Annette Michelson, On the Wings of Hypothesis: Collected Writings on Soviet Cinema

Cambridge : MIT Press, 2020, 233p. ill. 24 x 19cm, (October Books), eng
Index
ISBN : 9780262044493
Sous la dir. de Rachel Churner. Préf. de Malcolm Turvey
Texte intégral
1Taking its title from her well-known essay on “Montage and the Theory of the Interval” of 1992, this volume brings together four decades’ of critical essays by avant-garde cinema historian Annette Michelson (1922-2018). Ostensibly structured by her classic pairing of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, who, as she wrote, both posited “the making and experiencing of such film as, ultimately, a privileged mode of ontological consciousness itself” (p. 29), the collection is wide-ranging in terms of method (structuralist, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic) and scope (from Homer to Rene Clair, Marx to Maya Deren, Scriabin to Stan Brakhage). While tracing a formal trajectory from 1920s Soviet cinema to post-war American independent cinema, which she describes as its “true posterity” (p. 74) Michelson avoids adopting a triumphalist position by describing as a “hyperbolically American” tragedy the fact that Brakhage came to posit the “imaginative consciousness as inherently apolitical” (p. 30). Offering insights into the cinematographic thinking behind Soviet masterpieces such as Strike, The Man with a Movie Camera, and Three Songs of Lenin, the volume also explores the unrealisable plans Eisenstein had made for filmic renditions of Marx’s Capital and Joyce’s Ulysses. Michelson dances impressively and occasionally evasively around the historical heart of the complexity of the formal/political nexus. The editor’s decision to end with her essay on “The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning” ultimately poses the question in psychoanalytic terms; just as Eisenstein believed that “The last word of montage is an imitation of the process of thought” (p. 110), Michelson reads Vertov’s ode to Lenin as a politically-motivated exercise in the “transcending of a depressive position” (p. 223). The less well-known of the co-founders, in 1976, of the interdisciplinary journal October (having been steeped in continental theory while in Paris between 1950 and 1966), Michelson was instrumental in establishing film studies as a discipline on her return to the US. She pioneered a form of writing on film that was erudite yet poetic. The book’s merit may lie less in what one gleans from it about the working methods or ambitions of the Soviet cinematographers it treats, than in its author’s elaboration of an intellectually ambitious style of critical writing on cinema. Michelson isolates and unpacks the specifically cinematic devices developed by her protagonists. The collage of close looking and theoretical insight she offers is invigorating, as are the occasional autobiographical or self-reflexive moments when she describes her experience of Soviet archival research. She works with a wealth of key primary and secondary sources, including lengthy extracts from both, but is at her best when engaging in readings of particular film scenes and images, for example when dissecting the sightlines of the sitters’ gazes in an archival photograph of the 1935 All-Union Creative Conference of Workers in Soviet Cinematography. She does so with the same kind of attention a traditional art history might accord to a Renaissance altarpiece. Michelson is not shy of jargon (parataxis, hysteron proteron, propadeutic, anacoluthia etc.). Besides familiarity with the remarkable films which are their subject, these essays demand, as Michelson put it in relation to her viewing of Eisenstein, “a particular kind of attention” (p. 49): it is the kind of attention that has come to be seen as a hallmark of the ambitions for writing on the visual articulated in October.
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Klara Kemp-Welch, « Annette Michelson, On the Wings of Hypothesis: Collected Writings on Soviet Cinema », Critique d’art [En ligne], Toutes les notes de lecture en ligne, mis en ligne le 04 juin 2022, consulté le 15 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/76175 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/critiquedart.76175
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés), sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Haut de page
