Lesson 6

Another experience that took place in the same years was that of the art magazine
"Documents", directed by Georges Bataille in Paris in the two-year period 1929-1930.
On the pages of "Documents" many artists of Surrealism find expression and also
Ejzenstejn who in the fourth issue of the magazine, in 1930, gives 30 frames of a film
he is shooting, The General Line,and which will be released with the title The old and the
new in a version censored by Stalin, a complex film that represents the extreme
synthesis of Ejzenstejn's theories on editing.
Within the magazine that, as the subtitle says, deals with archeology, fine arts,
ethnography and variety, there is a section dedicated to the critical dictionary, in which
the authors choose a lemma and build a path of meaning. In the critical dictionary the
terms chosen by the editorial staff are deconstructed, they come out of abstract
language to take shape and have a concrete meaning. The aim is to promote a
polysemic, metaphorical language, open to the movement of words, against the static
and logical nature of language, especially of academic language, whose purpose was to
attribute to the world a rational reason. We want to renegotiate the meaning of words
to show how language is not a form of government of the world, but is something that
belongs to it and belongs to all that affective, attractive, passionate potential of which
the world is made. The concept chosen by Bataille, and which will then represent the
fil rouge of his interventions, is "shapeless". The term "formless" means to downgrade
the meaning of words, that is, their abstract form. The strength of words consists in
their ability to arouse emotions, to trigger forms of intensity, to unleash pathos and all
this goes beyond the scholastic meaning of the terms. We want to bring out irrational
elements, underlying the meaning, the active and instinctive dimension of words. This
emerges clearly in the sense attributed to the word "shapeless". Formless is not what
has no form, it is not what is in things, but it is a form of relationship that binds us to
things. The forms are not denied, but are downgraded by the ontological status that
has been attributed to them. It is, that of Bataille, an anti-idealist vision in favor of a
realistic approach: a revaluation of the low, shapeless aspect of reality. The formless is
not just a word but it is a perspective of investigation on the world, it becomes a
structural process of deconstruction of forms, a continuous movement that introduces
the dissomiglianza of form from itself. It is the coming-and-going from the form, the
turning it from the inside, originating a transgression from the form. All this will flow
into what he calls heterology, that is, a science that studies the world of the other, the
waste of aesthetic, social and political systems, everything that comes out of the norm,
impure, cursed, extreme, etc. Only this movement from top to bottom, from the ideal
to the real, is able to bring out the new form, underlying every simple
phenomenological form, an affective and emotional potential implicit in every form.
"Documents" comes with a very rich image appendix, as extensive as the written text.
The iconographies not only take into account the history of aestheticizing art, but also
the minor arts. The textual part, the most theoretical, within which the critical
dictionary is also contemplated, is to be considered pars destruens,that is, the
desecrating part towards the classical conception of art, of aesthetic idealism. The
iconographic apparatus (photographs and drawings) constitutes the pars construens,in
which the authors of the magazine propose their own reading of art. Visual fragments
rise to the status of documents that bear witness to something, hence the title
"Documents". The iconographic cut, sometimes surprising, runs parallel to the path
towards the formless. The images deconstruct the form to bring it to the bottom, to
materiality, arriving, on this road, to the empathic dimension.

These three images, by the surrealist photographer Jacques-André Boiffard,

accompany the article "The big toe" by Bataille and illustrate what Bataille himself said
theoretically. The captions identify the subject (male/female, age) who is not
photographed. This minimal portion of the body is renegotiated as if it were a portrait,
that is, it is immortalized as if it were a human face both in size and in black
background: a "low" part is shown through the portrait mode and the big toe thus
becomes an enormity. It abandons the classic aesthetic, but also the vertical vision of
reality, says Bataille. Faced with an image of this type, the viewer is forced to make an
effort to reorient his gaze, to abandon the vertical approach that looks towards the sky
to lower the eye to a low and concrete level, where the form is no longer ideal and
abstract, but concrete and real. These "lacerating" images are opposed to an "iron
rational construction".
Regnault in his nineteenth-century treatise, entitled Les écarts de la nature, reports
these drawings that depict abnormal and deformed beings. Inserting these images in
the essay The waste of nature within "Documents" highlights the reflection on
everything that exceeds the normal size.
In The Language of Flowers, even flowers, in their passage from life to death, show
exaggerated, excessive forms.
Among all these images there is no rational link explained, so much so that they belong
to three different essays; however, within this iconographic structure forms of
recursiveness are created that have to do with the relationship that the viewer places
in front of these images.
Between the pages of the magazine appears a table taken from the atlas of Aby
Warburg, composed between '24 and '29 and left unfinished due to his premature
death. The atlas proposes a history of art without text, made of pure images: it consists
of tables in which images that belong to a wide and differentiated temporal
chronology are juxtaposed in order to create a strong heterogeneity, also for support
(paintings, photographs, sculptures). Different images are recalled according to a
symbolic procedure that is that of pathosformel. Each table corresponds to a formula
of pathos that was born in antiquity and survives through time in different forms. For
example, the table that appears on "Documents" is dedicated to the figure of the
nymph. The gaze does not fall on the single form, but on the relationships that are
established between the forms.
Ejzenstejn came into contact with the group of "Documents" when, in 1930, he came
to France to give a lecture at the Sorbonne which was entitled Methods of
cinematographic expression compared with the methods of expression of the other
arts. At this chronological height the Russian director is certainly known in the Parisian
context and his theories on editing are known. During the conference the release of his
new film, The General Line, was announced, which was supposed to be screened at the
end of the conference, but, due to the police raid, is not screened in Paris. Some
scenes will be censored and the title will be changed to The Old and the New because of
some sequences that seemed to have a critical attitude towards technological progress
in the Russian countryside, in which the class struggle between the kulaks, affiliated
with the power, and the working peasants is inserted. As in other films by the director,
there is a figure of woman protagonist, Marfa. The failure of the conference does not
bring down Ejzenstejn who gives "Documents" the frames of the new film. The editing
of the frames that is carried out on the two pages of the magazine is very reminiscent
of the editing that is seen in the film. It combines heterogeneous images capable of
producing unusual and disconcerting relationships: human faces, bodies, backs of
animals, details and disproportionate close-ups. This type of images does not differ
much from the images that return to the iconographic apparatus of the magazine,
there is a strong continuity. The images do not illustrate the texts, they are not a
classical appendix classically thought, but between them they build universes, a
geography of reference points. Ejzenstejn's plates closely recall those of Aby Warburg.
For the latter pathosformel is "a polar and energetic formula that migrates through
history materializing in figures of opposite sign or in any case profoundly
heterogeneous, as in the various incarnations of the figure of the nymph that we find
unfolded in history or as in those cases in which the same formula of pathos is
manifested first in a pagan image and then in a Christian one, for example, from a
furious menade to a sorrowful Magdalene". In the frames of Ejzenstejn the close-ups
are taken at an extreme proximity and appear deformed by the grimace that the
characters make. They are re-proposed, in the editing, in the screams of the animals
that follow them. The shots taken from different angles are reminiscent of the images
that appear within "Documents", such as Man Ray's Anatomies. It is always a close-up
in which, however, we must redefine our point of view. The photo leads us to
downgrade the foreground to another form in which we and our point of view are

questioned.
In Ejzenstejn one experiments with the downgraded form. To enter into a relationship
with the world, with the pathetic dimension, it is necessary to go beyond the idea of
form and against a linear history. The Old and the New tells how the class struggle
survives beyond the historical context, which, like a karst river, emerges from time to
time.
Paul Valéry in an essay dedicated to the work of Degas Del suolo e dell'informe (1936)
pauses to admire the floors on which the dancers loved by the painter dance and
reflects on the formless. "I sometimes thought of the shapeless. There are things,
spots, masses, contours, volumes, which have, in some way, only a de facto existence:
they are only perceived by us, but not known; we cannot reduce them to a single law,
deduce their whole from the analysis of one of their parts, reconstruct them with
logical operations. To say that they are formless things means not that they have no
forms, but that their forms do not find in us anything that allows us to replace them
with an act of definition or sure recognition. And, indeed, the shapeless forms leave no
other memory than that of a possibility ...". These forms are not known to us and we
cannot do that logical operation that allows us to replace them with an act of
definition. In fact, we would have a hard time captioning Man Ray's photograph. From
the portrait we must downgrade ourselves, we must enter into a horizon of different
meaning. The same goes for Boiffard's images.
Rosalind Krauss, a great theorist of photography, retraces this surrealist photographic
period and devotes particular attention to the formless. According to Krauss, these
photographs are born from the strange relationships they have with the viewer,
arousing a necessary request for repositioning of the viewer to understand their
meaning. Twisting the body, filming part of the body, disproportionate close-ups are
ways in which photographers manage to capture what Bataille would call shapeless.
Our vertical gaze that raises our eyes upwards is pre-conditioned by a taxonomy of
values that Bataille invites us to put back into play.
The low materialism returns in the photo At the slaughterhouse of the Villette. The
slaughterhouse is a low element that also returns in the Ejzenstejn Strike, in which it is
compared to the massacre of the workers. The fourteen pairs of bovine legs lined up
outside the slaughterhouse are associated with the legs of the fox follies dancers.
Beyond the obvious figurative analogy (the legs of the dancers as the legs of the
animals), unusual photographic cuts coexist, as indeed in the previous photos. In the
photo outside the slaughterhouse the dark left wall acts as a scenic backdrop, as in the
photo of the dancers the curtain falls obscuring the upper half. These two images
coexist on the same pages creating alienating referral games with one another. This
type of images allows you to mediate between rationality and symbolism, says Bataille,
they suggest something beyond that is realized in the conflict between one image and
another. It is a truly ejzenstejnian montage. Already in the single image, the same
framing and frame there are different levels and, therefore, the image is polysemic, it
is already a montage, it is already an aggregate of meaning. Every form of pathos
exceeds the sense, has a set of senses. Already the framing is an editing cell as it is
saturated with meanings and significant elements.

WATCH THE FIRST PART OF THE FILM THE OLD AND THE NEW
The first part defines the context of action of the film in which the figure of Marfa is
detached as the protagonist of the story that then continues. This is the choral,
collective act. The sequences of the procession and the skimming machine have more
to do with the shapeless theorized by Bataille.