Art history as Janus: Sergei Eisenstein on the visual arts

My dissertation deals with the connection betweencinema and art history, and their respective ways of lookingupon 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’stexts dealing with three painters he considers cinematic:“Yermolova” (1937) studying Valentin Serov’s portrait of MariaYermolova, “El Greco” ( 1937) and “El Greco y el Cine” (writtenbetween 1939 and 1941) considering the Cretan painterDoménikos Theotokópoulos, and lastly “Piranesi or the Fluidityof Form” (undated, presumably 1947) analyzing GiovanniBattista Piranesi’s etchings. Eisenstein reads in the present,artworks taken from the past, in order to reimaginethem in thefuture through cinema. It is this tension that I expose byreshaping the content of these articles around key concepts oraround the paintings constitutive of Eisenstein’s arguments,which I scrutinize in the context of his own film theory. I alsoprovide a parallel art historical interpretation to them.In the second part of my work, I examine Eisenstein’s arthistorical sources, highlighting the extent of his reliance on HugoKehrer, Albert Giesecke, and JeanMartinCharcot. I outline thecirculation of ideas between them, and how they impact hisoverall approach to the visual arts and his conceptualization ofthe presence of compositional factors that enable the operation ofcinema in static media.