In October 188's “Visceral Economies, Queer Dialectics: Eisenstein Meets Bataille,” Elena Vogman argues that there is an “affinity” between Sergei Eisenstein's and Georges Bataille's views, thereby contesting Annette Michelson's verdict that any similarities between them are “superficial.” This article contends that Michelson is right, and that Vogman provides no evidence of an affinity between Eisenstein's and Bataille's thinking. In doing so, I defend the important methodological principle, exemplified by Michelson's work, that theory should not be applied, top down and a priori, to art as if it were mere grist for the theory mill. Eisenstein was a deeply original thinker and filmmaker, and while he might have shared some of Bataille's interests, he did so for reasons antithetical to Bataille's. His work should not, therefore, be appropriated by what Michelson called the “veritable Bataille industry … [that] has proliferated to the point of generating a grille through which the reading of the Eisensteinian text is now proposed.”

Longtime readers of October hardly need reminding that artist Michael Snow, who passed away in January 2023 at the age of ninety-four, was of singular importance to our journal, and especially to one of our founding editors, Annette Michelson. Michelson's first article devoted exclusively to a North American filmmaker “of the independent persuasion” was about Snow and especially his film Wavelength (1967), and this film in many ways exemplified the advanced art of the late 1960s and ‘70s that October was founded, in part, to defend and champion: art that was perceived as analytic rather than expressive; that expanded its medium even while hyperbolizing its defining conventions; that foregrounded temporality and duration; and that prompted cognitive reflection on the viewer's part about their phenomenological experience of the work and its possible sociopolitical ramifications. 1 (In retrospect, the film is also notable for its humor, which, while not addressed in much depth at the time, was partly informed by the Duchampian legacy of puns and wordplay, often involving the titles of works, that also influenced October and its early canon of artists. Humor was to remain a major, but underappreciated, feature of Snow's work.) Snow first appeared in October in issue No. 4 (Autumn 1977), with his “Notes for Rameau's Nephew,” about his film Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974), his contribution to the so-called New Talkie of the 1970s. 2 The same issue contained an article by critic Amy Taubin, who had acted in Wavelength , about an exhibition of Snow's photographs at MoMA. 3 Almost two years later, Michelson published in these pages her second major text on Snow, “About Snow,” in which she revisited Wavelength , but this time through the lens of a more politicized and psychoanalytically inflected version of phenomenology, which she took from French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry. 4 Now, according to Michelson, the film affirms the spectator as “transcendental subject” by offering a “gratifying confirmation of a threatened sovereignty” to audiences, something that is even more true, Michelson argued, of Snow's film La région centrale (1970). 5 Snow would feature in many subsequent essays published in the journal, including in a cluster of texts devoted to his work in issue No. 114 in 2005, among which was an interview with Snow conducted by Michelson about his work in music. 6 He was also the subject of an October Files (No. 24) co-edited by Michelson and Kenneth White.

Two film theorists, D. N. Rodowick and Murray Smith, have recently addressed the place of the natural sciences in the study of film and art, and they reach diametrically opposed conclusions. Rodowick argues that natural-scientific explanations have little or no role to play in the study of film and art as “cultural practices,” while Smith advocates a “naturalized aesthetics of film,” which he describes as “an approach that … treats [film] as a phenomenon which is likely to be illuminated by various types of scientific as well as traditional humanistic research.” In this paper, I argue that, while both views contain important insights, they are ultimately mistaken. Rodowick overlooks the important role the natural sciences can play in explaining the perceptual, cognitive, affective, and bodily capacities that shape and constrain our engagement with art as well as the properties of artworks that elicit and inform this engagement. Nevertheless, this does not mean, I maintain, that aesthetics should be naturalized, as Smith believes, given that the types of explanations standardly proffered in film studies and other humanistic disciplines can be autonomous from those of the natural sciences in the sense of being explanatorily self-sufficient.

Nineteen scholars, writers, and friends remember Annette Michelson (1922–2018), cofounder of October . Written tributes by Giuliana Bruno, Scott Bukatman, Enrico Camporesi, Edward Dimendberg, Jean-Michel Frodon, Amos Gitai, Vivian Gornick, Gertrud Koch, Antonia Lant, Stuart Liebman, Anne McCarthy, Tony Pipolo, Robert Polidori, Yvonne Rainer, Ethan Taubes, Allen S. Weiss, and Federico Windhausen, and a series of photographs by Babette Mangolte.

Rosalind E. Krauss and Malcolm Turvey honor critic and film historian Annette Michelson, co-founder of October , who died in September 2018 at the age of ninety-five. They detail Michelson's contributions to the journal in essays, translations, and the editing of special issues, and announce a forthcoming issue dedicated to her scholarship.

Modern artists have long been fascinated with the pantomime, circus, and other comic entertainments, and since the late 19th century, many modernists have made use of the figure of the clown in advancing their avant-garde agendas. Turvey calls this strain within modernism “comedic modernism,” by which he does not mean humorous modernism, but rather the employment of the slapstick comedian as a subject and/or model in modernist theory and practice. Turvey accounts for the pervasive appeal of the clown to modernists by examining the European avant-garde's appropriation of film comics in the interwar period. He argues that comedian comedy's major conventions accorded with and sometimes shaped modernist innovations in this period, and that there was no single reason modern artists were drawn to the figure of the slapstick film comedian. Moreover, he suggests, most of the forms of assimilation of the clown by modernists were already established by the time they turned toward American popular cinema in the 1910s. Turvey identifies several features of slapstick comedy that modernists fastened on to: the de-psychologization and objectification of the comedian; the figure of the alienated, “sad clown”; incongruity in gags and narrative structures; the satire of the bourgeoisie and the carnivalesque leveling of social distinctions; the release of primitive, instinctual behavior; and the privileging of often rebellious objects. He then shows how Rene Clair synthesized some of these variants in Entr'acte (1924), the celebrated avant-garde short he made with Dadaist Francis Picabia, as well as some of his other more popular modernist films of the 1920s.

Stuart Liebman : I want to take up several issues in Malcolm's introduction in order to amplify, and perhaps to qualify, some of his remarks. He rightly notes that we are presently living through a period of scholarly engagement with early film theory. Malcolm implies that the current interest is somehow larger and more extensive than it used to be, and there is some truth in that. In addition to those texts he mentions, one must cite Richard Taylor's massive efforts to reclaim through retranslation vast amounts of Eisenstein's writings, including a great deal of new material. He has also done the same for many of Pudovkin's texts. Taylor's efforts built on his joint project with Ian Christie to substantially expand the texts available by lesser-known Soviet figures in their excellent anthology The Film Factory , published in 1988, the same year that Abel's anthology on French cinema was released.

Classical film theorists are commonly divided into two opposing camps. In one are placed those, such as Rudolf Arnheim and V. I. Pudovkin, who “put their faith in the image,” to borrow André Bazin's phrase, arguing that “the most aesthetically significant feature of the film medium is its capacity to manipulate reality, that is, to rearrange and thereby reconstitute the profilmic event (the event that transpires in front of the camera).” In the other belong realists, like Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, who “put their faith in reality,” believing that “the truly cinematic film stays as close to recording as possible, eschewing the interpretation, recreation, or reconstitution of reality.” One of the many unusual things about the films and writings of Dziga Vertov is that they appear to straddle both camps at once.

When cinema studies was institutionalized in the Anglo-American academy starting in the late 1960s, film scholars for the most part turned away from preexisting traditions of film theorizing in favor of new theories then becoming fashionable in the humanities, principally semiotics and psychoanalysis. Earlier, so-called “classical” film theories—by which I mean, very broadly, film theories produced before the advent of psychoanalytic-semiotic film theorizing in the late ′60s—were either ignored or rejected as naive and outmoded. Due to the influence of the Left on the first generation of film academics, some were even dismissed as “idealist” or in other ways politically compromised. There were, of course, some exceptions. The work of pre-WWII left-wing thinkers and filmmakers such as Benjamin, Kracauer, the Russian Formalists, Bakhtin, Vertov, and Eisenstein continued to be translated and debated, and, due principally to the efforts of Dudley Andrew, André Bazin's film theory remained central to the discipline, if only, for many, as something to be overcome rather than built upon. Translations of texts by Jean Epstein appeared in October and elsewhere in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Richard Abel's two-volume anthology, French Film Theory and Criticism 1907–1939 (1988), generated interest in French film theory before Bazin. But on the whole, classical film theory was rejected as a foundation for contemporary film theorizing, even by film theorists like Noël Carroll with no allegiance to semiotics and psychoanalysis.