Eisenstein's Paris Diary: An Introduction

Abstract This introductory text unfolds and interprets some key elements from Eisenstein's Paris Diary, contextualizing his encounters and providing further details for understanding the filmmaker's fragmentary and sometimes cryptic diary as an autotheoretical practice. Written from the perspective of one immersed in the artistic and intellectual Paris of 1929 and 1930—as evidenced by Eisenstein's encounters with Colette, Tristan Tzara, Gertrude Stein, André Malraux, Filippo T. Marinetti, Abel Gance, Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Kiki de Montparnasse, Darius Milhaud, and others—the diary highlights the importance of his exchange with the avant-garde micro-cinematographer Jean Painlevé, as well as his theoretical and political kinship with the heterodox Surrealist group around the journal Documents. The introduction investigates the way in which Eisenstein's Paris Diary both documents daily events and serves as an ephemeral depository for the author's theoretical ideas on filmmaking and montage, seeing these in terms of such late works as Method, Montage, and Disney.