Beschreibung
Eisensteins adaptation of Karl Marxs Capital (19271928) is a phantom in a double sense: although never realized, it has nonetheless haunted the imagination of many filmmakers, historians, and writers to the present day, most recently with Alexander Kluges News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx - Eisenstein - Capital . Furthermore, its first public materialization - a ten-page fragment of the directors work diaries - was marked by what remained absent: Eisensteins images and working materials. Dance of Values aims to conjure the phantom of Capital once again only this time on the basis of the full scope of Capital s archival body. This visual instruction in the dialectical method, as Eisenstein himself called it, comprises over 500 pages of notes, drawings, press clippings, expression diagrams, plans for articles, negatives from October , theoretical reflections and extensive quotations. Dance of Values explores the internal formal necessity underlying Eisensteins choices in Capital , arguing that its visual complexity as well as its epistemic efficacy reside precisely within thestate of its material : the dance of heterogeneous themes and disparate fragments, a non-linear, provisory, and non-articulated flow. Sequences from archival materials, published here for the first time, are constructed not as mere illustrations, but as visual arguments of their own leading to a more concrete understanding of Eisensteins stake in Capital : a visual theorization of value. A close reading of Eisensteins archive in its formal necessity allows not only for the reconstruction of morphological elements present in Marxs theory of value but also for the theorization of a more fundamental crisis of the political-medial representation, a present that extends from its contemporary context to today. Employing an unambiguously morphological procedure, Eisensteins 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 Marxs 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.
Autorenportrait
Elena Vogman ist Autorin, Literatur- und Medienwissenschaftlerin und Kuratorin. Sie promovierte in 2016 über »Sinnliches Denken. Eisensteins exzentrische Methode« und war seitdem Postdoc im Forschungsprojekt »Rhythmus und Projektion« an der Freien Universität sowie Fellow am IKKM an der Universität Weimar. Sie lehrt Geschichte und Theorie der Medien an der Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee und arbeitet an einem Forschungsprojekt zu »Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe«. Im Fokus ihrer Forschung stehen Formen des visuellen Denkens, Anthropologien des Rhythmus, Montagepraxis sowie Medien und Milieus in der Praxis der Institutionellen Psychotherapie. Gemeinsam mit Marie Rebecchi und Till Gathmann kuratierte sie die Ausstellung »Sergei Eisenstein: The Anthropology of Rhythm« bei Nomas Foundation in Rom.
