“He went crazy!”: Sergei Eisenstein prepares the adaptation of "The Capital" by Karl Marx

Abstract

This article is an analysis of a legendary creative project of Sergei Eisenstein, who at the end of the 1920s was thinking about filming Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx. For years this idea was regarded as anecdotal empty bragging of the eminent director, but his journals from the years 1927–1928 include materials proving that the conceptual work on the film was at an advanced stage. The main idea behind the film fully developed the concept of the so-called intellectual cinema as an ideological discourse, with which Eisenstein had already experimented when making October: Ten Days That Shook the World. The author of the article sets young Eisenstein’s working notes on the film version of Capital in the context of his interest in Marxism and in the political and propaganda context of his cinema’s evolution in the 1920s, also explaining the reasons for the failure of the project, the theme and ideology of which were to some extent reflected in Eisenstein’s unfinished Hollywood projects. ­