17 - From expressive movement to the “basic problem”

Summary

This chapter presents the collaboration between the protagonists of the author's story, the film director Sergei Eisenstein and the psychologists Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky and their German colleague Kurt Lewin. The untraditional ideas of an artist interested in psychology, psychoanalysis, and anthropology inspired these psychologists, and vice versa, and this new relationship between them resulted in a new psychological theory of art. The idea of expressive movement as the emotional appearance of affect in body movement was important for several theater schools. Eisenstein declared that expressive movements on stage were always conflicted movements, a conflict between reflex and inhibition, urge and will formed the foundation of his "bi-mechanics". He looks for an analogous primary conflict in art, which he calls the "basic problem" (Grundproblem), the first title of his book. Vygotsky's concept of inner speech influenced Eisenstein's reflections on constructing inner monologue in film.