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Elena Vogman: Dance of Values

Elena Vogman

Dance of Values
Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project

PDF, 288 Seiten

Broschur, 288 Seiten

Visual Theorization of Value

Eisenstein’s adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital (1927–1928) 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 Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital. Furthermore, its first public ‘materialization’ – a ten-page fragment of the director’s work diaries – was marked by what remained absent: Eisenstein’s 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 Eisenstein’s choices in Capital, arguing that its 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.

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 Eisenstein’s stake in Capital: a visual theorization of value. A close reading of Eisenstein’s archive in its formal necessity allows not only for the reconstruction of morphological elements present in Marx’s 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, 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.

Inhalt
  • 9–12

    Preface

  • 13–80

    The Value of Crisis

  • 81–142

    Capital ’s Stream of Consciousness

  • 143–198

    The Value of Lenin

  • 199–270

    Metamorphosis of Values

  • Kulturindustrie
  • Kinematografie
  • Filmtheorie
  • Karl Marx
  • Wert
  • Kino

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Elena Vogman

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.

Weitere Texte von Elena Vogman bei DIAPHANES
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