6533b82ffe1ef96bd1295118

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Montage and Spectator: Eisenstein and the Avant-Garde

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We could say that the avant-garde at the beginning of the century received the advent of cinema enthusiastically; that is not strange. Though the differences between groups, movements, works, or acts that are included under this arrogant name are sometimes too vast, there was a similar project — or group of projects — whose aim was to proclaim the crisis of a homogeneous world, born in the humanism of the Renaissance and validated in the Age of Enlightenment . Cinema thus became a suitable space for attacking and criticizing the artistic and cultural tradition. We can enumerate briefly some reasons for this attitude. First, cinema was one of the less 'artistic' forms of art, so to speak. Cinema was a modality placed in a field that was historically nearer to the development of the productive forces; in this way, it reestablished the old link between art and production by means of technique. Furthermore, this took place under a precise form of production (industry) that demonstrates the rupture with a characteristic bourgeois idea — the autonomy of art (Burger 1984). Secondly, cinema revealed a high degree of mechanical reproduction. In its mechanism the loss of aura', whose beginnings were discovered by Walter Benjamin (1969) in the invention of the printing press and later in the general use of photography in the last two thirds of the nineteenth century, was definitively accomplished. The consequences of this loss — the end of the condition that links the artistic work with cult and ritual — were also pointed out in Baudelaire's poetry and criticism. In spite of his criticism of photography, Baudelaire's critical and poetic output showed the impossibility of artistic autonomy and its new status within modernity. Later, Adorno also found in cinema a 'suspicious' presence of these artistic auratic elements, but in any case cinema itself was the coup de grace to the sacred basis of art. Thirdly, the destruction of the rational subject, the guarantor of a