ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with Sergei Eisenstein’s consecration of Chinese theatrical and cultural traditions. For Eisenstein, the art of traditional Chinese theatre was peculiar to the structures of the profoundest Chinese thought that was canonized by tradition and enriched by the experience of latter-day generations. It was such a complex system of thought or what he called “sensual thinking” that cast a strong and lasting spell on the mind of Eisenstein when he watched Mei Lanfang’s performances. This chapter examines Eisenstein’s interpretation of the tradition of Chinese theatre and of Mei Lanfang’s art and investigates the way Eisenstein consecrated (and thus spectralized) Mei Lanfang’s art in the most ancient Chinese tradition and found in it the “now-time” for the future that Eisenstein envisioned for the Soviet theatre and cinema. Eisenstein’s revolutionary modernist “Method” was illuminated and haunted by a constellation of traditions of humanity, including Chinese and Japanese traditions, in its aestheticizing (sensual and imagistic) approach to the ideological, and the political, of Socialist Realism.
