BOOK REVIEWS
Annette Michelson’s On the Wings of Hypothesis BY ELIJAH YOUNG | Goldsmiths, University of London
To suit the needs, perhaps, of a cultural environment increasingly defined by intersection, a convergence of interests has come to inform and characterize much of contemporary art criticism. Curated here, Annette Michelson’s writings on the Soviet school of montage filmmakers epitomizes that such an approach can work in defiance of over-saturation. Michelson’s consilience electrifies, no doubt in part to the sheer range of subjects considered, from correlating Sergei Eisenstein to American avant-gardist Stan Brakhage to identifying the Byzantine hagiography encoded into Dziga Vertov’s profile of V.I. Lenin. Prior to her passing in 2018, Michelson had begun to anthologize her critical articles with the collection On the Eve of the Future (2017), which documents her research on the experimental American cinema of the mid-twentieth century. Published posthumously, the second volume of that project, On the Wings of Hypothesis, concerns the theoretical approaches to montage established by two Soviet filmmakers—Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov—and their realization in cinematic practice. Overall, what is catalogued here is a view of art as a fundamental pursuit of ontological manipulation. In his foreword to the book, Malcolm Turvey identifies this view as “singularly fertile” (xvi) for Michelson and her contemporaries. Certainly, across the breadth of her writing on popular and experimental film, the notion remains that acknowledging the dialectic between filmmaking and spectatorship can inspire development of both positions. The sense Michelson seeks to articulate is expressed as that of “artists whose notions of their art are [...] shaped by the ideological structure in which they are formed” (29). The first chapter, “On the Wings of Hypothesis: Montage and the Theory of the Interval (1992),” finds Eisenstein in accordance with this, citing his own view of montage as “the organization of the elements or its intervals into phrases,” or, laconically, “drawings in motion” (14). Montage in the Soviet Union, then, becomes the exemplary movement for Michelson’s expression of ethics and politics through aesthetics and, as a result, evidence for a necessary symbiosis of theory and practice. Following this introduction, the collection is split into two sections. The first comprises four essays, written between 1973 and 2001, concerning Sergei Eisenstein. To open the second chapter, “Camera Lucida / Camera Obscura (1973),” and to begin elaborating upon her discussion of dialectics, Michelson cites the poet T. S. Eliot’s
On the Wings of Hypothesis: Collected Writings on Soviet Cinema Annette Michelson, Rachel Churner (ed.) 256 pp. October Books ISBN 978-0-262-04449-3 $39.95 CAD
consideration that “no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone” (27). Eisenstein is, hereafter, presented as conscious of this supposition, willing to theorize his work based upon recognition of both his contemporaries and his antecedents. The image Michelson constructs is that of an artist in revolt against a bourgeois structure of film production, hailing from the West and upheld by directors such as D. W. Griffith, for which montage might be a panacea, “an agent of dialectical consciousness” (38). The clear influence of materialist philosophers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx is recognized, and Michelson employs Marx’s assertion that “man makes religion, religion does not make man” (69) as a quaint analogue for Eisenstein’s own desire to construct a new cinematic form of representation, outside the established “knowns” of theatrical structure.
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