Lo schermo come quadrato dinamico e l’architettura di vetro

Abstract

In a phase of the history of film and media theories, such as ours, characterised by an intense debate about the notions of medium and dispositif, going back to authors such as Dziga Vertov and Sergei M. Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, may be a way not only of setting such a debate in a historical perspective, but also of finding new ways of thinking the very notions of medium and dispositif. In this essay, the author examines Eisenstein’s understanding of the cinematic dispositif as a flexible, dynamic, evolging assemblage of techniques, spaces and operations focusing on two crucial moments of his long and complex career: the conference The Dynamic Square presented in Hollywood in 1930, and the unrealized film project Glass House presented that same year to the production company Paramount. In both cases, Eisenstein considers the screen, one of the crucial components of the cinematic dispositif, as at the same time the condition without which the projected images could not be visualized, a surface of changing dimensions and forms, and the site of a series of experimentations on montage and on cinematic space which in Glass House focuses on the aesthetic and social implications of a perfectly transparent space.

Keywords

• screen
• Eisenstein
• dispositif
• Dynamic Square
• Glass House