Eisenstein reads Diderot: Cinema before Cinema

Abstract

The article examines a specific aspect of Sergei Eisenstein’s reception of Denis Diderot, focusing on the way the filmmaker reads in the Enlightenment philosopher’s theatrical writings a call to work on form rather than on content. To this end, it first reconstructs the editorial fortune of Eisenstein’s key text Diderot Wrote About Cinema, emphasizing the existence of an early Spanish edition published in Buenos Aires (1982). It then situates this reading within a broader constellation of influences (post-revolutionary Russian theatre, Stanislavski, and Meyerhold) and analyzes how Eisenstein, drawing on Diderot, reformulates the relationship between theatre and the cinematograph: cinema appears both as a “bastard son” (when it confines itself to filmed theatre) and as a “natural son” (when it technically fulfills Diderotian ideals such as authenticity, the fourth wall, and pictorial composition). Finally, it shows that Eisenstein’s exploration of framing and camera movement extends, in cinematic terms, Diderotian procedures of vision and spatial traversal, thereby illuminating the persistence of a “silent legacy” across a century and a half.