Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema7/2/2012·DOI·Read paper
Abstract
Sergei Eisenstein made drawings more or less constantly from the time he was a child until the end of his life, with only a short break in the 1920s when he was making his first films. Among the thousands of preserved drawings is a large collection depicting people (and animals, and various anthropomorphized features of sexual anatomy) having sex. Rarely discussed or analysed, the sex drawings are usually seen in a purely biographical context, but they were thematically and aesthetically fundamental to Eisenstein’s artistic and theoretical writing, which explores the diverse ways that perception, consciousness and creativity originate in the body. Far from being only ‘the return of the repressed’, Eisenstein used the drawing process as a laboratory to examine the often violent extremes of desire as he was developing his ideas on the wellsprings of artistic creativity in the body’s inner divisions and the human wish for connection and ecstatic transcendence and transformation.
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