Eisenstein, Shub and the Gender of the Author as Producer
biography to be written in or translated into English.1 Numerous shorter biographical sketches have been published and Eisenstein's sometimes enigmatic personal life, his very public career, and his unfinished as well as completed creative projects continue to fascinate readers and viewers of his films. This fascination has been renewed as, over the last two decades in particular, hitherto inaccessible archival material has gradually become available. The existence of four Eisenstein biographies in English suggests that what is known about the great Soviet director lends itself readily to dramatic narrativisation, and thatthere is enough interest in him as an individual creator to periodically justify this enterprise. The Eisenstein biographies are one tangible manifestation of what lan Christie refers to at the beginning of his 'Introduction' to the collection of essays Eisenstein Rediscovered: the '"aura" that surrounds him'.2 Christie goes on to discuss new film historical work in the 1980s and 1990s which has substantially redefined the terms of that 'aura'. This work fully acknowledges the diversity of Eisenstein's interests and activities, and situates him within a 'new, more sophisticated totality' which takes into account preas well as post-Revolutionary cultural and intellectual influences.3 The net result of this new historical work has been to enhance rather than displace Eisenstein's 'aura', but the brief allusion to Walter Benjamin should give pause for thought. Eisenstein emerged from a Soviet avant-garde cultural context which questioned traditional notions of authorship and influenced Benjamin's critique of the individualised creation of 'auratic' artworks. The Western European and North American canonisation of Eisenstein as a seminal filmmaker and theorist (a reception history which has yet to be thoroughly explored) has obscured the fact that, as far as film and media authorship is concerned, Soviet avant-garde film culture bequeathed a divided legacy to Western scholarship.4 Discussions of Eisenstein tend to take place quite separately from considerations of the radical critique and reformulation of traditional notions of authorship (cinematic and otherwise) proposed by certain Soviet avantgarde theorists in the 1920s. This debate around authorship passed into the intellectual traditions of Western Marxism, principally through the work of writers such as Walter Benjamin, in 'The Author as Producer' (1934), and informs more recent reformulations such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger's 'Constituents of a Theory of the Media' (1970).5 Although he has now been severed from this particular historical context, Eisenstein's emergence as one of the key reference points within world film culture was intimately bound up with this Soviet avant-garde debate about authorship which fed into Western Marxism.