ABSTRACT
In Film Sense, Sergej Eisenstein claimed that in the wake of the failed attempts of Wagner, Scriabin, and Kandinsky to create a truly synaesthetic art, fi lm was the medium that would at last be able to realize this artistic vision. The term synaesthesia (from the Greek, syn-aisthesis, a union [syn] of sensations [aesthesis], or sensations felt together) was coined in a medical dictionary in 1874, at a time when Symbolist poetry was attracting attention to synaesthetic art. The mainspring of the Symbolists’ conception stems from Charles Baudelaire’s idea of “correspondences,” emblematically expressed in his poem of the same name:
Nature is a temple in which living pillars Sometimes emit confused words; Man crosses it through forests of symbols That observe him with familiar glances. Like long echoes that mingle in the distance In a profound tenebrous unity,
synaesthesiainfilm theory
Vast as the night and vast as light, Perfumes, sounds, and colors respond to one another.
