Film in the House of the Word

In 1928 Sergei Eisenstein published a brief manifesto on film sound that has met with no direct critique or reply in more than half a century. In his statement, written within a euphoric moment of convergence between theory and practice that gave us October and General Line, and suggested to him the grand project of an Eisenstein began an effort that precipitated in a group of empty centers and their satellite notes and essays: the hypothetical cinematic realizations of three written texts-An American Tragedy, Ulysses, and Capital. Eisenstein himself, under the extreme pressures of the Stalinist restoration, largely abandoned his research into intellectual montage for extended meditations on synaesthesia, the microstructure of the frame, and the architectonics of film narrative, in a resurrection of the quest for a fusion of the arts; the man who directed a production of Die Walkiire in Moscow must have seen, in the musical drama of Wagner, a prefiguration of some of film's boldest ambitions. These ambitions still obtain; that research, advanced by Vertov, has never entirely languished. The dream of a sound film has come true ... whole world is talking about the silent thing that has learned to talk. Eisenstein awakened to the factualization of desire with surprised ambivalence, as if discovering the Silent Thing to have been carved by Pygmalion-for film, perennially associated with music, had never been generically silent. It had been mute, once an apprentice mime in a precinematic (and prelinguistic) theater, now a journeyman aspiring to an intricate mimesis of thought, to whose construction a sound-on-film technology was as vital as cinematography itself. It was not simply sound, then, that threatened to destroy all the formal achievements of montage, but the dubious gift of speech, the Prime Instance of language, the linear decoding of the terrain of thought into a stream of utterance. Thus film, from its first word, was to be perceived in a double posture of defilement and fulfillment, and Eisenstein found himself present at a rite of passage; the end of the Edenic childhood of montage was accompanied by a wistful vision of fading virginity and purity. syndrome of logophobia has been pandemic throughout recent practice

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