© Lo Sguardo - rivista di filosofia N. 25, 2017 (III) - Rivoluzione: un secolo dopo 183 Contributi/9 Stuck in-Between: Supple Gender in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) Natalya Khokholova Articolo sottoposto a doppia blind review. Inviato il 31/01/2017. Accettato il 23/10/2017 Eisenstein’s films as well as his sketches and conceptual essays are strongly suggestive of the artist’s avant-gardist preference for independently functioning and floating limbs over articulate and emotionally responsive human characters 1 . However, in his historical drama, Alexander Nevsky (1938), regardless of their marginal position and the scarcity of their appearances within a visual narrative of sequential shots, female characters guard and reaffirm the boundaries of the two ideological agendas: of the artist himself inspired by the revolutionary aptitudes of the modern art-form, and the authoritative office of the Soviet cinematography under Stalin. Women, in this Eisenstein production, happen to be makers of meaning who address both socialist realist (imposed on the artist) and Eisenstein’s own, formalist aesthetics of intellektual’noe kino that was developed under the ideological climate of the Russian Revolution. This article uncovers how Sergei Eisenstein preserved his artistic autonomy and individuality in Stalin Prize-winning film Alexander Nevsky (1938) via the means of the avant-gardist device of plasmaticness. The study of Eisenstein’s film, Alexander Nevsky, demonstrates that there is no give and take interaction between the spectator and the woman bodies represented on the screen, because formalist aesthetics is designed to work towards the functional dominance of art over people and their sentiments and desires. «A work of art, understood dynamically, is just this process of arranging images in the feelings and mind of the spectator» 2 . 1 Marie Seton, Yon Barna, Rostislav Iurenev, David Bordwell, Oksana Bulgakowa, Anne Nes- bet, and Khristin Thompson—produced a substantial amount of work on Eisenstein’s Life and Art, in which they acknowledge Eisenstein’s formalist aesthetics and his artistic appreciation of the engine-driven kinetics of moving objects. During his lifetime, for the uniqueness of his artistic visions, simultaneously Eisenstein was praised and criticized. For example, a third-rate director, David Maryan, provides enthusiastic, in the light of Stalinist judgment and cen- sorship environment, although somewhat uncouth, evidential critique. I place it here as an example to demonstrate Eisenstein’s non-conformist position among the majority of the Soviet filmmakers, intellectuals of that time, and his disconnect from the Socialist realist ‘norm’: «For- malism, formalism and once again formalism... This is a terrible disease with you. Formalism condemns you to loneliness; it is a world view of pessimists, who are in conflict with our era. I should say that I hate formalism with all my being, hate its elements in works of art, even when they are done by such masters as you. I became your opponent when I saw October. I saw the Revolution through your eyes. I did not see Bezhin Meadow, only excerpts concerning the fire, but that was enough. How could you make a fire the central episode in the process of kolkhoz building?». See A. J. LaValley and B. P. Scherr, Eisenstein At 100, New Brunswick 2001, p. 202. 2 S. Eisenstein and L. Jay, The Film Sense, New York 1947, p. 17. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1156985