Response to Roundtable Comments

Abstract

In her response, Neuberger elaborates and extends a few of her key arguments as discussed by Brandenberger, Kleiman, Petrone, Platt, and Tsivian. She focuses on questions involving Eisenstein’s exceptionality, the general reception of Ivan the Terrible, Stalin’s response to the film and its homoeroticism, and fundamental questions about Eisenstein’s interpretation of Ivan and his reign, its application to the present and to all rulers. She clarifies fundamental questions about Eisenstein’s conception of dialectics, and shows his commitment to dialectics as something more than more than binary conflict. Eisenstein not only saw all phenomena as “unities of opposites”, but contrasted the dialectical contradictory with a unitary definitive, giving us neither a simpler dualism nor a permanent state of contradiction. The categorical doesn’t cancel out the contested (or vice versa): together the categorical and the contested create another level of complexity, making it possible to see Ivan the Terrible as a film that repeatedly poses questions about power, violence, and human perception, and a film that is a radical critique of Stalinism and Soviet ideology. The author underlines, that in This Thing of Darkness she tried to show that the search for “meaning” in Eisenstein (and in my reading of Eisenstein) was no simple path toward a definitive truth, but is something like the way we experience films: seeing, hearing, intuiting, sensing, learning, feeling, wondering, learning a little more, and eventually thinking through what we have seen and experienced in order to make it meaningful for us.