Walter Benjamin^§MS0b visited Moscow in 1927, and spent two months there. Among his interests in the capital of the revolution, then a decade old, was Soviet film, and in particular the work of the famed director, Sergei Eisenstein. Released in 1925, Battleship Potemkin is Eisenstein’s dramatization of a mutiny by the crew of a war ship in the failed revolution of 1905.

“A great film, a rare achievement,” says Benjamin. “This film has solid concrete foundations ideologically; the details have been worked out precisely, like the span of a bridge.”⁹³

Here was one such carefully engineered detail: “The leader of the mutiny, Lieutenant Commander Schmidt, one of the legendary figures of revolutionary Russia, does not appear in the film.” An oppressed social class (an abstract concept) is represented as the agent of history rather than the individual (a representative person instantiated). “That may be seen as a ‘falsification of history,’” Benjamin continues, “although it has nothing to do with the estimation of his achievements … It would have been senseless to depict them as differentiated individuals … Here, for the first time, a mass movement acquires the wholly architectonic and by no means monumental qualities that justifies its inclusion in film.”⁹⁴

Aleksandr Luria and Lev Vygotsky^§MS1.1.3a met regularly with Eisenstein to discuss the ways in which the abstract concepts in Marx’s philosophy of historical materialism could be embodied in visual imagery. Eisenstein was interested to get the technical assistance from the two professors of psychology, on the translation between verbal and visual concepts or what Eisenstein called the “generalized image.” He was also interested to enlist their support to research the success of his films in conveying these concepts to audiences. Together, they created questionnaires for audiences of students, workers, and peasants to determine whether they had understood the concepts underlying the images. After Eisenstein died, Luria kept the great visualist’s brain in a bottle in his office at Moscow State University.⁹⁵

Even if Benjamin did not meet Luria and Vygotsky during his time in Moscow, he well understood their purposes and Eisenstein’s.

The mode of mental reception of the peasant is basically different from that of the urban masses …; serious scenes provoke uproarious laughter and … funny scenes are greeted with straight faces … To expose such audiences to film and radio constitutes one of the most grandiose mass-psychological experiments in the gigantic laboratory that Russia has become … At the moment, the establishment of an “Institute for Audience Research” in which audience reactions can be studied both experimentally and theoretically, is being considered.⁹⁶

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⁹³ Walter Benjamin, 1927 [1999], “On the Present Situation of Russian Film,” pp. 12–19 in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, edited by M.W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 19.

⁹⁴ Ibid., p. 18.

⁹⁵ Michael Cole, Karl Levitin, and Alexander R. Luria, 1979 [2006], The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with the Making of Mind, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 207, 243; Al LaValley and Barry P. Scherr, eds., 2001, Eisenstein at 100, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

⁹⁶ Walter Benjamin, 1927 [1999], “On the Present Situation of Russian Film,” pp. 12–19 in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, edited by M.W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 14

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 111-112. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Sergei Eisenstein’s "Battleship Potemkin" §MS1.1.3f