Skip to main content

Distributed for DIAPHANES

Dance of Values

Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project

Distributed for DIAPHANES

Dance of Values

Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project

Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital was never realized, yet it has haunted the imagination of many filmmakers, historians, and philosophers to the present day. Dance of Values aims to conjure the phantom of Eisenstein’s Capital, presenting for the first time material from the full scope of the film project’s archival body. This “visual instruction in the dialectical method,” as Eisenstein called it, comprises more than five hundred pages of notes, drawings, press clippings, diagrams, negatives, theoretical reflections, and extensive quotations. Dance of Values explores the internal formal necessity underlying Eisenstein’s artistic choices, and argues that its brilliant adaptation of Marx’s Capital relied on the fragmentary and nonlinear state of its material. Published here for the first time, sequences from Eisenstein’s archival materials are presented in this volume not as mere illustrations but as arguments in their own right, a visual theorization of value.

240 pages | 30 color plates, 30 halftones | 6 x 9 1/2 | © 2018

Think Art

Art: Art--General Studies

Philosophy: General Philosophy


DIAPHANES image

View all books from DIAPHANES

Reviews

"Vogman provides a textual and visual analysis of Serge Eisenstein’s diaries from 1927 to 1928, the period during which the famous Soviet film director was at work on a plan for an adaptation of Marx’s Capital, a film project that was never realized. Vogman highlights the experimental and performative role of these notebooks, suggesting they should be looked at not as a film plan or script but as a book project."

Choice

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press