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The Theater of Attractions*

SERGEI TRET’IAKOV

Although the “attraction” achieved its fame as a component of Sergei Eisenstein’s cine-
matic montage practice, it should not be forgotten that its origins lie in the collaborative
theater work of Eisenstein and Tret’iakov from 1923.1 Influenced by the reflexology of Ivan
Pavlov and the biomechanical labor science of Aleksei Gastev, the two proposed the theory of
the attraction in an attempt to establish rational norms for evaluating the affective content
of the theatrical event. As Eisenstein would later state, the attraction was a “unit for measur-
ing the force of art.” The basic idea of an aesthetic action that stimulates the organism of the
spectator was not in and of itself a noteworthy innovation at the time; in fact, the Russian
art journals of the day were flooded with articles focused on advancing the field of research
that Mayakovsky designated as “physiological criticism,” a discipline whose object of study
was the art work’s use-value as an instrument to organize the neural responses of the specta-
tor.2 Rather, Tret’iakov’s particular contribution in “The Theater of Attractions” was to
mobilize these experiments with the psychophysiology of spectatorial processes for the project of
dismantling aesthetic illusion tout court.
If conventional theater addressed the audience as an abstract and universalized sub-
ject, the theater of attractions stipulated that the productions must be tailored according to
the variable ideological and physical composition of different audiences. And if narrative
theater contained the intrigue within the stage’s visual proscenium, the actor in the theater

* “Teatr attraktsionov,” Oktiabr’ mysli, no. 1 (1924), pp. 53–57. Translator Kristin Romberg is grate-
ful to Dmitri Gutov and Aleksei Penzin for clarifying aspects of the Russian text, and to Devin Fore for
editorial advice.
1. In 1923 and 1924 Tret’iakov worked closely with Eisenstein in the First Worker’s Theater of the
Moscow Proletkul’t, where together they produced the first plays designated as montages of attractions:
an adaptation of Ostrovskii’s Even a Wise Man Stumbles and two plays by Tret’iakov, Are You Listening,
Moscow? and Gasmasks. Their close collaboration would, moreover, continue after Eisenstein left the the-
ater to work as a filmmaker. Eisenstein discusses the attraction in “The Montage of Attractions” (1923)
and the “Montage of Film Attractions” (1924), both of which are translated in Writings 1922–1934, vol. 1
of S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1988).
2. Between 1923 and 1925, numerous articles that appeared in Lef, Zhizn’ iskusstva, and Sovetskoe
iskusstvo proposed a variety of techniques for quantifying and standardizing the reactions of the specta-
tor in the theater and cinema.

OCTOBER 118, Fall 2006, pp. 19–26. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
20 OCTOBER

of attractions faced the spectator as a physical presence in the auditorium. The theater of
attractions focused attention not on the spectacle but on the audience as a concrete and tangi-
ble entity to be affected. For this reason Tret’iakov proposed that the theater of attractions could
be likened to a surgical theater whose object was the spectator, although he insisted that this
patient must be one who is starkly sober: he must be operated upon without anesthesia, with-
out the haze of aesthetic semblance or the prophylaxis of representation.3 The spectator must be
made aware of the fact that his own body was the object of this theatrical procedure. By con-
cretizing the audience and incorporating this embodied subject as an element of the
performance, the theater of attractions breached the epistemological barrier that created the
spectacle’s illusion. It thereby disabled a contemplative mode of aesthetic consumption.
The evolution of this theatrical experiment culminated with Tret’iakov’s 1926 I Want
a Baby.4 Continuing to eschew densely plotted narrative forms, Tret’iakov designed this final
“montage of attractions” to be constantly interrupted by discussions and seminars on various
topics germane to the play’s subject matter, eugenics, and even concluded by inviting the
audience to come on stage and view an actual exhibition of genetically “exemplary” children.
In the process, it perforated the score of the play, the source of its integrity as an autonomous
art object. In the last montage of attractions, then, the spectator steps into an open-ended
work. So while theater critics speculated about various methods for acquiring audience feed-
back––questionnaires, hidden cameras, etc.5—Tret’iakov built this feedback mechanism into
the text of the play itself. Perhaps we could thus characterize I Want a Baby as a precursor to
the happening; or perhaps a closer relative, both genealogically and sociopolitically, would be
Bertolt Brecht’s Great Pedagogy. In either case, the director of I Want a Baby, Vsevolod
Meyerhold, had clearly drawn the logical conclusion when he insisted that the publicity for
the play should not announce “first, second, and third ‘show’ [ spektakl’], but first, second,
and third ‘discussion.’” 6

The recent history of Russian theater has shown close parallels with other
forms of art, particularly literature and painting. Once subjective impressionism and
symbolist stylization had done away with any sense of reality in art, once art had
withdrawn beyond the boundaries of reality into a realm of illusion where “there
abides not sickness, nor sadness, and especially no class war,” there came a period

3. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Rabochii teatr,” Oktiabr’ mysli, nos. 5–6 (1924), p. 56.
4. While the montage of attractions would live on in Eisenstein’s film work, it nevertheless contin-
ued in its cinematic afterlife to be a device that was intrinsically theatrical. Thus Annette Michelson has
suggested that even Eisenstein’s film work belonged to a “general critique of representation effected
through theater.” See Michelson’s “Introduction,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette
Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. l.
5. See, for example, M. Zagorskii, “Kak reagiruet zritel’?,” Lef, no. 6 (1924), pp. 141–53; and A. P.
Borodin, “O razlichnykh priemakh izucheniia teatral’nogo zritelia,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, no. 9 (1925),
pp. 30–37.
6. Vsevolod Meyerhold quoted in a stenographic record from a meeting on the production of I
Want a Baby, reprinted in Sovremennaia dramaturgiia, no. 2 (1982), p. 242.
The Theater of Attractions 21

when art turned to explore a space that had been forfeited to a set of utilitarian
industries. It is utterly characteristic of this return that it did not begin by subordi-
nating the object to a clearly defined, socially useful job; it did not follow a specific
material form’s clear-cut social function (thus, aestheticism, psychologism, and the
discrepancy between the aesthetic tradition and economics remained firmly in
place).7 This return took the opposite approach: it began by becoming conscious of
the material and formal elements of the art at hand. In the way that they studied
their art’s materials, the principles of its support structure and combination [skrepy
i kombinirovaniia], Cubism and nonobjectivity (with their problem of faktura), and
transrationalism and the theory of the self-made word in literature, correspond to
the theory of biomechanics in theater. The theory of biomechanics offers an
organically based and calculated type of movement to replace the decaying wood of
the MKhAT’s autohypnosis, the aesthetic plastic pretensions of the Kamernyi
Theater, and the Malyi Theater’s muscular narcosis.8 It provides for expressive
movement the same scientific foundation that the Scientific Organization of Labor
and scientifically based sport brought to labor movement.
Yet I must emphasize that despite the tremendous importance of biomechan-
ics as a new and purposive method of constructing movement, it far from resolves
the problem of theater as an instrument for class influence. This is why two essen-
tially incompatible functions for the new theater have appeared at different times
in the press (indeed, at times simultaneously, for example, in my own work while I
was developing my theses on Meyerhold’s theater). On the one hand, we see an
agit- or advert-theater proposed, and on the other, a theater of illustrative demon-
stration and the presentation of everyday life. Completely overlooked is the fact
that the spectacle that acts upon the emotions and that which addresses the intel-
lect are, according to their own devices, absolute opposites.
Historically, the path from form to social prescription, rather than the reverse,
turned out to be the right one. Those who took the opposite route, ignoring the
material and its properties in an effort to build the things necessary for the current
plan, quickly fell into old aesthetic molds and produced work that was not only use-
less, but also actually harmful (e.g., the Forge’s prolet-poetry, the painting of
AKhKhR,9 MGSPS’s [Moscow City Council of Trade Unions] theater, and even the
Theater of the Revolution, to the extent that it remained unaffected by Meyerhold’s
work, or where Meyerhold ran up against the obviously unsuitable material of an
obsolete type of acting that could not be adapted).

7. This may be explained by the fact that the idea of introducing art into industry arose from the very
group of artists who had broken away from easel painting and stood as far removed from the questions of
the reorganization of the socioeconomic base as economists and politicians from questions of art. [-S. T.]
8. Tret’iakov refers to the three most prominent theaters in Moscow, each known for different
styles and acting methods: Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT), well known as the cradle of
method acting; Tairov’s Kamernyi Theater, known at that time for an aestheticized use of European
and Asian theatrical traditions like pantomime and commedia; and the Malyi Theater, the oldest and
most traditional dramatic theater in Moscow.
9. Presumably Tret’iakov is referring to AKhRR, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia.
22 OCTOBER

Of course one must also consider those groups who did work with the mater-
ial, but who stopped halfway. Unable to apply their knowledge of the material’s
properties to the day’s urgent problems, they squandered their energies on aes-
thetic knick-knacks, displays of pure self-indulgence, and a shamanism in the
service of refined pastimes. Literary transrationalism is one example. With no
desire to become a factory or laboratory of exact methods, it moved entirely into
handcrafting verbal decoration, the justification of which required the most elabo-
rately concocted rationalizations based entirely on psychology.10 In the visual arts,
the nonobjectivists took a similar path, contenting themselves with decorating
porcelain teacups with squares and other geometrical forms or with converting
those teacups into constructions so flat that they ceased to be fit for practical use.
In theater, this trend produced an aestheticization of the machine (Foregger’s
dances) and the self-indulgent theatrical eccentrism that, tainted by the aesthetic
idolization of every Americanism, created a sort of American skyscraper exotica
(an example is the dying Petersburg FEKS).
Work on stage material—that is, its transformation into a machine that helps
make the actor’s job as broad and multifaceted as possible—becomes socially justi-
fiable only at the point when the machine is not only firing its pistons and
sustaining a definite workload, but also carrying out useful work in response to
actual problems of the revolutionary day. Without this useful and emphatically util-
itarian function, all the achievements of the new theater very easily begin to serve
the opposition. The reactionary theatrical front regarded constructivism and
eccentrism as a source of “little tricks” [priemchikami] to spice up the performances
of theaters of the right front, a dash of “red pepper” to satisfy petty-bourgeois
tastes. Needless to say, the majority of theaters, so obviously hostile to the new the-
ater’s basic revolutionary tendency, did not have Cuckold’s interests in mind when
they replaced their pavilions and backdrops with ladders and planks.11 Now, when
a production uses these sorts of constructions, it is actually considered a sign of
good taste. In Meyerhold’s theater, by contrast, Cuckold represented only one
phase in the mastery of material, a phase without which the production of The
Earth in Turmoil would have been inconceivable.12

10. Even if the transrationalists don’t mention it themselves, one can’t help but think of the task of
creating name-days (for saints). The names that emerge today—for example, Oktiabrina—are made
from the same suffixes that in principle also construct names like Evelina, Georgina, Frina, and Irina,
and carry the unbearable scent of confectionary philistinism, which kills the whole explosive expres-
siveness of the name’s origin. Tendencies to found name-monuments must be opposed, as must be
name-projects, name-tendencies, and names connected to industry. “Rapit” (a type of especially hard
steel) is an example of one of these names. [-S. T.]
11. Meyerhold’s production of The Magnanimous Cuckold in April 1922 employed Liubov’ Popova’s
Constructivist stage design, which was composed of wooden scaffolding and ladders.
12. The Earth in Turmoil was also written by Tret’iakov. Meyerhold’s 1923 production used a number
of contemporary real-life objects, including a car, motorcycles, field telephones, machine guns, a
mobile army kitchen, and a combine harvester.
The Theater of Attractions 23

Even in The Earth in Turmoil, the construction is already nothing but a purely
auxiliary structure enabling future performances to be staged in any preexisting
setting, e.g., the square, the factory, the arsenal, the courtyard (similar to those of
the Meyerhold theater’s summer tours).
Thus the logical course in the search for the new theater begins by mastering
the material properties of theatrical activity on a scientific basis and then proceeds to
address the precise social tasks that convert theater into a tool for class action. The
theatrical demonstration is replaced by the theatrical commission [prikazom], by a
process of direct work with the audience [priamoi obrabotkoi auditorii]. Indeed, here
we have located our next task: to integrate the audience as an element in the perfor-
mance and to develop methods for calculating the particular effects and emotional
charge that theater seeks to provoke in its audience.
The Theater of Attractions is exploring this territory. The director of the
Proletkul’t Theater, Sergei Eisenstein, considers an attraction to be any calculated pres-
sure on the spectator’s attention and emotions, any combination of staged elements that
is able to focus the emotion of the spectator in the direction that the performance
requires. From this point of view, the performance is not at all a demonstration of

Eisenstein and Tret’iakov’s production of


Even a Wise Man Stumbles. 1923.
24 OCTOBER

events, characters, or plastic combi-


nations, more or less true to life. It is
a site for the construct ion of a
sequence of theatrical situations that
work on an audience according to a
given task. The attraction seizes the
audience’s attention, compresses its
emotion, and discharges it. In the
end, the performance has delivered
the requisite “charging” of the specta-
tor. Of course, Comrade Eisenstein’s
work in the First Workers’ Theater
thus far represents only the first step
toward the conscious calculation of
theatrical perception. Yet this first
step is already significant : fir st ,
because it demands that the perfor-
mance calculate attractions in ac-
cordance with a definite audience
(otherwise an effect could be falsified
or inaccurate); and second, because it
converts what was formerly an artistic
Rehearsal for Eisenstein’s production of theatrical demonstration into pro-
Tret’iakov’s Gasmasks. 1924. ductive work based upon experiment
and calculation.
The attraction is not to be regarded as a new invention in theater. Theater
always employed the attraction, but unconsciously. Think of all the particularly
affecting parts of a performance, those climactic moments that are intended to
provoke applause and ovation, all those dramatic final exits. These are all attrac-
tions. But their position in the old theater is secondary and subordinated to the
psychological logic of the plot. The Art Theater’s chirping cricket is also an attrac-
tion. An attraction always requires an estimation of habitual viewer psychology,
and then, against this baseline, it can work on the nerves to produce a moment of
alarm. In the Theater of Attractions, creating a performance entails first finding
the form that most sharply provokes the viewer’s emotions (i.e., the attraction).
These attractions, then, are deployed in a sequence of mounting intensity, which
secures the final discharge of the viewer’s emotion in the desired direction (the
montage of attractions).
A montage of attractions may either result from mere contiguity or be moti-
vated by the plot. The first type of montage shows up in the music hall, the variety
show, and the circus program (although there they are directed toward a self-
indulgent and aesthetic form of emotion); the second type of performance is
composed as a play with a plot. In the production of Even a Wise Man Stumbles, we
The Theater of Attractions 25

find the first type of montage of attractions. Its attractions are above all based on
acrobatic tricks and stunts and on parodies of canonical theatrical constructions
taken from the circus and the musical. The acrobatic demonstrations provoke
audience reflexes that are almost entirely objective [absoliutnye] and that are con-
nected to motor structures that are difficult and unfamiliar for the spectator. The
connection between the attractions is provided by the plot, which on the whole
plays a very minimal role, serving only to guarantee continuity of attention. It
should be noted that several very effective attractions (for example, the balancing
act) are linked to the plot in a completely artificial way, through arbitrary motiva-
tions (in this case through the words “go out on a limb”). Yet none of the power of
this performance relies on the motivating text. Far more crucial is the way that
groups of attractions operate as partial agit-tasks. For example, there are attrac-
tions of political satire (e.g., Joffre and Curzon), satire of everyday life (in the
fourth and fifth acts), topical buffoonery (in the fifth act), and theatrical parody
(e.g., the fascist’s movements stylized in the mode of the Kamernyi Theater, the re-
creations of MKhAT’s repertoire parodied by Turusina and Ryzhii, or the series of
exits that provoke cries of “Bravo! Just like in the Bol’shoi Theater!”). The perfor-
mance’s effect on the audience is expressed in statements such as “What a shame
that I can’t control my movements like that,” “If only I could do cartwheels,” and
so on.
This result—these platonic sighs over physical ineptitude that nonetheless
remain sighs—demonstrates exactly the same aesthetic that every Ivan Ivanovich
carries “in his soul” as he exits a performance of Brand, depressed from all Brand’s
thrashing about. The advantage in the Theater of Attractions is that people do
not leave the performance regretting the absence of personal inner turmoil or the
decadent refinement of Chekhovian heroes, but rather their own existing physical
shortcomings. Nevertheless, a fact is a fact, and as an attempt to develop the mon-
tage of attractions, Wise Man is only of formal, experimental significance. In this
regard, Wise Man is just as nonobjective as Cuckold.
The production of Moscow, Do You Hear Me? is somewhat different. This play
was created for and adapted to the tasks of the period when the German revolu-
tion was unfolding. Its function was the condensation of a victory-directed
[pobedoustremitel’nuiu] revolutionary energy in the masses who would very possibly
end up replenishing Germany’s armed front, and who in any case would have had
to provide active material support [aktivnym tylom] for the revolution. The play
was staged on the same principle as Wise Man: no emotional experience on the
stage, no psychological or historical veracity, but rather an efficacy in accumulat-
ing emotions of class sympathy and class hatred. The performance had to
function as a precise tool for accumulating this kind of emotion in the audience.
Quantitatively it contained few attractions: the scene with the whip and spit in the
first act, the unmasking of the provocateur in the second, the openly staged mur-
der of Kurt in the third, and the portrait of Lenin in the fourth. The director’s use
of attractions to build an ever-increasing and alarming nervous tension employed
26 OCTOBER

a variety of techniques: both naturalistic devices (blood, chattering teeth, a rifle


shot) and a technique of supercharging emotion through the extensive use of
pauses (for some critics this called to mind MKhAT’s use of pauses). The entire
structure of the movement relied on the simplest organic movements, decom-
posed into their elementary parts and then recomposed into sometimes highly
complicated figures (e.g., the murder of the provocateur). This movement—con-
structed not on the basis of feeling, but just the opposite, on a study of the way
that it works in reality—produced the desired effect. Viewers typically remarked
that performing a role in this way requires complete habituation. No less interest-
ing was their amazement when the same movement was demonstrated in its
decomposed form, which clarified the nature of a performance that is constructed
on the basis of calculations of the emotional intensity, tempo, and movement of
the actor (not to be confused with inspiration or conversion into the character on
stage, or with penetration into the character’s psyche). This emotional tension is
absolutely identical to the efficiency and readiness that is familiar to anyone who has
ever executed any sort of work in a serious way.
Preliminary calculation can be said to account for 70 percent of the produc-
tion’s effect. This is not the full 100 percent, because 1) as historical events marched
on, the play lost the context for which it was intended; and 2) the audience had
nowehere near the homogeneous class composition that is necessary for the
Theater of Attractions to calculate and deliver a maximally productive effect.
To summarize in conclusion:
Sergei Eisenstein’s Theater of Attractions is the latest stage of work on a pro-
ductive theater that is effective in terms of class [klassovo-deistvennogo teatra] and
that treats the performance as a series of pressures on the audience’s psyche to be
brought about by theatrical means. The Theater of Attractions requires an audi-
ence with a homogeneous class composition, and it understands this audience as a
material that can be worked using a set of established techniques. First taking into
account the audience’s psyche and the concrete tasks of contemporary social real-
ity, the Theater of Attractions organizes the material of the stage by creating
attractions from every means that has an expressive influence on the spectator. It
uses every means, because the Theater of Attractions is not a theater with a fin-
ished style, but a theater of expedient class action and conscious utilitarian aims.

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