Plasmatic mimesis: Notes on Eisenstein’s (inter)faces
Plasmatic mimesis: Notes on Eisenstein’s (inter)faces

Summary/Abstract: This essay explores the question of (inter)faces as a problem of mimetic form in the work ofSergei Eisenstein. While Eisenstein ’s early theory of attractions emphasizes the productionof audience effects through “motor imitation,” his later writings appear to depart from thismodel for sake of a notion of “ex-stasis” that would transport the spectator out of her or hiscurrent state. These two sides of Eisenstein’s thought are brought together here in the conceptof “plasmatic mimesis,” which is explored through the figure of the face in a number of histheoretical texts and his first film Strike (1925). By taking up the device most associated withthe face in Eisenstein – typage – and reading a specific instance in Strike ’s superimposition ofanimal and human faces, this essay ultimately aims to decenter the face as a privileged site formimesis-as-mirroring in cinema and audio-visual media. Thinking the face through conceptof “plasmatic mimesis” makes it into one form among others but in doing so it frees the faceto assume the principle Eisenstein calls “formal ecstacy”: the capacity of all form not simplyto mimic but to ex-statically stand beside and beyond itself.

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