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An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film by DustinCondren. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024. 352 pp. $58.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐7846‐9

Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: It is only after finishing this book that one comes to understand how apt its title is."Imaginary" is not "incomplete" or "unfinished," something we associate with things imperfect or, worse yet, with the lack of accomplishment.On the contrary, "imaginary" here means ideal, a film as it exists in its author's head before it becomes a subject to material realities, from the studio budget to the state censorship and the rest.As Russian Formalists insisted, what counts in art is not form, but formation, the process rather than product, the ideal and idyllic state of work when one can afford to imagine freely without selecting what will and what will not end up in the finished piece.In literary studies, we use the term "drafts" and assume their verbal and thus publishable nature.When it comes to film, and especially to the incorrigible synaesthete Sergei Eisenstein, we deal with different media, often produced in outstanding quantity and quality.Sometimes, it is hard to say whether the fact that the unrealized project did not become a finished film makes it really unrealized: the set of drawings for The Glass House or several notebooks of collages for the planned adaptation of Marx's Capital could very well be considered separate works of art (as well as art theory).Viktor Shklovsky was convinced that, film or no film, thousands of pictures that Eisenstein drew in preparation for Ivan the Terrible are the most valuable artistic output of the project.The problem, of course, is that Eisenstein's being the largest personal collection at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, there is no way we can present any of these works in its totality.Where he allowed himself unlimited freedom, we need to put limits to make it available as a finished piece.Finishing is limiting.Dustin Condren approached this monumental set of materials with the strategy I found remarkably productive: writing about each of the six projects he chose for analysis (Eisenstein left more), he highlights the specific aspect of filmmaking that Eisenstein was focusing on when envisioning the future film.The Glass House was an attempt to go beyond montage, to imagine the juxtaposition of different scenes (simultaneously happening in individual rooms of the building made of glass) in one shot by using unexpected angles in a unique custom-built set.Capital (which, amusingly, as Condren shows, Eisenstein apparently never read) should have become, on the contrary, a next step in the development of intellectual montage first tried in October (a film based on exposing the method rather than telling a story or even depicting history).My two favorite chapters, on Sutter's Gold and An American Tragedy, show what the contrapuntal use of sound Eisenstein proposed theoretically in the famous statement (cosigned by Grigori Aleksandrov and Vsevolod Pudovkin) might have looked like in reality: famously, Eisenstein (just like Chaplin) detested the talkies with their synchronized dialogue; instead, in these films he relied on monologue, the inner speech of his main character, often using any forms of sound other than actual speech, from noises and melodies all the way to the newly powerful sound of silence.If Sutter's Gold
DOI: 10.1111/russ.70098
Institution: Harvard University
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4415377458
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