"Values Resemble a Dance, Not a Statue" – Sergei Eisenstein's Capital Project

Research Seminar

Online event via Zoom and on site (previous registration)
Date: Oct 11, 2021
Time: 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Elena Vogman
Location: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rom
Contact: amir.saifullin@biblhertz.it

"Values Resemble a Dance, Not a Statue" – Sergei Eisenstein's Capital Project

Sergei Eisenstein’s planned ﬁlm adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital stands as one of the most enigmatic projects in the history of cinema. Though never realized, it has haunted the imagination of many ﬁlmmakers, historians, and philosophers to the present day. A recent look into Eisenstein’s archive revealed the full scope of his plans: between October 1927 and September 1928, he gradually transformed his working diaries into an editing board. This "visual instruction in the dialectical method", as Eisenstein himself called his project, comprises over 500 pages of notes, drawings, press clippings, expression diagrams, plans for articles, negatives from October, theoretical reﬂections and extensive quotations. What can be seen and read is not a ﬁlm but a series of variations on the themes of economy and capitalist exploitation.

Based on Elena Vogman’s recent book Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project the seminar will explore the internal formal necessity underlying the Eisenstein’s choices, arguing that Capital’s visual complexity as well as its epistemic efﬁcacy reside precisely within the state of its material: the dance of heterogeneous themes and disparate fragments, a non-linear, provisory, and non-articulated ﬂow. In this way Eisenstein’s montage sequences produce a kind of surplus value entirely their own: a semiotic excess, which stirs the materials and represented bodies into a dance analogous to Marx’s "dance" of "petriﬁed conditions". It is in this polymorphic and "diffuse" language – associated with the stream of consciousness of Joyce's Ulysses – that Eisenstein saw the strongest critical and affective potential for the future cinema.

Elena Vogman is a literary scholar, theorist and independent curator. She has published two books: Sinnliches Denken. Eisensteins exzentrische Methode (Diaphanes 2018) and Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project (Diaphanes 2019). She is currently Principal Investigator and Freigeist-Fellow of Volkswagen Foundation at Bauhaus-University Weimar with a research project on "Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconﬁguring the Hu-manities in Postwar Europe".

This event will take place on Zoom Webinar. The link to join the event will be sent to you in a confirmation email. Please register through THIS LINK.
For participation on site please register by sending an email to: amir.saifullin@biblhertz.it

Scientific organization: Amir Saifullin