Identità dell’immagine : la vita della forma nel montaggio dell’inquadratura di Ejzenštejn

The interpretation of the image in terms of an “energetics” tends to un- derstand the form as linked to a system of “invariants” and “transformations”, thus finding itself necessarily assigning primacy to a whole (and tending to a “system”) of forces through which the power of the image comes to dissolve the form itself, characterizing the visual in an almost exclusive way as a flow of functions and relationships. What happens in a perspective in which that tension between invariants and transformations does not exist, but the image itself is an ecstatic iden- tity which is maintained under any structural and functional modification as a “use”, as a “life of form”? And even more: what kind of “identity” of the form is it, if it manifests it- self not so much “in spite” of the modifications, but rather precisely “through” plasticity, in the formal gap, in its becoming an unstable identity and in de- realizing every subjective strategy of domination over the imaginary? What happens if the image, precisely as a form, is the locus of a plural and meta- morphic “meta-identity”? Backlit with the pages on the incessant ecstasy that characterizes the pathetic composition, Ėjzenštejn’s reflection on the plastic composition that takes place in the “montage of the shot” acts for us in this sense as a funda- mental moment for verifying a deeply rooted morphological perspective in the reflection on form, thus opening up to a renewed dialogue with the disci- plinary field of Visual Studies.