The Total Art of Eisenstein: The Ideology Behind The old and the New
Lo viejo y lo nuevo | Sergei Eisenstein | 1929
Tomás Viera

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Abstract

The history behind early Soviet cinema has fascinated Western scholars for decades. Conflicting accounts of unpublished scripts and censorship by the Communist Party have prompted detailed discussions on the limits imposed by the young Stalinist regime over the members of cultural vanguards. However, these debates occlude the larger problem of how the works produced by artists such as Sergei Eisenstein expressed the ideological tensions of a social system that was struggling to find a fitting balance between democracy and authority, between experimentation and order. Our study analyzes the 1929 film The old and the new, with the aim of exploring how these same tensions could manifest themselves well beyond the apparently opposed interests of art and politics. With this objective, we make use of the Lacanian theory of the unconscious, which allows us to analyze the duality of behaviors that can be manifested from within a single discursive subject.

Keywords: Soviet Union | Sergei Eisenstein | cinema | ideology | Stalinism

This article is, for the time being, only available in Spanish: El arte total de Eisenstein: la ideología detrás de Lo viejo y lo nuevo


NOTAS



Volumen 13 | Nº 2

JULY 2023
July 2023 - Octuber 2023

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