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

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 was planned as a continuation of Marxist-based socioeconomic criticism, not unlike in the earlier Capital, An American Tragedy was more ambitious on the philosophical front: there, Eisenstein further developed Dostoevsky’s opposition between intention and action, thinking and doing, in this case of murder, of which the protagonist may or may not be guilty, depending on where we stand in this debate. Condren here relies on Brothers Karamazov, and convincingly so, but there is a more closely related piece in The Diary of a Writer, wherein Dostoevsky discusses an actual murder, known as the case of Kairova, and argues against the notion of premeditation. A human psyche, writes Dostoevsky, can be so unpredictable that even when a person enters the room with a knife, one cannot be sure she has deep down decided to use it. To juxtapose the internal and the external, Eisenstein planned to use visuals and sound in a direct counterpoint: the microphone recording hero’s inner monologue stands for thinking; the camera showing his girlfriend falling off the boat they both are in—for action. Finally, two remaining chapters are devoted to the analysis of MMM and Moscow, the films Eisenstein planned to make after returning from America to the USSR in the 1930s. It seems incredible how, under the duress of increasingly limited opportunities to speak, to do, and even to think, Eisenstein’s vision grows only more and more experimental, even crossing into the surreal (and this at the times when “realism” was an absolute dogma). MMM was imagined as a comic counterpart to the inner monologue technique he perfected in An American Tragedy (at one point in MMM the microphone was supposed to literally go inside the protagonist’s body). Once again, the work on MMM shows how Eisenstein’s creative thought had troubles containing itself in the realm of the film with human actors and pushed beyond, in this case toward the unlimited opportunities of animation. It also testifies to Eisenstein’s bravery: on one of his preparatory sketches, he drew a sixteenth-century executioner on Moscow’s lobnoe mesto, next to a contemporary janitor in the same place and in the same pose. In the USSR of the 1930s, the meaning of the grim joke was clear: both are engaged in chistka (“purge,” an official term for the waves of Great Terror initiated by Stalin), a parallel he later developed in Ivan the Terrible. This book is more than a study of film projects which never became films. It shows the power of the undone: works we manage to finish come and go, the unrealized ones remain with us, always in the making. Still, the last part of the book, the appendix, is sobering and heartbreaking: it lists thirty-two major and twenty-five minor Eisenstein films we will never get to see. But, thanks to his bottomless archive and the work of scholars like Condren, we can imagine them.