Page 138 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 138/146
Sergei Eisenstein: A Sequence from Alexander Nevsky 1943.
Sergei Eisenstein’s meticulous analysis of a sequence from his film Alexander Nevsky (1938) cor- relates shot-frames, musical measures, camera movement, and viewer’s eye movement, in the famous ‘Battle on the Ice’ sequence from the film about the mediaeval Russian national hero, es- tablishing Eisenstein’s thesis of the correlation or ‘complete correspondence of the movement of the music and the movement of the eye over the lines of the plastic composition’. I discovered this fascinating diagram as a gatefold bound into Eisenstein’s 1943 book The Film Sense. It is a further example of his consideration of film as a total or composite medium, and of his constructivist ap- proach to film-making. This meant to me that Eisenstein was searching for an algorithmic ap- proach to the multimedia, synaesthetic, immersive - and soon to be interactive art of the later 20th century, and the ‘total’ art works that would be the norm in the 21st century - art-forms that utilised the best in mono-media art, but brought all these other factors together. The diagram even looks
like the interface for video-editing software!
https://mediainspiratorium.com/1940-1950/
It was with great joy that I discovered this art-paper printed gatefold in Eisenstein's The Film Sense - a 1943 edition, that looked too wartime austerity to have such an insert. Eisenstein was trained as an engineer, and I admired the way he had dissected this sequence from his famous film Alexander Nevsky, which I first saw at art college in Portsmouth in about 1964 - the deep mys- teries and scheming of the Russian Orthodox priesthood, the panoramic battle on the ice, the vic- tory of Nevsky - all these fragments seared themselves on my brain. Discovering this diagram in the 1980s - I was able to use it in my book Understanding Hypermedia (1993) - brought Eisen- stein's film back to me with a jolt. I've used his meticulous analysis in lectures on story-boarding, pre-visualization and hypermedia authoring.
The artists exploring this emerging techno-aesthetic were often, like Eisenstein, those who had authored the first wave of modernist aesthetics in the 1920s - the pioneers of the Bauhaus, the Russian Constructivists, the Dutch De Stijl group. I want to focus here on just a few examples, not directly related to photography, but thinkers whose reformulation of what modernist design is, re- verberated through the rest of the 20th century, and laid the foundations for the convergent digital media of the 21st. The New Bauhaus artist/designer/photographer György Kepes, the influential modernist polymath Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, the Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, the American architect-engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller, the American design historian Siegfried Gideon, the poet and film-maker Jean Cocteau, the Scottish-Italian artists Eduardo Paolozzi, the ex- Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer - just a few of the inspirational media-artists who intimated through their work the direction of the avant garde towards the new media of networks, digital, in- teraction, immersion, and multimedia - towards the kind of media ecosystem we enjoy now.