Ill. 1. Sergei M.

Eisenstein, schematic
sketch of the Carcere oscura con
antenna pel suplizia de malfatori (Dark
prison with scaffolding for the torture
of evildoers). From Giovanni Battista

Piranesi, Prima parte di architteture e

prospettive, .
[Eisenstein, ber Kunst und Knstler, p. ,
puEl. in Manfredo 7afuri, The Sphere and
the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture

from Piranesi to the 1970s (CamEridge, M$

M,7 Press, ), plate , p. .@

Eisensteins Piranesi and Cinematic Space

Steven Jacobs

Piranesi and Pre-Cinema

Some of the most striking characteristics of Piranesis works can easily be labeled
as cinematic. Full of whimsical details and effortlessly redolent of light and
atmosphere, his etchings seem to evoke for the modern viewer a lm screen under
the ickering light of a movie proMector. Moreover, his predilection for crossing
diagonals, the privileging of the angular over the frontal perspective, and the
multiplicity of vanishing points give his prints a sense of motion the essence
of the lm medium. ,n addition, Piranesis etchings are based on a spatial layout
and framing, which acknowledge and even emphasize a montage-like combination
of discontinuous fragments. Piranesis images thus trigger a kind of mobile gaze,
which plays perfectly on shifting perspectives and on dramatic contrasts between
close details and distant spaces.
$part from their proto-cinematic associations, all of these Tualities contribute to
the unmistakably dramatic character of his works. If Piranesi is to be considered
a precursor of lm, he pregures a spectacular kind of cinema realized in
breathtaking cinemascope, glorious Technicolor, and stereophonic sound. Piranesi,
in short, turns architecture into spectacle. Given this perspective, it is worthwhile
to mention here that Piranesis early biographers connect him with the Valeriani
brothers and the Bibiena family, the leading scenographic designers of the period.1
The oblique perspectives of Ferdinando Galli-Bibienas scene vedute in angolo, which


1. Nicolas Penny, Piranesi, London,

Bloomsbury Books, 1978; p.5.

created an illusion of depth in small theaters, proved to be important for Piranesi,

who would become a master of spaces that evoke movement.
It is in this context that Piranesi is mentioned in Anne Hollanders fascinating book
on the interconnections between painting, prints, and lm. After discussing the
importance of the Bibiena inventions for early Italian cinema and D. :. Grifth,
she deals with Piranesi, to whom the modern movie-loving world so deeply
responds.2 Hollander notices the suggestion of a screen of ickering atmosphere
and the effect of a painted veil lit from behind the same paradigm that makes,
in her words, the movies so psychologically penetrating.

Eisenstein and the Visualization of Movement

2. Anne Hollander, Moving Pictures,

Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,
1991; p.21.
. Ibidem, p.22.
4. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film
Theories: An Introduction, London, Oxford
University Press, 1976; p. 42.
5. Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei
Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking, London,
Tauris Books, 2; p.1.

First and foremost, however, Piranesis association with cinema goes back to the
Soviet lmmaker Sergei M. Eisenstein (1898-1948), whose oeuvre includes such
lms as Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1927), Old and New (aka
The General Line, 1929), Alexander Nevsky (198), Ivan the Terrible (1944/48) and a
vast collection of unrealized and unnished proMects. In addition, Eisenstein was a
prominent lm theorist and a prolic writer, who wrote seminal essays throughout
the 192s, 19s and 194s during which he developed an elaborate theory of
montage his notion of montage also plays an important role in his intriguing
reections on Piranesi. Eisensteins fascination with Piranesi was part of his
highly eclectic way of thinking. According to Dudley Andrew, Eisenstein was
temperamentally unable to deduce a lm theory from a rmly held philosophy,
and he cluttered up his theoretical research with massive amounts of arcane
data culled from a lifetime of scattered reading in at least four languages.4 As
Anne Nesbet opens her monograph tellingly entitled Savage Junctures, Eisenstein
delighted in unlikely Muxtapositions he was apt to cite from Stalin and :alt Disney
in the same breath.5 His mode of writing is characterized by meanders, abrupt
digressions, joyful paradoxes and oxymorons, and often directed toward a punch
line. Moreover, the heterogeneity of his thinking enabled him to refer frequently
to Marx and Lenin but also to the reexology of Pavlov, the psychoanalysis of
Freud, the formalism of Shklovsky, and Lucien Lvy-Bruhls ideas on so-called
savage thinking and primitive art. In addition, Eisenstein wrote extensively on
diverging artistic phenomena, varying from El Greco, Kabuki theater, Picasso,
Delaunay, Dickens, -oyce, Le Corbusier, Grifth, Disney, Saul Steinberg cartoons,
Life magazine advertisements, and, last but not least, Piranesi.
Throughout his vast collection of writings, Eisenstein refers several times to
Piranesi. First of all, Piranesi is mentioned in Eisensteins Memoirs in a passage
dedicated to a marvelous Leningrad bookshop, which the director visited many
times as a student and which keeps recurring in his dreams. How many times,
Eisenstein writes, Ive held a full set of Piranesis Carceri in my hands here, only
144

three sheets of which huddle together at home.6 A 1948 sketch of Eisensteins

Study by Soa :ischnewezkaja clearly indicates that Piranesi was included in the
lmmakers collection since it shows one of the Carceri prominently displayed on
the wall.
Piranesi, however, was not only physically present in Eisensteins intellectual
environment, but his art also proved important for the lmmakers ideas on the
relationship between art, space, and movement, which were highly important for
his lm practice and theory. Piranesis compositional technique, for instance, is
discussed in an essay entitled Form and Content: Practice, which is included in the
1947 edition of The Film Sense. In a paragraph characteristically dealing with the
visualizations of movement, Eisenstein notes that pure line, that is, the specically
graphic outline of a composition, is only one of the many means of visualizing
movement. This line the path of the movement, Eisenstein continues, can
be drawn in other ways besides purely linear ones.7 Referring to Rembrandt,
Delacroix, Drer, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, and also Piranesi, Eisenstein states
that movement can also be evoked with the same success by changing nuances in
light, for instance, or by shifting densities of chiaroscuro. For Eisenstein, Piranesi
reveals no less emotional a ight with his particular line a line built from the
movements and variations of counter-volumes the broken arcs and vaults of his
Carceri, with their intertwined lines of movement woven with the lines of his
endless stairs breaking the accumulated spatial fugue with a linear fugue.8

Piranesi, El Greco, Pathos and Ecstasy

In addition, Eisenstein refers to Piranesi in an essay on El Greco, several versions
of which were written in the late 19s and early 194s.9 This essay deals with
two versions of El Grecos representation of Christ Cleansing the Temple. Whereas
in the 1560-65 version, held by the National Gallery in Washington, the painter
is mainly intent on telling the story from the Gospel, in the 1570 version, held
by the National Gallery in London, he is more preoccupied with symbolical
meaning. Eisenstein speaks of a leap from a narrative interpretation to a gurative
interpretation.10 Nonetheless, the latter version irritates Eisenstein because the
picture as a whole does not undergo genuine ecstasy, a genuine explosion in this
process.11 Subsequently, Eisenstein starts to fantasize how this painting could be
ecstaticized in the unique spirit and manner of El Greco. In the subsequent
paragraphs of his essay, he starts to sketch (by means of a written description)
a more desirable version of the picture he would exchange the format of the
canvas into a vertical rectangle, the architectural setting should be transformed into
an immaterial and cloudy space, the gure of Christ should hang over the other
gures, who should in turn be transformed into a chaos of torsos, knees, elbows,
forearms, and thighs, spread along the canvas, et cetera. Ironically, Eisenstein notes,
El Greco did paint this version, albeit with another subject the 1610 Resurrection
145

6. Sergei Eisenstein, Immoral Memories:

An Autobiography by Eisenstein, Boston,
Houghton Mifin Company, 198; p. 188.
7. Sergei Eisenstein, Form and Content
Practice, in The Film Sense, San Diego,
Harcourt Brace & Company, 1947; p.16970.
8. Ibidem, p. 171.
9. Sergei Eisenstein, El Greco, in
Angela Dalle Vache (ed), The Visual Turn:
Classical Film Theory and Art History, New
Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press,
200; pp.195-205.
10. Ibidem, p.197.
11. Ibidem, p.197.

of Christ (Museo del Prado, Madrid). For Eisenstein, this version contains and
exhibits pathos a kind of emotional and passionate aspect of art, which has
nothing to do with a romantic or expressionist longing. In the introduction to his
translation of Eisensteins Nonindifferent Nature (1987), Herbert Marshall explains
that pathos is comparable to the engine of an organic structure bound to destroy
itself from within in order to achieve reincarnation as its opposite.12 In so doing,
pathos involves a kind of self-reexivity reminiscent of modernist or avant-garde
practices. According to Eisenstein, the pathos of a work of art coincides with the
experience of the representation breaking its own representational setup. Beyond
any mysticism, Eisenstein suggests that gures and devices of representability are
capable of evoking the unrepresentable. He further calls such an experience of the
unrepresentable an ecstatic experience according to Piero Montani this theory
of the ek-stasis of representation is the most original aspect of Eisensteins
aesthetic.1
It is precisely in this context that Eisenstein invokes Piranesi, because he enables
us to juxtapose two different stages of one and the same work (or, actually, similar
works), the second of which can be interpreted as an ecstatic adaptation of the
rst. Looking at the different states of Piranesis etchings, Eisenstein notes that
the architect has become an artist and the archeologist a visionary. Paraphrasing
Alexandre Benoiss History of Painting, Eisenstein writes that myopic minds
reproached Piranesi for the fact that in proceeding from his archaeological studies,
he was not able to restrain his fantasies. However, one may ask what is essentially
more valuable those grains of so-called knowledge, which a true archaeologist may
discover in his investigations, or that new fairytale world which arose in Piranesis
imagination as the result of his ecstasy before the power and beauty of Roman
architecture.14

Explosions and the Fluidity of Forms

12. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Nonindifferent
Nature: Film and the Structure of Things, New
York, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
1. Pietro Montani, The Uncrossable
Treshold The Relation of Painting and
Cinema in Eisenstein, in Angela Dalle
Vacche (ed.), The Visual Turn: Classical Film
Theory and Art History, New Brunswick, NJ,
Rutgers University Press, 200; pp.206-17.
14. Eisenstein 200 204.
15. See, for instance, Sergei Eisenstein,
ber Kunst und Knstler, Mnchen, Rogner
& Bernhard, 1977; pp. 126-74.
16. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the
Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from
Piranesi to the 1970s, Cambridge, MA, MIT
Press, 1990; pp.65-90.

These ideas are reiterated and elaborated in an essay entirely dedicated to the
eighteenth-century Italian architect and engraver. Eisenstein wrote this text,
entitled Piranesi or the Fluidity of Forms, in 1946-47, shortly before his death. Later,
the text on Piranesi was included together with the El Greco essay in both German
and English collections of Eisensteins writings.15 Whats more, Eisensteins
Piranesi essay became a canonical text for architectural historians when an English
translation was published in a 1977 issue of Oppositions and, particularly, when ten
years later, Manfredo Tafuri famously included an abbreviated version in The Sphere
and the Labyrinth.16 Following Eisenstein, Tafuri presented the eighteenth-century
architect and engraver as a precursor of twentieth-century avant-garde practices,
as indicated by the books subtitle, Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the
1970s.

146

Explicitly stating that he is a long-standing admirer of the architectural frenzies of

Piranesis Carceri, Eisenstein starts his text with an evocation of the corner room
of his Moscow apartment, in which a Piranesi etching, Carcere oscura from the series
Opere varie di Archittetura (174), is attached to the wall. (ill. 1) Considering himself
more of an enthusiast than a connoisseur, Eisenstein is struck by the amazing
perfection of the Piranesi etching as well as by the degree of its balanced
gentleness. A bit disappointed, he calls it unecstatic and he subsequently
suggests developing a creative interpretation such as the one he performed on
the El Greco painting. He applies his technique of ecstatic transguration on the
Piranesi etching by means of a series of so-called explosions. Reminiscent of
the scrupulous analyses of the shot compositions and montage patterns of his
own lms by means of drawings and diagrams, Eisenstein supports this ecstatic
transguration of the Piranesi etching with detailed descriptions and a series of
sketches. This operation, Eisenstein stipulates, is now simpler, more familiar, and
demands less time and space than the one made on the El Greco painting. Ten
explosions will be enough to transform ecstatically this diagram that has been
drawn in front of our eyes, he states. Eisenstein, however, admits that he applies
the very same procedure as the one that Piranesi himself used in the composition
of the Invenzioni capriciose di Carceri and in the second edition of the Carceri. In
any case, Eisenstein writes, Piranesis second etching is actually the rst one
exploding in ecstatic ight.17 In this process, the material elements of Piranesis
composition have changed. The concreteness has [@ own apart, Eisenstein
further notes.18 In addition, he writes that the accumulation of perspective moves
into the distance, borders on the madness of narcotic visions [@ but each link
of these totally dizzy perspectives is in itself quite naturalistic. [@ The madness
consists only in the piling up, in the juxtapositions that explode the very foundation
of the objects customary possibility, a madness that groups objects into a system
of arches that go out of themselves in sequence, ejecting new arches from their
bowels; a system of staircases exploding in a ight of new passages of staircases;
a system of vaults that continue their leaps from each other to eternity.19 For
Eisenstein, Piranesi enables the evocation of the nature of architectural fantasies
in which one system of vision is transformed into others; where some planes,
opening up to innity behind each other, carry the eye into unknown depths, and
the staircases, ledge by ledge, extend to heavens, or in a reverse cascade of these
same ledges, rush downwards.20
The spatial distortions and interpenetrations, the smashed continuities, and the
multiplication of vanishing points in short, the explosions create disorientation
as well as pathos and ecstasis. Eisenstein does not forget to mention that ecstasy
is for some strange reason very often connected with visions of architectural
images.21 For Eisenstein, Piranesi turns the image into a series of discontinuous
fragments. Eisenstein even speaks of the fragmentation of the means of
expression. Even the way Piranesi deals with light adds to this. The play of
chiaroscuro, Eisenstein notes, is rather a collision of luminescent projections
with the ruins of gaping darkness between them.22 It is this fragmentation, of
147

17. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Piranesi, or the

Fluidity of Forms, in Tafuri 1990 71.
18. Ibidem, p.74.
19. Ibidem, p.75.
20. Ibidem, p.71.
21. Ibidem, p.77.
22. Ibidem, p.75.

Ill. 2. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Sketches for

the analysis of the Carcere oscura con
antenna pel suplizia de malfatori by
Piranesi.

148

course, that turned Piranesi into an early icon of modernity and a precursor
of the avant-garde in the eyes of Eisenstein, Tafuri and other commentators.2
Piranesis treatment of every form of classicist derivation as mere fragment leads
to a monstrous pullulation of deformed symbols bereft of meaning. In addition,
the collision of architectural fragments creates excess and leads to the technique
of the shock. For Tafuri, the Piranesian forest, like the sadistic atmospheres of
his Carceri, shows that it is not only the sleep of reason that produces monsters;
reason awake can also create deformity. [@ Rationalism would seem to reveal its
own irrationality.24

Cinematism, Montage and Architecture

Fragmentation, however, is also inherent to the medium of cinema and its reliance
on editing or montage. It is worth mentioning here that, for Eisenstein, montage
was based on collision and conict (in contrast with the practice of continuity
editing in the Classical Hollywood cinema or Vsevolod Pudovkins idea of linkages).
Furthermore, Eisenstein also linked the principle of montage both to the formalist
idea of laying bare the device and the theme of activating the public through
emotional psychological shocks in the spectator. No wonder that lm, the art of
montage, was for Eisenstein the art form with the most pathos the art form
with the most stored emotional energy, precisely because so many different media
charge each other within cinema itself.
Eisensteins search for fragmentation and montage in Piranesis etchings or other
pictures is part of his attempt to invent a new category between painting and
cinema, which he calls cinematism. Expressing in several of his writings the notion of
cinema as the contemporary phase of painting, Eisenstein elaborately discussed
the inscription of time in a static picture and the sequential nature of aesthetic
perception ideas that were at odds with the modernist pictorial aesthetic, which
was largely indebted to Lessings separation of arts, time and space, or to Kants
exclusion of duration as a parameter of aesthetic experience.25
Furthermore, Eisensteins text on Piranesi should be read as part of a wider
context, which not only includes his reections on El Greco but also on Japanese
and Chinese scroll painters, Robert Delaunay, and the Mexican muralists to name
just a few. As Yve-Alain Bois noted, Eisensteins numerous texts on painting and
the graphic arts can be read as a direct answer to the accusation of pictorialism,
formulated against his lms by no less a painter than Kazimir Malevich if my
lms are pictorial, Eisenstein seems to be arguing, it is because many painters were,
unknowingly, practicing cinematography and a whole section of the history of
painting should be rewritten in terms of cinematographic analysis.26 This resulted
in a veritable obsession with a search for cinematography outside cinema.

2. See also Diana Agrest, Design versus

Non-Desing, in K. Michael Hays (ed.),
Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from A
Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture
1973-1984, New York, Princeton
Architectural Press, 1998; p.44-45.
24. Manfredo Tafuri, Toward a Critique
of Architectural Ideology (1969), in K.
Michael Hays (ed), Architecture Theory Since
1968, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1998;
p.10.
25. Yve-Alain Bois, Introduction
to Eisensteins essay on Montage and
Architecture, in Assemblage 10, December
1989; p.11.
26. Ibidem, 112.

149

Ill. 3. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible,

1944/1948. Set drawing by Iossif Spinel.

150

Strikingly, Eisenstein discovered this cinematism in architecture, a discipline that

played an important part in his biography. The son of an architect, Eisenstein had
studied civil engineering. During the Civil War, he built pontoon bridges for the
Red Army, and in 19-4, became involved together with Moshei Ginzburg
and one of the Vesnin brothers in an architectural competition for the center
of the city of Nalcik in the Caucasus. In his Piranesi essay, Eisenstein states that
on the various paths and crossroads of my journey toward cinematography I
had to occupy myself for some time with architecture as well (at the Institute
of Civil Engineers). I was just about to proceed with my projected work when
the whirlwind of the Civil War swept me away and did not return me to drawing
boards of architectural projects, but transferred me to the stage of the theatre,
rst as a designer, then as a theatre director, nally as a lm director.27 Some of
his stage-set designs are marked by forceful diagonals and spirals reminiscent of
Piranesi, such as those for Meyerholds 1922 production of George Bernard Shaws
Heartbreak House or for a 1922 production of Ludwig Tiecks Der gestiefelte Kater,
in which stage and auditorium intersect. Eisensteins fascination for architectural
modernism can also be seen in Old and New (1929), which features sets designed
by Andrei Burov.
Architecture furthermore plays an important role in Eisensteins lms. Apart from
the architectural character of his shot compositions and framings (noted by many
commentators), Eisenstein had to nd practical answers to the problem of how
to lm a building, how to transform it from a passive setting of the action into a
major agent of the plot. In many of his famous scenes, such architectural elements
as staircases are used as organizing structures both formally and symbolically. In his
Piranesi essay, Eisenstein himself compared Piranesis predilection for ecstatic
spaces lled with staircases and arches with some of his most famous lm scenes
Kerenskis ascent of the Jordan Staircase in the Winter Palace in October (1927); or
the famous Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (1925). The ecstatic image
of a staircase hurling across from one world to the next, from heaven to earth, is
already familiar to us from the Biblical legend of Jacobs dream, and the emotional
image of the elemental head-long descent of human masses down the Odessa
staircase, stretching to the sky, is familiar to us from our own opus, Eisenstein
wrote.28
However, of all Eisensteins lms, it is Ivan the Terrible (two parts, 1944 and 1948),
the making of which more or less coincided with the writing of the Piranesi essay,
which displays the inuence of the Carceri most clearly. (ill. 3) Not coincidentally,
Ivan the Terrible is Eisensteins only lm with elaborate sets. Since the late 190s,
Eisensteins work was increasingly dominated with studies in shadow and darkness
under the inuence of artists like Goya, Ensor, and Piranesi. Although he presents
Piranesi as a precursor of an avant-garde conceptualization of space, Eisenstein
too, like the Romantics Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, situates
Piranesi in the tradition of the Gothic. In his Piranesi essay Eisenstein refers to
De Quincey and he asserts that the denition of Piranesis spaces as Gothic is
151

27. Eisenstein, Piranesi, in Tafuri 1990

79.
28. Eisenstein, Piranesi, in Tafuri 1990
71. The reference to the staircase scene in
October is on page 84.

not a mistake since Piranesis ecstasy caught precisely what is fully expressed
in Gothic halls and cathedrals.29 Eisenstein writes that Gothic churches are the
embodiment of ecstasy frozen in stone.0

29. Ibidem, p.8.

0. Eisenstein, Piranesi, in Tafuri 1990
80.
1. See Bruno Girveau, La Nostalgie
bktisseuse Architecture et dcor chez
Disney, in Il tait une fois Walt Disney:
Aux sources de lart des studios Disney, Paris,
Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 2006;
pp.208-6.
2. David Bordwell, The Cinema of
Eisenstein, Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, 199; p.195 and pp.24748.
. See ibidem, p.195.
4. See David Bordwell, Eisenstein,
Socialist Realism, and the Charms of
Mizantsena, in Al Lavalley & Barry
P. Scherr (eds.), Eisenstein at 100: A
Reconsideration, New Brunswick, NJ,
Rutgers University Press, 2001; pp.17-18.
5. Eisenstein, Piranesi, in Tafuri 1990
85.

In Ivan the Terrible, characters and their shadows create exaggerated arcs and explosive,
Piranesian diagonals. Moreover, with its highly stylized shadows dominating the
walls of the womb-like settings, Eisensteins last lm reminds us of his debt to
Piranesi or at least to a Piranesi mediated by German expressionism and by
Walt Disneys Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (197), the vertiginous staircases of
which are unmistakably indebted to the Carceri.1 In addition, as David Bordwell
has noted, Piranesis vertiginous depths are achieved by similar effects, based on
such cinematic techniques as those afforded by the distorting capacities of the
28mm wide-angle lens.2 Because of its ability to juxtapose close foregrounds and
distant backgrounds and hence to create tension between themes, Eisenstein called
it the ecstatic lens par excellence in his essay on El Greco. Strikingly, the spatial
fragmentation created by means of hectic editing, characteristic of Eisensteins
lms of the 1920s, is exchanged for a kind of montage within the shot reminiscent
of the deep-focus photography more or less simultaneously developed during the
late 190s and 1940s by directors such as Orson Welles and William Wyler. Already
in The Old and the New (190), Eisenstein had developed a technique of wide-angle
depth compositions with many grotesque foregrounds and this technique would
become dominant in Ivan the Terrible, in which shot depth often articulates the
space as an arena for dramatic action and mise-en-scne.4 Moreover, in Ivan the Terrible
Eisenstein increasingly used axial editing combined with depth staging in order to
create a constantly unfolding foreground, which opens up new spatial vistas. This
practice is perfectly in line with Eisensteins interpretation of the Carceri. To the
already existing states [@, Piranesi invariably adds new foregrounds, Eisenstein
writes. Like the tubes of a single telescope extending in length and diminishing
in diameter, these diminishing arches engendered by the arches of a plane closer
up, these ights of stairs ejecting progressively diminishing new ights of stairs
upward, penetrate into the depths.5 Eisensteins shot compositions thus perfectly
parallel Piranesis Vedute, in which ruins are brought to the foreground and which
are characterized by such a close viewpoint that the plate could not include the
entirety of the buildings depicted but demanded, instead, a focus on details. Like
Piranesi, Eisenstein deliberately exploited disparities of scale.

Montage and the Promenade architectural

Eisensteins interest in Piranesis vertiginous spaces was doubtless stimulated by
his own cinematic experiments characterized by a dynamic conception of space.
In contrast with the editing style of Classical Hollywood established by D. W.
Grifth, Eisensteins famous montage of attractions celebrated the power
of the movie camera to triumph over the usual limitations of time and space.
152

Ill. 4a. Auguste Choisy, The Acropolis,

First Sight of the Platform in Le
Pittoresque dans lart grec, Histoire de
larchitecture, 1899.

15

Ill. 4b. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Montage and

Architecture, late 190s, diagrams of the
successive positions of the Acropolis
as described in perspective by Auguste
Choisy.

[Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art,

Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture
(Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 2000), p.
120.]

Particularly in his lms of the 1920s, unity of space is exchanged for shifting
perspectives, jumping camera positions, and juggling directions. Favoring abstract
or intellectual correlations over spatio-temporal connections between the images,
Eisensteins lms are perfectly in line with the new and dynamic spatial paradigm
of constructivism.6 His montage-based cinema both triggered and expressed the
new spatiality explored by cubism, suprematism, and constructivism.
Given this perspective, Eisensteins interest in Piranesi is self-evident. Piranesi
is not only a precursor of cinema, but his spatial layout and framing, which
acknowledge and even emphasize a montage-like combination of discontinuous
fragments, pregures the cinema as an Eisensteinian montage of attractions. In
addition, Piranesis images can be considered cinematic because they trigger a kind
of mobile gaze, which perfectly plays on shifting perspectives and on dramatic
contrasts between close details and distant spaces.
According to Eisenstein, this mobile gaze was not only prepared by artists such as
El Greco and Piranesi but also in architecture, an art that implied real movement
of the beholder in space instead of movement in its virtuality. For Eisenstein, the
ecstatic (from ex-stasis) was the fundamental shared characteristic of architecture
and lm. According to Eisenstein, however, the cinematic character of architecture
(sequentiality and montage) had long been repressed by architects. The art of
cinema and montage, Eisenstein seems to argue, made architects aware of these
features, which where rediscovered by constructivism and such contemporaneous
architects as Le Corbusier, who he met in the Autumn of 1928 in Moscow.7

6. For Eisenstein and Constructivism, see

Franois Albera, Eisenstein et le constructivisme
russe, Lausanne LAge dhomme, 1990. See
also, Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film,
New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001.
7. On Le Corbusier and his links with the
USSR, see Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier
et la mystique de lURSS: Thories et projets
pour Moscou 1928-1936, Bruxelles, Pierre
Mardaga Editeur, 1987.
8. Eisenstein 1989 116-1. Fragments of
this essay had been published in English
earlier under the title Montage 198
in The Film Sense, New York, Harcourt
Brace Jovanovitch, 1942, and in Sergei
M. Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director,
New York, Dover Publications, 1970. See
also Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art,
Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture,
Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2000; pp.
118-22.
9. Eisenstein 1989 116.

Reminiscent of Le Corbusiers conception of the promenade architecturale,

Eisensteins ideas on architecture were elaborated in an essay entitled Montage and
Architecture, which he wrote in the late 190s in the same period as the essay on
El Greco, in which he also refers to the issue of montage computation within
an architectural ensemble.8 In Montage and Architecture Eisenstein deals with the
shifting point of view of a moving spectator. He contrasts two paths of the
spatial eye the cinematic, where a spectator follows an imaginary line among a
series of objects, through the sight as well as the mind he speaks of diverse
impressions [that] pass in front of an immobile spectator and the architectural,
where the spectator moves between a series of carefully disposed phenomena that
he absorbed sequentially with his visual sense.9
In order to illustrate his arguments, he refers to the Acropolis in Athens with its
apparent disorder in the placement of buildings a feature that racked the brain
of so many architectural theorists working in the classical tradition. Eisenstein, of
course, refers to the famous analysis of the Acropolis in the Histoire de larchitecture
(1899) by Auguste Choisy, which he cites at length. (ill. 4a, 4b) For Eisenstein, Choisy
propagated a cinematic perception of architecture in the sense that he explains
the aesthetic motivation of the apparent disorder in the placement of buildings
on the Acropolis by referring to the importance of the variable point of view of
154

a mobile spectator. Following Choisy, Eisenstein shows how the placement of the
buildings of the Acropolis in Athens was projected according to a predetermined
path to be followed by the visitors movable eye. By means of a series of successive
perspective views of the movement of an imaginary visitor of the Acropolis,
Choisy demonstrated the successive tableaux and the picturesque composition of
the site. Eisenstein asks his reader to look at Choisys text with the eye of a lmmaker, to see it as a kind of storyboard of the Acropolis. The Greeks have left
us the most perfect examples of shot design, change of shot, and shot length (that
is the duration of a particular impression. [] Its hard to imagine, a montage
sequence for an architectural ensemble more subtly composed, shot by shot, than
the one which our legs create by walking among the buildings of the Acropolis,
Eisenstein notes.40 In Choisys carefully sequenced perspectives, Eisenstein nds
a montage effect and he even speculates on the desirable temporal duration of
each picture, nding that the shot length can be determined by the relationship
between the pace of the spectators movement and the rhythm of the buildings
themselves and the distances between each of them. Choisys analysis, of course,
enables Eisenstein to conclude that architecture, too, is lms predecessor and
he calls the Acropolis the perfect example of one of the most ancient lms.41
In Eisensteins discussion of the cinematic disposition of the buildings on the
Acropolis, a complex web of interconnecting intellectual relations thus becomes
apparent Eisensteins direct involvement with both Piranesi and Choisy, Choisys
debt to Piranesi, the importance of Choisy for the elaboration of Le Corbusiers
idea of the promenade architecturale, and the fondness with which Eisenstein and Le
Corbusier regard each others work.
Eisensteins discussion of Choisy also seems to imply that sequentiality is a
prerequisite for cinematism. As Tafuri noted, Eisenstein sees in the entire series of
the Carceri a totality composed of disconnected fragments belonging to a single
sequence, based on the technique of intellectual montage.42 If Piranesis prisons
are anything, Eisenstein suggests, they are spaces edited together from unrelated
episodes; they are cinematic. Given this perspective, Eisenstein sees in the entire
series of the Carceri a totality composed of disconnected fragments belonging to
a single sequence. However, although sequentiality is a prerequisite for cinematism,
as such it is not enough to call architecture cinematic otherwise the notion
could be applied to all kinds of series or successions of views of buildings and
the notion would become completely meaningless. Piranesis Vedute de Roma, for
instance, could easily be read as a series of shots of a lmed travelogue on Rome.
As an instance of proto-industrial image making, the Vedute are an important point
of reference in cinemas prehistory. To read them as a lm, however, is not an
Eisensteinian operation. We can, instead, read the Vedute as a montage sequence
of a 190s Hollywood lm, rather than as an equivalent of avant-garde montage.
A rapid succession of Piranesis Vedute would be more reminiscent of a montage
sequence in the style of Slavko Vorkapich than of an Eisenstein lm. If we should
produce a cinematic equivalent for the Vedute, we would rather suggest the socalled lm cartolina Hollywood lms of the 1950s such as Roman Holiday (William
155

40. Ibidem, p.117.

41. Ibidem, p.117.
42. Tafuri 1990 56.

Ill. 5. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Sketch for The

Glass House, 190.
[Oksana Bulgakowa, Sergej Eisenstein Drei

Utopien: Architekturentwrfe zur Filmtheorie

(Berlin PotemkinPress, 1996), p. 108.]

156

Wyler, 195) or Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco, 1955) that are situated
in Rome and that evoke the city by simply showing some establishing shots of
monuments in a visually glorious but topographically nonsensical sequence.4 In
these lms, the city is subjected to what John Urry called the tourist gaze and
becomes a moving postcard collection the tight relation between postcards and
cinematic mapping of Rome is the subject of Peter Greenaways Belly of an Architect
(1987), in which Piranesi is frequently mentioned and which contains framings
based on some of the Vedute.44
In order to make architecture into something cinematic, sequentiality alone is not
sufcient. In Eisensteins terminology, a Piranesian explosion of forms and
a uidity of forms are also required. The architecture itself should entice the
spectator to change position, which results in a decentering effect of parallax
something that can be traced back to Piranesi and his elaborate disjunction of plan
and elevation, which leads to a vertiginous fragmentation depriving the spectator
of any center of reference.

Moscow and The Glass House

This relentless vertigo resulting from the uidity of forms that holds within itself
the potential to explode into successive states can also be found in some unrealized
lm projects that have architecture as their major theme. Moscow (194/47), for
instance, was planned to cover four centuries of Moscows existence as a leading
Russian city. According to Oksana Bulgakova, the lm project should be read in
the context of discussions on architecture and urban planning taking place in the
Soviet Union in the early 190s such as the Moscow CIAM congress of 19.45
Strikingly, the lm focuses on the citys monuments, but these would have been
visualized entirely by means of art direction an idea already developed within the
context of one of Eisensteins earlier unmade lms the cinematic adaptation of
Karl Marxs Capital, in which grand architectural monuments (such as the pyramids)
would have been built in the studio. According to James Goodwin, the Carceri were
an acknowledged source for the sketches for the urban environment during earlier
centuries in the proposed lm history Moscow.46
Another unrealized lm project with explicit architectural ambitions was The Glass
House, on which Eisenstein worked during the late 1920s and early 190s. (ill. 5) The
Glass House project, which entails many written notes and drawings, originated in
April 1926, during Eisensteins stay in Germany. To a certain extent, it can be seen
as an answer to Metropolis (1926), the lm on which Fritz Lang was working when
Eisenstein visited the UFA studios in Berlin.47 However, Eisenstein continued
working on the project for some years, at least until his visit to the United States
in 190. Once in Hollywood, he proposed it as his rst feature for Paramount but
he was unable to compress the various scenes and numerous ideas he had sketched
157

4. David Bass, Insiders and Outsiders

Latent Urban Thinking in Movies of
Modern Rome, in Franois Penz &
Maureen Thomas (eds.), Cinema and
Architecture: Mlis, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia,
London, British Film Institute, 1997; pp.
85-88.
44. Michael Baumgartner, A Walk through
R Peter Greenaways Mapping of Rome
in The Belly of An Architect in Richard
Wrigley (ed.), Cinematic Rome, Leicester,
Troubador Publishing, 2008; p. 157. For
Urrys notion of the tourist gaze, see John
Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in
Contemporary Societies, London, Sage, 1991.
45. Oksana Bulgakowa, Sergej Eisenstein
Drei Utopien: Architekturentwrfe zur
Filmtheorie, Berlin, PotemkinPress, 1996;
pp. 172-87.
46. James Goodwin, Eisenstein, Cinema,
and History, Urbana University of Illinois
Press, 199; p.155.
47. See Sergei Eisenstein, Glashaus, in
Oksana Bulgakowa (ed.), Eisenstein und
Deutschland: Texte, Dokumente, Briefe, Berlin
Akademie der Knste, 1998; pp.178. Francois Albera, Formzerst|rung
und Transparanz Glass House vom
Filmprojekt zum Film als Projekt, in
Oksana Bulgakowa (ed.), Eisenstein und
Deutschland: Texte, Dokumente, Briefe, Berlin
Akademie der Knste, 1998; pp. 12-42;
and Oksana Bulgakowa, Sergej Eisenstein
Drei Utopien: Architekturentwrfe zur
Filmtheorie, Berlin, PotemkinPress, 1996;
pp. 109-2.

into a single plot to satisfy the conventions of the American feature lm.
Self-evidently, the project relates to contemporaneous notions advocated by such
artists such as Moholy-Nagy or Theo Van Doesburg on light as an architectural
material. In addition, it is in line with the daring experiments with glass architecture,
from the Glserne Kette to the work of constructivists like Lissitzky and Melnikow,
and other prominent modern architects like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le
Corbusier, who said of the new architecture of glass that it exposes the spectacle
of modern life. The fact that Eisensteins glass house is actually a glass skyscraper
turns it into an instance of the Americanism of European architects and artists, who
were fascinated by the modern American skyscraper city.48 During his stay in the
United States, Eisenstein visited New York as well as a glass factory in Pittsburgh.
In addition, the archival materials on the project include a clipping from a 190 New
York Times Magazine article on Frank Lloyd Wrights idea to build a glass skyscraper
in Manhattan.

48. See Jean-Louis Cohen & Hubert

Damisch (eds), Amricanisme et modernit:
Lidal amricain dans larchitecture, Paris,
Flammarion, 199; and Jean-Louis Cohen,
Scenes of the World to Come: European
Architecture and the American Challenge 18931960, Paris, Flammarion, 1995.

A lm entirely situated in a glass skyscraper is, of course, a great concept for a

lmmaker interested in the dynamic spaces of Piranesi. The way steep angles would
have juxtaposed dissonant elements seen through transparent oors and ceilings
evokes Piranesis Carceri, in which one line leads us into depth, only to be broken
by another and in which other axes are unexpectedly reduced or expanded in scale,
yielding an overwhelming sense of vast vaults. One can only wonder about the
many ideas that Eisenstein noted on the use of the photographic qualities of glass
surfaces and their optical effects. The lm would have included mirroring glass,
glass in various hues from various thicknesses, polished glass, corrugated glass,
glass in combination with water and frost, the idea of a glass room full of smoke,
a glass swimming pool, et cetera. First and foremost, however, the project would
allow the lmmaker to experiment with the new spatial concepts of modernity.
Eisenstein fantasizes about suspended pieces of furniture and the suprematist
compositions of carpets on transparent oors. In a space in which everything is
transparent, all viewpoints and camera angles could be used. Reminiscent of the
axonometric drawings employed by Choisy, which show ground plan, exterior,
section and interior disposition simultaneously, there would be no top and bottom
an element that also determined Eisensteins nal and unrealized lm project The
World Turned Upside Down (1945), which only survives through a few drawings. Last
but not least, glass would enable the director to achieve montage in a single frame.
Every shot would be a multiple exposure without the help of trick photography.
On the level of story development, The Glass House was conceived as a fable about a
transparent world in which people paradoxically do not see each other. When their
eyes are opened, greed and hate are the result eventually causing the destruction
of the glass tower. The story, possibly inspired by Eugene Zamyatins dystopic
novel We (1921), combined situational comedys favor of ironic reversals with a
harsh critique on the alienation and isolation inherently connected to American
capitalism. However, developed at the time when the Soviet Union evolved into
Stalins nightmarish dictatorship, The Glass House seems to present a haunting
158

image of the panoptic regime of modernity as such. This image of transparency

curiously harks back to the gloomy and dark crypts and dungeons of Piranesi and
the uidity of forms Eisenstein noted in the Italian engravers work. Piranesis
explosions have been exchanged by what he calls the pathetic objectlessness of
glass. By using the vertiginous and ecstatic qualities of glass, Eisensteins Glass
House becomes the ipside of Piranesis Carceri.

159