# Antonio Somaini (2021). *Formula pafosa, Pathosformel: Eisenstein and Warburg*. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic. > [!INFO] > Type:: [[&]] > Title:: Formula pafosa, Pathosformel: Eisenstein and Warburg > Author(s): [[Antonio Somaini]] > Year:: 2021 > Tags:: > DOI:: > Citekey:: somaini_formula_2021 > ZoteroURI:: [Open in Zotero: Formula pafosa, Pathosformel: Eisenstein and Warburg](zotero://select/items/@vassilieva_eisenstein_2021-1) > ReviewedDate:: [[2023-01-01]] ## Citation ```latex [@somaini_formula_2021] ``` ## Related ```dataview TABLE file.aliases AS "Title" FROM [[@vassilieva_eisenstein_2021-1]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ``` ## Summary ![[Kunichika_Sugoroku_Tea-house_D (1).jpg]] Toyohara Kunichika (1835-1900) _E-sugoroku Board of a Teahouse in the Yoshiwara_, Mid - 1860’s. Six Sheet Panel. 에이젠슈테인이 가부키를 처음 본 것은 1928년 그리고 [[@eisenstein_unexpected_1988]]를 쓰고 linked the archaic, centuries-long tradition of Kabuki with the latest stage in the technological development of cinema → sound cinema 그리고 1929년 에세이 [[@eisenstein_beyond_1988|Sergei Eisenstein (1988) Beyond the Shot]]에서 더 Develop했음. > “stating that the ‘monistic’ approach to the interweaving of music, stage design, acting, dancing and singing found in Kabuki – the fact that all these expressive registers were treated as ‘equivalents’ rather than hierarchically subordinated to one another – could provide a model for the future of audiovisual ‘montage thinking’.” ([[@eisenstein_beyond_1988]], 117, 122) (Somaini, 2021, p. 109) > “As in most of Eisenstein’s writings, the key question is how to understand the laws that govern the effectiveness of a work of art, its capacity to act on the mind, body and emotions of the spectator.6” (Somaini, 2021, p. 110) ![[1920px-El_Greco_(Domenikos_Theotokopoulos)_-_Laocoön_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg]] El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) - Laocoön ![[05orpheu.jpg]] Dürer’s drawing The Death of Orpheus ![[The Resurrection.jpg]] The Resurrection (1597 - 1600) ![[1527px-Leonardo_da_Vinci_-_Virgin_and_Child_with_St_Anne_C2RMF_retouched.jpg]] Leonardo’s St. Anne, the Virgin, and Child (1503–19) “Among these is the ‘unexpected juncture’, still somewhat understudied, that links Eisenstein with Aby Warburg (1866–1929).” (Somaini, 2021, p. 109) “Without being aware of one another, Eisenstein and Warburg both found in the idea of a ‘formula of pathos’ – Pathosformel in Warburg, formula pafosa in Eisenstein – a concept which was to play a crucial role in their understanding of the history, agency and power of images and artistic forms.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 109) “Eisenstein mentions the concept of a formula pafosa, sometimes called formula ekstaza (formula of ecstasy)” (Somaini, 2021, p. 109) See Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, ed. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 183. On Nonindifferent Nature, see Naum Kleiman’s introduction to the Russian edition (Naum Kleiman, ‘Pafos Eizenshteina’, in Sergei M. Eizenshtein, Neravnodushnaia priroda [Moscow: Muzei kino/d Eizenshein-tsentr, 2004], 5–32) and Pietro Montani’s introduction to the Italian edition (Pietro Montani, ‘Introduzione’, in Sergej M. Ejzenštejn, La natura non indifferente, ed. Pietro Montani [Venice: Marsilio, 1981], IX–XLI). “‘On the structure of things’ (1939), in which Eisenstein presents the three notions of organicity, pathos and ecstasy as the pillars of the entire theoretical construction of Nonindifferent Nature.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 110) “As in most of Eisenstein’s writings, the key question is how to understand the laws that govern the effectiveness of a work of art, its capacity to act on the mind, body and emotions of the spectator.6” (Somaini, 2021, p. 110) “This was to be a series of rectangular plates with black backgrounds and various montage-like arrangements of photographic reproductions which were supposed to map the ‘survival’ [Nachleben] and the spatio-temporal ‘migration’ [Wanderung], mainly from Greek and Roman antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, of a series of Pathosformeln, a series of recurring ‘heightened gestures’ [erregte Gebärde] that Warburg considered to be expressive of a number of intense prototypical emotions and affects.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 110) “oxymoronic’ since it associates the turbulent, unstable energy of pathos with the fixed, schematic nature of the formula.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 111) “What role do the concepts of formula pafosa and Pathosformel play in Eisenstein’s and Warburg’s interpretation of the history of images and  artistic forms?” (Somaini, 2021, p. 111) “What epistemological tools did they use to compare and analyse the different historical manifestations of the formula pafosa and the Pathosformel?” (Somaini, 2021, p. 111) “inally, can we identify, in both Eisenstein’s and Warburg’s intellectual itineraries, a common source that might explain such unexpected convergence?” (Somaini, 2021, p. 111) “the experience of a direct encounter with ‘ancient’ energies and affects which seemed to have survived through history before reappearing in the present.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 111) “In the first place, the journeys were travels in space which were experienced by both Warburg and Eisenstein as travels in time, reaching back to earlier, deeper strata of culture, in which Warburg hoped to find the origins of symbolic” (Somaini, 2021, p. 111) “thought and action, and Eisenstein believed he could observe the surviving forms of ‘prelogical’ and ‘sensuous thinking’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 112) “hese journeys made possible encounters with cultures perceived by both Warburg and Eisenstein as intertwining different historical layers, so that deeper, older strata seemed to have survived and mingled with later ones.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 112) “Both itineraries through New Mexico and Mexico provided direct contact with rituals and ceremonies in which bodies in a state of ecstatic frenzy experienced some kind of transformation, as if pathos and ecstasy had an intrinsically dynamic and performative nature.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 112) “their capacity to act on the body, mind and emotions of the spectator, could only be understood within a cultural-anthropological perspective.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 112) “The term Pathosformel appears for the first time in Warburg’s writings in the 1905 essay ‘Dürer and the Italian Antiquity’, in which he wrote that what the Italian artists of the Renaissance were searching for in the art of classical antiquity were not examples of a classicism based on the Apollinean values of ‘noble simplicity and silent greatness’ praised” (Somaini, 2021, p. 113) “but rather the models of an art inbued with a Dionysian energy of pathos: an art in which the protagonists of the Italian Renaissance could find, as Warburg writes, a series of ‘prototypes of heightened pathetical gestures’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 113) “These ‘moving accessories’ were for Warburg not only a stylistic trait that Italian painters of the late fifteenth century had found in models from classical antiquity, but also the signs of an understanding of pathos as a force that becomes visible at the intersection between inner bodily states and the natural, sensible milieu or medium surrounding the body itself.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 113) “‘accessory’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 113) “As the operator of a conversion between the intangible air and the visible bodies, but also between the visible movements and the motions of the soul.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 113) “it is because they provided artists with an invaluable #gurative and pathetic tool: a kind of interface that bodies could have, at their edges, between the ‘external causes’ (relating to the space outside, to the atmosphere) and the ‘internal causes’ (relating to the space inside, to the mood) of their movements.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 114) “Warburg saw examples of how ‘forcefully’ an ‘archaeologically authentic Pathosformel’ of murderous fury had ‘migrated’, thanks to some kind of ‘survival’ followed by a ‘re-entry’, from classical antiquity to the Italian and the northern Renaissance, travelling across a kind of ‘pathetic current’ [pathetische Strömung] that carried a series of ‘prototypes of heightened pathetic gestures’ and acted as a powerful ‘style-building’ factor.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 114) “an ‘historical phenomenology of the energetic formation of expressive values’,28 which was the basis of Warburg’s cultural history of images.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 114) “Warburg’s intention, as we know from the ‘Introduction’ he wrote in 1929, the year of his death, was to establish an ‘inventory’ of ‘pre-coined expressive values’ concerning the ‘representation of life in motion’” (Somaini, 2021, p. 114) “intense pathos-laden emotions that were preserved in the collective memory as ‘engrams of affective experience’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 115) Warburg, ‘Mnemosyne Einleitung’, 631. “According to both of these, memory was not a mental activity specific to human consciousness, but a property of all organized, organic matter that explained many processes of reproduction and transmission between an organism and its environment” (Somaini, 2021, p. 115) “‘engrams of emotional experience” (Somaini, 2021, p. 115) Warburg, ‘Mnemosyne Einleitung’, 631. “The hundreds of black-and-white photographic reproductions that Warburg planned to include in the plates of the published version of the atlas, were conceived by him as ‘dynamograms’” (Somaini, 2021, p. 115) Warburg, ‘Mnemosyne I. Aufzeichnungen’, 640. “that is, visual diagrams or ‘seismographs’” (Somaini, 2021, p. 115) “emotional energy” (Somaini, 2021, p. 115) “tracing the trajectories” (Somaini, 2021, p. 115) “The various texts by Eisenstein that have been assembled under the title Nonindifferent Nature were not the first in which he engaged with questions of pathos and ecstasy.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 116) “The artistic and political dimension of pathos had already been tackled in 1926, in the context of the German reception of The Battleship Potemkin, which Eisenstein described in the essay ‘Constantsa’ (1926) as characterized by a ‘new psychologism’, moving away from the ‘montage of attractions’ which had played a key role in The Strike (1925)” (Somaini, 2021, p. 116) “In 1929 the question of pathos and ecstasy recurs in an essay entitled ‘How Is Pathos Made?’” (Somaini, 2021, p. 116) “‘an ecstatic, trance-like state’” (Somaini, 2021, p. 116) “Another 1929 essay, ‘The Dramaturgy of Film Form’, stated that the ‘emotional dynamisation’ of the spectator derives from the capacity of film form to capture and reproduce ‘in concrete forms’ the tensions and conflicts that characterize ‘the dialectical system of objects’ to transmit their transformative energy to the spectator.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 116) “As Eisenstein writes, the ‘dynamisation of material’ which constitutes film form ‘produces, not in the spatial but in the” (Somaini, 2021, p. 116) “psychological, i.e. the emotional, field’ a form of ‘pathos’, with the last pages of the essay offering examples from the end of The Strike (1924) and from various passages of October.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 117) “The connection between pathos, ecstasy and dialectics is crucial to understanding the concepts of ‘formula of pathos’ and ‘formula of ecstasy’ that we find in Nonindifferent Nature.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 117) “In the texts that make up this book, Eisenstein considers nature to be essentially ecstasic because of its dialectical structure and pathos to be the emotion that accompanies the feeling of embodied participation in the dialectical processes of nature.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 117) “Eisenstein considered the realm of natural phenomena to be characterized by constant quantitative and qualitative transformations.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 117) “The artist experiences this emotion and injects it into a work of art which is itself in a state of continuous ‘ecstasy’, a leap of each separate element or sign of the work of art ‘from quality to quality’,” (Somaini, 2021, p. 117) “The four sections of Nonindifferent Nature examine different examples of creating pathos and ecstasy in works of art predating cinema – drawing, painting, architecture, theatre and literature – from the most varied cultural and historical  traditions.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 118) “‘the ecstastic scheme of the construction of pathos’” (Somaini, 2021, p. 118) Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, 185. “As often in his writings, Eisenstein cites examples from his own films and describes ‘the pathos of the milk separator” (Somaini, 2021, p. 118) “‘gigantic qualitative leap in the area of social progress, from individual landownership to collective agriculture’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 118) “In the field of architecture, Eisenstein finds examples of ecstatic forms in the multilayered, labyrinthine spaces of Piranesi’s Prisons (particularly in the series dated 1745 and 1761–5) and in the ‘telescoped’ interior spaces of his own Ivan the Terrible, as well as in the upward thrusts of Gothic cathedrals and in the ‘vertical landscapes’ of Chinese and Japanese paintings.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 119) “In yet other cases, ‘being beside oneself ’ appears in works which describe or visualize some kind of immersion or dissolution of a subject into the surrounding natural environment: a merging of the self and the landscape, a blurring of the limits that separate individuals from their encompassing milieu.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 119) “This may happen when the pathos of a character radiates ‘beyond the limits of the human being’ and spreads ‘both to the milieu and the surroundings of the character’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 119) “Eisenstein also found examples of this overspill of pathos from a literary character in the way that Émile Zola compels the ‘surrounding environment’ [sreda] and ‘atmosphere’ to resound ‘in unison’ with the emotional tonality of a given moment in his ‘realist’ depictions of human existence.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 119) “This he considered as equivalent to the idea of a ‘nonindifferent nature’, since it refers to a situation in which the landscape acts This ebook belongs to IL MOON ([email protected]), purchased on 28/04/202” (Somaini, 2021, p. 119) “!e Eisenstein Universe 120 as ‘a complex carrier of the possibilities for a plastic interpretation of emotions’, ‘resonating’ with some kind of affective tonality or ‘atmosphere’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 120) “He mentions also a whole series of literary and pictorial works, in which what is at stake is a kind of ‘dissolution in nature and a union with it’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 120) “Eisenstein asks himself what unites all these different examples: is it a simple analogy, a simple formal resemblance, or do we find in all of them ‘the same laws’ the same ‘formula’?” (Somaini, 2021, p. 120) “The question was a difficult one, for anyone writing in the cultural and political  context of the Soviet Union just after the end of the Second World War, dominated by a strong nationalism and a teleological vision of history. Eisenstein  answers it by saying that what explains the ‘suprahistorical’, ‘supranational’ and ‘supra-social’ nature of the ‘formula of pathos’ is the fact that, in the works of art that follow it, the spectator experiences ‘a sense of participation in the laws governing the course of natural phenomena’” (Somaini, 2021, p. 120) Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, 168-9 “To experience the state of pathos and ecstasy means, therefore, to experience ‘a transport out of concepts, out of representation, out of images, out of any rudiments of consciousness whatsoever, into the sphere of “pure” effect, feeling, sensation, “state”’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 121) “Warburg” (Somaini, 2021, p. 122) “For him, the effectiveness of the formula pafosa is reached when the  artist, the artwork and the spectator experience that same state of ‘being beside oneself ’ [vykhod iz sebya] which is constitutive of all natural phenomena.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 122) “For both Warburg and Eisenstein, the effectiveness of the ‘formula of pathos’ is rooted in the process of ‘empathy’ that ensures its transmission across time.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 122) “‘one with and merged with the organic environment and nature surrounding him’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 122) “Again, for both Warburg and Eisenstein, the ‘formula of pathos’ has a transmedial, transhistorical dimension.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 122) “Warburg’s Pathosformeln ‘migrate’ across a non-linear, non-progressive history conceived in terms of ‘survival’ and ‘re-entry’, and what explains their persistence is their being rooted in ‘engrams’ engraved in the material fabric of collective memory. Eisenstein’s formula pafosa, as we saw, is ‘suprahistorical’, ‘supranational’ and ‘supra-social’ because such are the dialectical laws of nature that it captures and transmits.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 122) “Warburg’s energeticist approach to the cultural history of images leads him to think in terms  of ‘currents’, ‘polarities’ and ‘inversions’, focusing on the ways in which the same Pathosformel might oscillate, throughout history, between opposite magnetic poles, as we saw in the case of the nymph.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 122) “within the world of natural phenomena, a series of ‘shifts’, ‘leaps’ and reversals” (Somaini, 2021, p. 123) “For both authors, finally, the tool used to study the ‘formula of pathos’ is montage: the open, variable montage of photographic reproductions that Warburg practised in the plates of the atlas Mnemosyne, and the literary montage that Eisenstein deploys in his writings, through the endless sequences of examples, digressions and citations that become increasingly prominent in the 1930s and 1940s, sometimes also supplemented by drawings, schemes, cutout reproductions and even photo-collages.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 123) “In montage – which Eisenstein considered a ‘correlational and comparative activity’ [sootnositelnaya sopostavitelnaya deyatelnost] and Warburg a ‘comparative observation’ [vergleichende Betrachtung]” (Somaini, 2021, p. 123) “both believed they had found a heuristic and morphological tool to study the restless migrations and metamorphic manifestations of the ‘formula of pathos’.” (Somaini, 2021, p. 123) ## Annotation ### Related ```dataview LIST FROM [[@vassilieva_eisenstein_2021-1]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ```