On the phenomenon of sacred violence in Sergei Eisenstein’s secular art: the images of Heaven and Hell in the revolutionary trilogy

2024

Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия, Vol 116, Iss 116, Pp 89-113 (2024)

The article examines the quasi-religious mode of creativity of the Soviet avant-garde film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) in the context of secular modern culture. Since the time of the French Revolution, the theme of violence, which has penetrated into European public discourse, has firmly fixed in the public consciousness the indissoluble connection between the semantics of revolution and terror. The phenomenon of Sacramental violence, considered in detail, refers to the theory of "proletarian violence", the ideologists of which were the philosophers Georges Sorel (1847-1922) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The "revolutionary trilogy", created under the influence of their teachings, contains the theological justifications of revolutionary terror, which determined the legitimacy of violence on the part of the proletariat, starting with the idea of a general strike and ending with the world socialist Revolution. Basically the "revolutionary trilogy" is a secular hybrid form containing many heterogeneous religious elements, among which Marxism as a quasi-religion plays a dominant role, which is associated with the introduction of class attitudes into drama and the imaginative structure of Eisenstein's films. The trilogy presents inversions of messianic models borrowed by marxism from the Russian culture of the Silver Age: the messianism of the proletariat, the Russian Christ As the Messiah, the kingdom of God on earth. A special attention in the course of considering the phenomenon of sacred violence is given to the concept of the Sacred by Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), the secular analogue of which contributes to the formation of the Soviet model of sacredness. The article also examines the concept of sacred violence as presented by the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962), which helps to identify the archaic religious layer in the image of revolutionaries. Much attention is paid to the study of the theme of sacrifice, captured by Eisenstein's "cinema of violence". Following the provisions of the theory of the French philosopher Rene Girard (1923-2015), the presence of several types of sacrifice in the trilogy, including archaic and Christian, is justified. The text emphasizes that the sacrifice performs the function of sacralizing both the martyrs of the revolution and the power established with their help.

article

Russian

St. Tikhon's Orthodox University, 2024.

“cinema of violence”, sacred violence, gospel of violence, marxism, revolution, sacrifice, martyrs, theodicy, dionysian revelry, eschatology, avant-garde, secular hybrids., «кинематограф насилия», сакральное насилие, евангелие насилия, марксизм, революция, жертвоприношение, мученики, теодицея, диониссийский разгул, эсхатология, авангард, секулярные гибриды., Religion (General), BL1-50