Infinite Eisenstein

This essay offers a brief philosophical speculation about two central and widely-studied aspects of Sergei Eisenstein's film-making, both associated with the thought and artistic practice of Lev Tolstoy. These two aspects are montage and the immersion in the film discussed by Eisenstein in 'The Structure of Film' where he refers to something like Tolstoy's theory of art as infection (заражение) or affective mimesis. I suggest that these two aspects, whether avowed by Eisenstein or not, have to do with the infinite. They have to do with the infinite in its two principal 'forms,' the qualitative infinite of absolute immediacy and the quantitative infinite of the infinitely countable or uncountable. The essay concludes with a discussion of the significant differences between Tolstoy's conception of the infinite and that of Eisenstein with reference to Martin Heidegger's notion of thought as mutual transformation of the thinker and the object of thought.