Art history as Janus : Sergei Eisenstein on the visual arts

My dissertation deals with the connection between cinema and art history, and their respective ways of looking upon artworks, exemplified by the writings of Sergei Eisenstein (18981948) on the visual arts. In the first part of my work, I focus on four of Eisenstein’s texts dealing with three painters he considers cinematic: “Yermolova” (1937) studying Valentin Serov’s portrait of Maria Yermolova, “El Greco” ( 1937) and “El Greco y el Cine” (written between 1939 and 1941) considering the Cretan painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos, and lastly “Piranesi or the Fluidity of Form” (undated, presumably 1947) analyzing Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings. Eisenstein reads in the present, artworks taken from the past, in order to reimagine them in the future through cinema. It is this tension that I expose by reshaping the content of these articles around key concepts or around the paintings constitutive of Eisenstein’s arguments, which I scrutinize in the context of his own film theory. I also provide a parallel art historical interpretation to them. In the second part of my work, I examine Eisenstein’s art historical sources, highlighting the extent of his reliance on Hugo Kehrer, Albert Giesecke, and JeanMartin Charcot. I outline the circulation of ideas between them, and how they impact his overall approach to the visual arts and his conceptualization of the presence of compositional factors that enable the operation of cinema in static media.