Sergei Eisenstein and the Music of Landscape: The ‘Mists’ of Potemkin between Metaphor and Illustration

Abstract

As is known, Sergei Eisenstein’s artistic course has always proceeded along with his theoretical evolution and aesthetic reflection. In many aspects, the Eisensteinian theory considers music as an aesthetic, linguistic and communicative model: starting from the well-known Statement on Sound¹ — gone down in history as Sound Manifesto — a polished metaphorical imagination inspired by music guides the thoughts of the Russian filmmaker, within both the theoretical formalization and film analysis. Analyses like the one carried out by Eisenstein on the ‘symphony of the mist’ in Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) are the paradigmatic model of a kind of inherently metaphorical treatise, in which a figurative structure, coherent and systematic, is created through the application of musical terminology to the film grammar. The Eisensteinian analysis hosts careful references, never obvious, to basic elements of the musical form, as well as to macro formal structures and even to real compositive procedures, such as polyrhythmicity and the fugue.