Saturday, September 21, 2024, from 6-9pm
S. M. Eisenstein: Complete Works
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
S.M. Eisenstein: Complete Works, 120 35mm black-and-white and color slides (135 format), 1969, continuous projection
At the end of the 1960s, the Paris-based magazine L’Avant-Scène du Cinéma debuted a series of publications on major film directors with an unusual form: boxed sets of photographic slides, 120 per filmmaker, in cases designed like reference volumes with imitation-leather bindings, so each could be seamlessly displayed on a library shelf. The first two sets released were devoted to the complete films of Eisenstein and Jean Renoir; later volumes would focus on the oeuvres of Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel. Rather than compiling previously-published press images—typically the carefully-staged products of on-set photographers—L’Avant-Scène’s albums were reproductions of single frames from original 35mm prints. Not only did this result in collections of images found nowhere else, it also meant that many slides retained visible traces of motion blur, enhancing the sense that the viewer was studying fragments of the films themselves.
The series introduced the study of film into the expanding market for multimedia education, with a format that allowed for large-scale projection in lecture halls, film clubs, libraries, and private homes. “The true subscribers of this portable cinematheque, a totally original initiative,” a reviewer for L’Express observed, will be “all those who have long deplored the verbal evocation of invisible masterpieces.” In the United States, the series was quickly snapped up for release by Grove Press, which at that point was not only one of the most important publishers of radical literature in America, but a leading distributor of international cinema, a company that owner Barney Rosset proudly envisioned as a “new kind of communications center of the Sixties.”
Today, these slides have survived as rare but seemingly obsolete objects, long ago superseded by videotape and digital images. Few libraries and collections around the world have retained them; the copy we will be showcasing tonight was carefully restored by hand from an original edition that had nearly fallen apart with the ungluing of time. Notably, less than a year after the initial release of S.M. Eisenstein: Œuvres complètes, Roland Barthes published his essay “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills” in Cahiers du cinéma, offering an extended rumination on the value of encountering motion pictures through fixed photographs. Here Barthes argues, provocatively and paradoxically, that some vital quality of the filmic cannot be understood through moving images themselves, but is best comprehended through stills:
For written texts—unless they are extremely conventional, utterly committed to the logico-temporal order—the reading time is free; for the film, it is not, since the image cannot proceed either faster or slower, without losing its perceptual figure. The still, by instituting a reading which is at once instantaneous and vertical, flouts logical time (which is only an operative time); it teaches us to dissociate technological constraint (the film's projection) from the authentically filmic, which is the “indescribable” meaning. Perhaps it is this other text (here derived from stills) whose reading Eisenstein called for when he said that the film must not be simply looked at and listened to, but that it must be studied by eye and ear alike. Such seeing and hearing does not postulate, of course, a simple application of the mind (which would be no more than a banal requirement, a pious hope), but rather an authentic transformation of reading and its object, text or film: a major problem of our time.
Our presentation will feature two carousels, looping continuously, each with 60 slides arranged chronologically. Visitors are invited to come and go as they please. The concessions stand will be open throughout.
FREE