El dadaísmo de Eisenstein en El diario de Glumov

Abstract

Eisenstein made a short film in 1923 that was to be part of a theatrical performance entitled Glumov's Diary. This film is his first cinematographic work and is considered a Dadaist experiment. The play The Diary of a Scoundrel that Ostrovsky premiered in 1868 in Moscow is the basis of the show devised by the filmmaker for the Proletkult. In this article we analyze a selection of resources and motifs used in this film to try to identify their intertextual and contextual connections. The analysis leads us to the conclusion that these motifs and scriptural forms are closely related to the French fantastic cinema of authors such as Méliès, Chomon, Cohl, Deed or Linder. These directors, who were very successful during the first twenty years of the twentieth century, were strongly influenced by the Parisian avant-garde of the late nineteenth century among which the Incoherents stood out. The use of these textual elements by the Soviet filmmaker is, moreover, perfectly consistent with his theoretical elaborations on the montage of attractions.