Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Diaries: Elena Vogman with Michael Kunichika

Join us on Tuesday, January 21, 7pm at e-flux Screening Room for “Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Diaries”, a talk by Elena Vogman with Michael Kunichika, followed by a screening and public reading.

Almost fifty years after the first publication of Sergei Eisenstein’s Notes for a Film of Capital in the pages of October, the journal has recently published an extensive new selection from the Soviet director’s Capital Diaries (1927–1928). Selected by Elena Vogman and translated by Michael Kunichika, this new publication draws from over five hundred pages of notes, images, press clippings, drawings, and diagrams Vogman reconstructed as part of Eisenstein’s Capital project. In these diaries, Eisenstein attempts to develop his (ultimately unrealized) film based on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

The talk will introduce the Capital Diaries, featuring readings from the new translation and screenings of selected scenes from Eisenstein’s contemporary films October (1927) and The General Line (1929). The experimental, diaristic, and proto-cinematic nature of the Capital Diariesprovides a fuller understanding of Eisenstein’s work on film and the central role of images in this process. The talk will explore the director’s auto-theoretical experiment involving psychoanalysis (including his own), “intellectual attractions,” typage (non-professional actors), and the many ways James Joyce’s Ulysses, especially the “inner monologue,” served as creative resources for the Capital project. Delving into Eisenstein’s heterodox materialism and (multi)linguistic obsessions, the presentation will uncover new dimensions in Eisenstein’s articulation of montage.
For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.

Host or Publisher e-flux Screening Room