Stuck in-Between: Supple Gender in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938)

Eisenstein’s films as well as his sketches and conceptual essays are strongly suggestive of the artist’s avant-gardist preference for independently functioning and floating limbs over articulate and emotionally responsive human characters[1]. However, in his historical drama, Alexander Nevsky (1938), regardless of their marginal position and the scarcity of their appearances within a visual narrative of sequential shots, female characters guard and reaffirm the boundaries of the two ideological agendas: of the artist himself inspired by the revolutionary aptitudes of the modern art-form, and the authoritative office of the Soviet cinematography under Stalin. Women, in this Eisenstein production, happen to be makers of meaning who address both socialist realist (imposed on the artist) and Eisenstein’s own, formalist aesthetics of intellektual’noe kino that was developed under the ideological climate of the Russian Revolution. This article uncovers how Sergei Eisenstein preserved his artistic autonomy and individuality in Stalin Prize-winning film Alexander Nevsky (1938) via the means of the avant-gardist device of plasmaticness. The study of Eisenstein’s film, Alexander Nevsky, demonstrates that there is no give and take interaction between the spectator and the woman bodies represented on the screen, because formalist aesthetics is designed to work towards the functional dominance of art over people and their sentiments and desires