Ornament as National Form in Late Eisenstein

The paper discusses Sergei Eisenstein’s unrelenting interest in the category of “national form” in the 1930s. It examines Eisenstein’s innovative attempts to provide an equivalent to the perspectival “distortions” of Eastern miniatures, a distinct national formal feature, on the cinematic screen. The paper provides an analysis of Eisenstein’s 1941–42 series of drawings inspired by Kazakh folklore. The formal structure of the drawings is clearly informed by the director’s investigation into the sphere of ornament and line and allowed him to articulate an immanent tension between nationally specific material and universal formal devices.

SPEAKER

Nariman Skakov is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He holds an MPhil degree in European Literature and a DPhil degree in Modern and Medieval Languages from the University of Oxford. And before joining the Harvard faculty he spent 11 years teaching at Stanford University. His teaching and research interests lie primarily in 20th-century Soviet and Post-Soviet literature and culture. His first monograph, The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time, was published by I. B. Tauris in 2012. His work on literature and visual arts has appeared in venues including Slavic Review, Russian Review, Dostoevsky Studies, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and Новое литературное обозрение. He has recently completed a monograph titled Reorientalism: From Avant-Garde to National Form that deals with late modernist experiments in the Soviet Union in the 1930-40s.