonstrators in October, which, according to Antunes evokes

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sound only symbolically, does produce a strong kinesthetic effect,

prompting the viewer to brace in light of the repeated shock. The
combination of the gunman’s scowling face with the stroboscopic
flickering of his machine gun is a tense, shocking moment, the
kinetic energy of which spills over into the long shot of the scat-
tering crowd, making us commiserate with the fleeing victims. In
addition to its visceral quality, this scene is a call for revolution,
targeting the viewers’ emotions and intellect.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Eisenstein developed an original
theory about cinema’s ability to activate the viewers’ rational com-
prehension while at the same time mobilizing the “archaic lay-
ers” of their consciousness—the source of enactive sensorimotor
experience. Known as the Grundproblem (a foundational problem),
this theory postulates that art’s power lies in its ability to initiate
“a ceaselessly oscillating process of our consciousness, which is
capable of instantaneously shuttling back and forth between two
foundational stages[,] . . . transition[ing] from the stage of sensory
thinking (prelogical thinking, thinking in images) to the differen-
tiated, logically elegant thinking.”91
In order to understand the first route—the “regression” onto
a more primitive level of “sensory thinking”—Eisenstein turned to
an eclectic array of psychological, neurophysiological, biological,
and anthropological literature on topics ranging from the reflexes
of human embryos and the gestural language of primates to the
development of motor skills, speech, and writing in children to var-
ious neuropathological cases and to accounts of religious ecstasy
and altered states of consciousness.92 A major impetus for this quest
was provided by Vygotsky and Luria. Their studies detailed the way
in which the mastery of cultural symbols and practices furnished
the human mind with specific protocols of emotional regulation,
self-expression, and problem solving. By observing children, illiter-
ate adults, and neuropathological patients, they were able to iden-
tify phases of cognitive development when functional systems are
incomplete, disintegrated, or otherwise divergent from the average
literate adult.
Eisenstein was fascinated by these cases and believed that even
in a regular adult under certain conditions, the irrational logic of
sensory thinking may come to the fore.93 He thought that deliber-
ately constructed symbols and rhythms (in cinema and other arts)
could replicate the conditions that reroute the viewers’ conscious to
its more primeval functioning mode (i.e., turn on “the ‘posterior’
mind which possesses a tremendous power of primeval, undiffer-
entiated, undivided energy”).94 His artistic explements and analy-
ses of other artworks were geared toward exploring the artificial

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means of inducing these unusual modes of perception and allow-

ing the audience to become privy to an alternative “psychological
habitus.”95 To give a few examples, Viacheslav Ivanov has shown
that in one of the scenes of Bezhin Meadow, Eisenstein planned to
create an effect of the “reverse perspective” (an alternative to the
linear perspective developed during the Renaissance that may be
found in icons and, according to Luria, in children’s drawings)
as a way of communicating the peculiarities of a child’s percep-
tion of the world.96 Julia Vassilieva has analyzed Eisenstein’s evolv-
ing theory of movement construction within the mise-en-scène in
relation to Luria’s observations on a Parkinson’s patient who was
unable to walk on a flat floor but could climb stairs because the
sight of steps activated a different motor program in his brain.97 In
the same essay, Vassilieva also shows how Luria’s case of Solomon
Shereshevskii, a patient presenting with a clinical case of photo-
graphic memory, inspired Eisenstein to articulate his own under-
standing of synesthesia.98
Spread over the volumes of Metod, The Non-Indifferent Nature,
and his diary and other unpublished archival materials, Eisenstein’s
explorations of the Grundsproblem comprise an enormous corpus of
work, the rich potential of which is still not fully accounted for by
film scholars. This corpus contains some arguments that perhaps
may appear passé—too schematic, too exotic, or too speculative.
Yet it also articulates original forward-looking insights of a kind that
are rarely found in today’s neuroscientific research. Particularly
illuminating is his acknowledgment of the multilevel organization
of brain processes and his reflection on the functional interrela-
tion of the higher “abstract” cognitive processes and the “lower”
sensorimotor simulation. Eisenstein’s theory demonstrates that
the audience’s engagement with cinematic structures involves not
only an emotional attunement but also a form of knowing, doing,
and being.
Conclusion
Despite the exceptional promise of the mirror neuron theory for

understanding the first-person simulation of filmic events in the
spectator’s brain, several crucial aspects of the film-viewing experi-
ence are too often taken for granted in neurocinematics. Could
the perception of events in real life be equated with their artistic
presentation? If kinesthetic empathy is such a prevalent, power-
ful mechanism of reaction, what accounts for diverse audience
responses to the same film?

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Further, while the mirror neuron theory covers the “embodied”

and “emotional” dimensions of the 4E+E model of cognition, what
could be said about its “embedded” and “extended” dimensions?
Eisenstein’s reflection on the psychological effects of the cin-
ematic form and his insistence on the ceaseless dynamic interac-
tion between the bodily, emotional, and higher cognitive neural
networks provides some clues for these questions. The higher level
of cognitive, symbolic-abstract inferences does not shut down when
the lower sensorimotor simulation of screen events plays out in our
brain, and Eisenstein, in his own way, was able to articulate a tight
relationship between these two vectors of art’s appeal. His plan
for empirical studies of spectators demonstrates his recognition of
the sociological factor of film reception and acknowledgment that
film viewers’ reactions are shaped by their previous exposures to
various symbolic and environmental experiences. Embracing the
avant-garde principle of defamiliarization and Vygotsky’s theses in
his Psychology of Art, Eisenstein believed that a profound encounter
with an artwork exerts a transformative influence on the specta-
tor’s perceptual habits. The director’s conception of “content” as
a chain of thought and “form” as a performative, self-aware revela-
tion of this content offers a sophisticated and refreshing expansion
of the traditional notion of film narrative. Moreover, his conception
of the cinematic structure as a concatenation of material prompts,
a spatial-temporal blueprint, and a “gestural” imprint of the direc-
tor’s cognitive operations opens a new horizon for understanding
the working of “extended cognition” in cinema.
Notes
1. Luis Rocha Antunes, The Multisensory Film Experience: A Cognitive Model of

Experiential Film Aesthetics (London: Intellect, 2016), 13.
2. Ibid., 4, 40–41.
3. Citing the collection The Visual Neurosciences, Antunes states that “what we
call seeing” is not just the result of “visual information” (ibid., 61). Movements of the
head and ocular muscles produce proprioceptive signals that the brain integrates
with the data coming from other organs (such as the retina and the inner ear) to
create a perception of spatial orientation, movement, and balance. See Leo Cha-
lupa and John Werner, eds., The Visual Neuroscience, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2004).
4. Eisenstein called the audience “the basic material” of both theater and
cinema. See Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions,” in Selected Works,
Vol. 1, Writings, 1922–1934, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: I. B. Tauris,
2010), 39. Elsewhere, he also referred to the director’s task as “the organization of
the audience through organized material.” See Sergei Eisenstein, “The Problem of

70.162.51.42 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 18:28:39 UTC
the Materialist Approach to Form,” in Selected Works, 1:63. On the idea of audience’s
reactions being Eisenstein’s main focus, see David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 115.
5. Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions,” 39.
6. Pia Tikka, “Cinema as Externalization of Consciousness,” in Screen Conscious-
ness: Cinema, Mind and World, ed. Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2006), 140; Pia Tikka, Enactive Cinema: Simultatorium Eisensteinense (Saar-
brücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010); Uri Hasson, Ohad Landesman,
Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin, and David J. Heeger, “Neuro-
cinematics: The Neuroscience of Film,” Projections 2, no. 1 (2008): 12; Vittorio
Gallese and Michele Guerra, “Embodying Movies: Embodied Simulation and Film
Studies,” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 3 (2012): 192; David
Bordwell, “The Viewers’ Share: Models of Mind in Explaining Film,” in Psychocin-
ematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 35; Tim J. Smith, “Watching You Watch Movies: Using Eye
Tracking to Inform Film Theory,” in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Mov-
ies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 169.
7. Maria Belodubrovkaya, “The Cine-Fist: Eisenstein’s Attractions, Mirror
Neurons, and Contemporary Action Cinema,” Projections 12, no. 1 (2018): 2–3. Her
polemic is directed at Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film
and the Incredulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda
Williams, 114–33 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
8. Antunes, The Multisensory Film Experience, 36–37.
9. Belodubrovskaya, “The Cine-Fist,” 9–10; Antunes, The Multisensory Film Expe-
rience, 36–37.
10. Belodubrovskaya, “The Cine-Fist,” 1.
11. Ibid., 10.
12. Ibid., 3.
13. Ibid., 10.
14. The origins of this trend lie in Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psycho-
logical Study (1916), which suggests, for instance, that our attention is activated in the
same way whether we are crossing the street or watching a theater performance. See
Hugo Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: a Psychological Study,” in Hugo Münsterberg on
Film: The Photoplay; A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New
York: Routledge, 2002), 79–80. Today, cognitive film scholars in the constructivist
camp insist that the human perceptual apparatus is a finite product of evolution
(i.e., the only faculty individuals can rely on, whether they watch a film or interact
with phenomena in their daily lives). This position informs David Bordwell’s and
Noel Carroll’s critique of Tom Gunning, Jonathan Crary, and other advocates of
the “modernity thesis,” which aimed to “historicize” perception (i.e., to connect
the mode of the early twentieth-century viewers’ engagement with film to broader
shifts of perceptual experience, brought about by modern urban environments).
See David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997), 142; Noel Carroll, “Modernity and the Plasticity of Perception,” Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59, no. 1 (2001): 11–17. Along similar lines, Ed S. Tan
suggests that in viewing mainstream narrative films, the suspension of disbelief is so
strong that our emotional experience runs a similar course as if we reacted to “the

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sight of nonfictional emotional events in real life.” See Ed S. Tan, Emotion and the
Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine (New York: Taylor and Francis,
2013), 82. Another cognitivist, Carl Plantinga, largely concurs with Tan’s point but
with the caveat that spectators know they are safely removed from the screen events
because those events are fictitious, and spectators cannot change what is happening
(for Plantinga, this caveat means that the viewers’ emotions are not qualitatively
different from real-life emotions but are simply less intense). See Carl Plantinga,
Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009), 64. Elsewhere in the book Plantinga dismisses the idea that
there could be distinctly form-related “aesthetic emotions” (62).
15. According to Naum Kleiman (private correspondence with the author,
May 4, 2020), decorating movie theaters for The Battleship Potemkin was the initiative
of the Goskino Studio. The Goskino was a Soviet heir to Aleksandr Khanzhonkov’s
commercial film studio, which was known for its lavish imaginative film produc-
tions before the Russian Revolution. After the first screening at the Bolshoi Theater,
the Goskino ran Eisenstein’s film at Moscow’s most prestigious theaters, the first
Goskino theater (former Khudozhestvennyi) and the Metropole, both of which had
been a property of Khanzhonkov. In decking out their facades and commissioning
movie posters from trending constructivist designers, the Goskino was reviving a
prerevolutionary advertising tradition under the conditions of the New Economic
Policy. Although this marketing strategy may not have been Eisenstein’s personal
idea, he may have found it appropriate, given his own earlier efforts to imbue the
spectator’s space with immersive sensory prompts in theater (one of his theatrical
productions, The Mexican, had a boxing ring next to the audience; another one, Gas
Masks, was performed in an actual chemical factory). Eisenstein’s many attempts to
fuse the gap between spectacle and the spectators are discussed in Sergei Eisenstein,
“Stereocinema” (1947), trans. Sergey Levchin, Public: Art, Culture, Ideas 24, no. 47
(2013): 42.
16. Sergei Eisenstein, “Kinoforma: Novye problemy (iz doklada na Tvorches-
kom soveshchanii 1935 goda),” in Metod, Vol. 1, ed. Naum Kleiman (Moscow:
Eizenshtein-Tsentr, 2002), 149. Intriguingly, contemporary brain research suggests
that incarnating a character alters the patterns of brain activity in actors. See Ste-
ven Brown, Peter Cockett, and Ye Yan, “The Neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: An
fMRI Study of Acting,” Royal Society Open Science, March 13, 2019, https://doi.org/
10.1098/rsos.181908.
17. Sergei Eisenstein, “Perspectives,” in Selected Works, 1:154.
18. On the correspondence between the ideological thesis of Battleship Potem-
kin (a “call for collective unity”) and cinematic structures, producing the sensory
pleasure of this primeval form of ecstatic experience, see Sergei Eisenstein, “Ob
odnom pristrastii g-na Onore de Balzaka,” in Metod, 1:306.
19. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and
the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser
(London: British Film Institute, 1990), 58. Gunning’s influential concept and its
relevance for contemporary cinema of special effects is explored in Wanda Strau-
ven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2006).
21. Sergei Eisenstein, “Plan rabot kinosektsii,” Russian State Archive of Litera-
ture and Art (RGALI) f. 923, op. 1, ed. khr.2405. Anna Toropova discovered this

70.162.51.42 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 18:28:39 UTC
document at the RGALI archive as part of her inquiry into methods of empirical
audience research in the early Soviet period. See Anna Toropova, “Probing the
Heart and Mind of the Viewer: Scientific Studies of Film and Theatre Spectators in
the Soviet Union, 1917–1936,” Slavic Review 76, no. 4 (2017): 942. For an extended
analysis of this document, see Ana Hedberg Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics: Move-
ment and Affect in Modern Literature and Film (New York: Oxford University Press,
2020), 229–33.
22. Eisenstein, “Plan rabot kinosektsii,” l.22. For the sake of clarity, I did not
acknowledge Eisenstein’s wordplay in my translation. Eisenstein’s verb for making
facial expressions, mimirovat’, may allude to the phenomenon of “mimicry” (mimi-
krirovat’), which is appropriate given the anticipated imitative reaction of the view-
ers. Eisenstein also combines two words with the same root, krupno (“large-scale” or
“gross”) as if to suggest that the scale of facial expressions would match the scale of
the shot. The Russian term for a close-up, krupnyi plan, literally means “a large-scale
shot,” like gros plan in French.
23. Sergei Eisenstein, “Stanislavskii i Loiola,” ed. Naum Kleiman, Kinovedcheskie
Zapiski 47 (2000), http://www.kinozapiski.ru/ru/article/sendvalues/384/.
24. Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics, 175–236.
25. Theodor Lipps, “Aesthetische Einfühlung,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und
Physiologie den Sinnesorgane 22 (1900): 415–16. Lipps elaborated his theory in a
series of publications, including the 1907 book Das Wissen vom fremden Ich (The
Consciousness of the Alien Ego), which Eisenstein quotes in “The Montage of Film
Attractions,” 48–49. Eisenstein’s quotation, however, is indirect: it comes from
Vladimir Bekhterev’s critique of Lipps in General Foundations of Reflexology. Vladimir
Bekhterev, Obshchie osnovy refleksologii cheloveka: Rukovodstvo k ob"ektivnomu izucheniiu
lichnosti, 4-e ed. (Moskva: Gos. Izdatel’vo, 1928), 25. Bekhterev insisted that motor
imitation does not provide privileged access to the other’s emotional state. For a
detailed analysis of the role that Lipps and Bekhterev played in Eisenstein’s concep-
tion of kinesthetic empathy, see Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics, chap. 4. On Lipps’s
theory of empathy as projection, see John Fizer, Psychologism and Psychoaesthetics: A
Historical and Critical View of Their Relations (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1981),
48–56; Giuliana Bruno, “Surface Encounters: Materiality and Empathy,” in Mirror-
Touch Synesthesia, ed. Daria Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 115.
26. First described by William Carpenter, the ideomotor effect became a topic
of interest for William James, who in turn influenced Eisenstein. On Carpenter, see
Oksana Bulgakowa, “From Expressive Movement to the ‘Basic Problem,’” in The
Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology, ed. Anton Yasnitsky, René Veer,
and Michel Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 427.
27. William James, Psychology: A Briefer Course (New York: Holt, 1892), 427.
Eisenstein cites this book extensively in his 1937 essay “Stanislavskii i Loiola.”
28. James, Psychology, 425.
29. Vladimir Bekhterev, Obshchie osnovy refleksologii cheloveka, 27.
30. L. S. Vygotsky, Psikhologiia Iskusstva (Moscow: Labirint, 2008), 259.
31. Ibid., 218.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 258.

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34. Ibid., 222.

35. Ibid., 263–64.
36. Ibid., 224.
37. Ibid., 257.
38. Ibid., 228.
39. Ibid., 260.
40. Julia Vassilieva, “Eisenstein and Cultural-Historical Theory,” in Flying
Carpet, Studies on Eisenstein and Russian Cinema in Honor of Naum Kleiman, ed. Joan
Neuberger and Antonio Somaini (Paris: Mimesis, 2017), 425.
41. Vygotsky, Psikhologiia iskusstva, 260.
42. These metaphors occur in Sergei Eisenstein, “The Problem of the Mate-
rialist Approach to Film” (1925), in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties,
trans. Julian Graffy, ed. Yuri Tsivian (Sacile: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004),
127, 128.
43. Alexander R. Luria, “Toward a General Theory of Expression (S. M.
Eisenstein the Thinker),” trans. Steven Shabad, Journal of Russian and East European
Psychology 51, no. 5–6 (2013): 202.
44. Sergei Eisenstein, “Kak delaetsia pafos?” (1929), RGALI f. 1923 op. 1 ed.
khr. 793.
45. Ibid., l.14. Julia Vassilieva has noted that Eisenstein’s view of hypnosis dif-
fers from negative associations attached to this state in the German Expressionist
culture. [Julia Vassilieva, “Eisenstein and Hypnosis,” presentation, Eisenstein Inter-
national Network Conference, Paris, October 14–16, 2019.]
46. Eisenstein, “Kak delaetsia pafos?,” l.14. For more details on Eisensetein’s
study of Zola with his students, see Sergei Eisenstein, “Diffuznoe vospriiatie,” in
Metod, 1:326–29; Sergei Eisenstein, “Dvadtsat’ opornykh kolonn,” in Neravnodush-
naia Priroda, Vol. 2, 73–114., ed. Naum Kleiman (Moscow: Eizenshtein-Tsentr, 2006).
47. Eisenstein, “Dvadstat’ opornykh kolonn,” 73–114. On the embodied
simulation of linguistic signs and literary texts, see Vittorio Gallese and George
Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-motor System in Concep-
tual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology 22, no. 3 (2005): 455–79; Guillemette
Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 2012); Arthur M. Jacobs, “Neurocognitive Poetics:
Methods and Models for Investigating the Neuronal and Cognitive-Affective Bases
of Literature Reception,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9 (2015), https://www
.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00186/full.
48. Eisenstein, “Kak delaetsia pafos?,” l.14.
49. Emma Widdis, Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917–1940
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 5.
50. Tret’iakov, cited in Widdis, Socialist Senses, 5.
51. Cf. Eisenstein’s insistence that acquiring knowledge must lead to a pro-
active contribution to society (“cognition is construction”) as well as his lambasting
of the nineteenth-century French scholar Ernest Renan’s elitist call for “a strong

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government” that would compel “the good rustics to do our share of the work while
we devote ourselves to mental speculation.” Eisenstein, “Perspectives,” 155.
52. On Proletkult’s ambitions for workers’ education, see Lynn Mally, Culture
of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1990), 162–64. On Eisenstein’s engagement with the philoso-
phy of the Proletkult’s founder, Aleksandr Bogdanov, see Mikhail Iampolski, “Ot
Proletkul’ta k Platonu: Eizenshtein i proekt smyslovoi samoorganizatsii zhizni,”
Kinovedcheskie Zapiski 89 (2009): 45–89. For a history of Eisenstein’s work in the First
Proletkult Theater and his disagreement with its leadership, see John Biggart and
Oksana Bulgakowa, “Eisenstein in the Proletkult,” in Culture as Organization in Early
Soviet Thought: Bogdanov, Eisenstein and the Proletkult, ed. Pia Tikka (Helsinki and
Espoo: Aalto University, 2016), http://crucible.org.aalto.fi/spherical.
54. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Method of Making a Workers’ Film,” in Selected
Works, 1:65. On Eisenstein’s assessment of the spectators’ associations with the
slaughtered bull, see Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of
Thinking (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 48.
55. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Fourth Dimension in Cinema,” in Selected Works,
1:182.
56. Sergei Eisenstein, “Plan rabot kinosektsii,” l.23.
57. Ibid. Eisenstein appears to evoke the German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer’s
classification of temperaments based on body types (asthenic, pyknic, athletic).
In his Medical Psychology (Medizinische Psychologie, 1922; Russian translation, 1927),
Kretschmer suggested that the functioning of the hormonal system influences
individual body type and temperament, or the “psychic tempo,” manifested in the
quickness and intensity of sensual and intellectual reactions and in “psychomotor”
parameters, such as the character and rhythm of the individual’s movements. See
Ernst Kretschmer, Meditsinskaia psikhologiia, ed. V. A. Lukov (St. Petersburg: Soiuz,
1998), 244. Eisenstein’s interest in exploring a connection between bodily motion
and character persisted throughout the 1930s–1940s in essays that consider hand-
writing, line drawing, gait, and even chiromancy. Passages from Krechmer’s Medical
Psychology dealing with topics such as the formation of motor habits in animals and
protozoans, erratic motions of panicked animals and hysterical patients, and the
influence of musical rhythm on the psychomotor apparatus undergird Eisenstein’s
exploration of the “pra-logical level” of consciousness, “diffused” perception, and
nonverbal aspects of the “inner speech.” See Sergei Eisenstein, Metod, 1:82–85,
195–97, 216–18. The director wrote notes in the margins of Kretschmer’s book that
he owned, particularly in a chapter describing the decomposition of thought into
discrete images in schizophrenia, which inspired the filmmaker’s reflections on
intellectual montage and abstract geometry. See Viacheslav Ivanov, Izbrannye trudy
po semiotike i istorii kul'tury, Vol. 1 (Moskva: Iazyki russkoii kul'tury, 1999), 288. See
also Eisenstein, Metod, 1: 84; Sergei Eisenstein, Metod, Vol. 2, ed. Naum Kleiman
(Moscow: Eizenshtein Tsentr, 2002), 410, 415, 435, 454, and 497.
58. Eisenstein, “Plan rabot kinosektsii,” l.23.
59. Giuseppe di Pellegrino, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, Vittorio Gal-
lese, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Understanding Motor Events: A Neuro-Physiological
Study,” Experimental Brain Research 91 (1992):176–80.

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60. Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, and Giacomo Riz-
zolatti, “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119 (1996): 593–609,
661. See also Giacomo Rizzolatti, Luciano Fadiga, Vittorio Gallese, and Leonardo
Fogassi, “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions,” Cognitive Brain
Research 3 (1996): 131–41.
61. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System,”
Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–92.
62. On the issue of difference between animals’ and humans’ brains, see Greg-
ory Hickok, “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understand-
ing in Monkeys and Humans,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21, no. 7 (2008): 1234.
Representative papers on the human mirror system include Luigi Cattaneo, Marco
Sandrini, and Jens Volkmar Schwarzbach, “State-Dependent TMS Reveals a Hier-
archical Representation of Observed Acts in the Temporal, Parietal, and Premotor
Cortices,” Cerebal Cortex 20 (2010): 2252–58; Cosimo Urgesi, Marta Maieron, Alessio
Avenanti, Emmanuele Tidoni, Franco Fabbro, and Salvatore Maria Aglioti, “Simu-
lating the Future of Actions in the Human Corticospinal System,” Cerebral Cortex 20
(2010): 2511–21; Alessio Avenanti, Matteo Candini, and Cosimo Urgesi, “Vicarious
Motor Activation during Action Perception: Beyond Correlational Evidence,” Fron-
tiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013), https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00185.
63. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, “The Functional Role of the
Parieto-Frontal Mirror Circuit: Interpretations and Misinterpretations,” Nature
Reviews Neuroscience 11 (2010): 271.
64. Lindsay M. Oberman, Edward M. Hubbard, Joseph P. McCleery, Eric L.
Altschuler, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, and Jaime A. Pineda, “EEG Evidence for
Mirror Neuron Dysfunction in Autism Spectrum Disorders,” Cognitive Brain Research
24 (2005): 190–91. For a critical review, see Hickok, “Eight Problems for the Mirror
Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans,” 1234.
65. Olaf Hauk, Ingrid Johnsrude, and Friedemann Pulvermuller, “Somatotopic
Representation of Action Words in Human Motor and Premotor Cortex,” Neuron
41 (2004): 301. For a critical review pointing out that this study has found only a
partial overlap between the areas activated during reading and the somatotopic
motor effectors, responsible for initiating specific actions, see Alfonso Caramazza,
Stefano Anzellotti, Lukas Strnad, and Angelika Lingnau, “Embodied Cognition and
Mirror Neurons: A Critical Assessment,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 37 (2014): 4.
66. W. Kyle Simmons, Vimal Ramjee, Michael S. Beauchamp, Ken McRae, Alex
Martin, and Lawrence W. Barsalou, “A Common Neural Substrate for Perceiving
and Knowing about Color,” Neuropsychologia 45 (2007): 2802–10.
67. Hickok, “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Under-
standing in Monkeys and Humans,” 1237. On the limitations of the mirror-neuron
theory for explaining social emotions, empathy, and autism disorders, see ibid.,
1234. On the dissociation between color knowledge and color perception posing
a challenge to the theory of sensory reenactment, see Caramazza et al., “Embodied
Cognition and Mirror Neurons,” 4.
68. Howard Poizner, Edward S. Klima, and Ursula Bellugi, What the Hands
Reveal about the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 77. Cited by Hickok,
“Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Mon-
keys and Humans,” 1237.
69. Caramazza et al., “Embodied Cognition and Mirror Neurons,” 11.

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70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. Eisenstein, “The Fourth Dimension in Cinema,” 190–91.
73. Hickok, “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Under-
standing in Monkeys and Humans,” 1236.
74. Caroline Catmur, Vincent Walsh, and Cecilia Heyes, “Sensorimotor Learn-
ing Configures the Human Mirror System,” Current Biology 17 (2007): 1527.
75. Vassilieva, “Eisenstein and Cultural-Historical Theory,” 424.
76. See Albert Newen, Leon de Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher, eds., The Oxford
Handbook of 4E Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Antonio Dama-
sio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994).
77. Mark Johnson, “The Embodiment of Language,” in The Oxford Handbook of
4E Cognition, 636. See also B. C. Smith, “Situatedness/Embeddedness,” in The MIT
Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. R.A. Wilson and F.C. Keil (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1999), 769–70; Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and
Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Andy Clark and David
Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58 (1998): 10–23.
78. Steffen Hven, “Sulla possibilità di una narratologia incarnata e antropome-
diale,” Fata Morgana 31 (2017): 201.
79. Ibid., 202.
80. Ibid. In this statement, Hven adopts his definition of enactive cognition
from Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind:
Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 9.
81. Hven, “Sulla possibilità di una narratologia incarnata e antropomediale,”
207.
82. Sergei Eisenstein, “Avtor i ego tema,” in Metod, 1:239.
83. Ibid.
84. Irina Schulzki, “’The Underlying Gesture’: Towards the Notion of Gesture
in Jean d’Udine and Sergei Eisenstein,” in From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and
New Media, ed. Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina, and Valentina Valente
(Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 102–15; Yuri Tsivian, Na
podstupakh k karpalistike: Dvizhenie i zhest v literature, iskusstve i kino (Moscow: Novoe
Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2010). According to Schulzki, Eisenstein believed that
bodily movement and other forms of dynamic expression imagined by the artist are
an embryo to be actualized in the audiovisual image. These gestures, or pathways,
aim to activate the sensorimotor simulation processes in the viewers. In contrast,
Tsivian argues that Eisenstein’s gestures are self-aware signposts that bring hetero-
geneous layers of material (levels of symbolic and sensual interpretation) into a
focal synthesis.
85. Antunes, The Multisensory Film Experience, 37.
86. Ibid., 38.
87. Ibid., 79.

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88. Ibid., 36. For a remarkable analysis of Eisenstein’s approach to sound in

October and other films, see Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Mon-
tage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011).
89. Antunes, The Multisensory Film Experience, 36.
90. On Eisenstein’s theory of synesthesia in relation to Vygotsky and Luria, see
Julia Vassilieva, “The Eisenstein-Vygotsky-Luria Collaboration: Triangulation and
Third Culture Debates,” Projections 13, no. 1 (2019): 39.
91. Sergei Eisenstein, “Diffuznoe vospriiatie,” 1:324 (emphasis in the origi-
nal). A comprehensive introduction to this theory is offered in V. V. Ivanov, “The
Grundproblem in the Theory of Art,” trans. Steven Shabad, Journal of Russian &
East European Psychology 51, no. 5–6 (2013): 179–91.
92. For a sustained analysis of Eisenstein’s notion of “sensory thinking” and
its sources, see Elena Vogman, Sinnliches Denken: Eisensteins Exzentrische Methode
(Zürich: Diaphanes, 2018); Marie Rebecchi and Elena Vogman, Sergei Eisenstein and
the Anthropology of Rhythm (Rome: Nero, 2017).
93. Eisenstein, “Diffuznoe vospriiatie,” 1:323.
94. Ibid.
95. Sergei Eisenstein, “Misteriia tsirka. Struktura kak siuzhet,” in Metod, 1:436.
96. Viacheslav Ivanov, Izbrannye Trudy Po Semiotike i Istorii Kul'tury: Tom 1
(Moskva: Iazyki russkoi kul'tury, 1998), 212.
97. Vassilieva, “The Eisenstein-Vygotsky-Luria Collaboration,” 35.
98. Ibid., 39.

70.162.51.42 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 18:28:39 UTC

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Sergei Eisenstein, Neurocinematics,

and Embodied Cognition:

Ana Hedberg Olenina

Discourse, 43.3, Fall 2021, pp. 351–382.

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Sergei Eisenstein’s famous assertion that the spectator is the end-

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My contention is that Eisenstein’s approach is at once more pro-

Immersion, Simulation, and the “Art versus Life” Debate

Belodubrovskaya’s 2018 essay explaining Sergei Eisenstein’s theory

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he were aiming straight at the camera, provided stand-alone thrills

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a crucial element of Eisenstein’s ﬁlm theory, it is misleading to say

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Figure 1. A climactic moment in the drama The Battleship

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of the organization of thought is in actual fact the ‘content’ of a

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Eisenstein’s Psychological Sources and the

With regard to theorizing the psychophysiological underpinning of

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Theodor Lipps’s turn-of-the-century theory of empathy (Ein-

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acquired behavioral patterns, that is, algorithms of engaging with

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according to Vygotsky, misses the point: what people seek in art is

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situated character, shaped by the perceiver’s life experience and

Spectators’ Agency, Autonomy, and the Dynamic Interaction

Despite his infamous metaphors of cinema as a “ﬁst” and “a trac-

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of his approach highlights the audience’s sensory simulation of the

We put our question bluntly:

What is striking about this methodology is Eisenstein’s duality with

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subconscious kinesthetic empathy to identify the dynamic value

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massacred demonstration in Strike (1925) puzzled peasant specta-

Eisenstein and Debates over the Mirror Neurons Theory

First identiﬁed in macaques, mirror neurons are neural networks

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cognition. Researchers have documented the activation of the

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processes that occur in other nonsensorimotor neural networks,

Cinematic Narrative from the Standpoint of

A comprehensive reevaluation of Eisenstein’s perspective on em-

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always coupled with emotions.76 Discussions of Eisenstein’s theory

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to exert a formative inﬂuence on Eisenstein, inspiring him to dig

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gaged in the abstract-symbolic appraisal, it is instructive to con-

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sound only symbolically, does produce a strong kinesthetic effect,

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means of inducing these unusual modes of perception and allow-

Despite the exceptional promise of the mirror neuron theory for

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Further, while the mirror neuron theory covers the “embodied”

1. Luis Rocha Antunes, The Multisensory Film Experience: A Cognitive Model of

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