In 2008, one of the principal directors of postwar Germany, Alexander Kluge, made his own film on Eisenstein’s plan: News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital. The well-known film historian and theorist Oksana Bulgakowa worked with Kluge on it.
Oksana Bulgakowa: “In 1928, Sergei Eisenstein planned to adapt Marx’s Capital, using the associative logic of Joyce’s interior monologue. The project remained only in diary sketches. Almost 90 years later, Alexander Kluge returned to that cinematic utopia in the monumental project Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital. For Kluge the coincidence of historical moments was essential: the economic crashes of 1929 and 2008, the end of silent cinema and the shift to a new digital culture. The result was not a film in the usual sense but a many-hour labyrinth of fiction and documentary episodes, interviews, quotations, photographs, music, mystifications, and found material.
The lecture will address Kluge’s dialogue with Eisenstein and the question that joins their projects: how Eisenstein tried to re-invent cinema as a non-linear form of thought, and how Kluge tried to carry that model into television, DVD, and video installation.”
The lecture will be moderated by film scholar and editor-in-chief of Kinema magazine, Viktoria Smirnova-Maisel.
OKSANA BULGAKOWA
- Professor emerita at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She graduated from VGIK in Moscow and received her doctorate at Humboldt University (1982).
- She taught at Humboldt University and the Free University in Berlin, at Stanford, at Berkeley, and at the International Film School in Cologne.
- Author of work on the history of Soviet and German cinema; curator of exhibitions and multimedia projects; author of the monographs FEKS: The Factory of the Eccentric Actor (Berlin, 1996); Sergei Eisenstein. Three Utopias. Architectural Sketches for a Theory of Film (Berlin, 1996); Sergei Eisenstein. A Biography (Berlin, 1998; English edition 2001; Russian The Battleship’s Fate, 2017); The Factory of Gestures (Moscow, 2005, 2021); The Soviet Ear-Eye: Cinema and Its Sense Organs (Moscow, 2009); Voice as a Cultural Phenomenon (Moscow, 2015); Things in Film: Silent Monologue, Hidden Memory (Wiesbaden, 2021). Selected filmography: Stalin, a Mosfilm Production (1993, with Enno Patalas and Frieda Grafe); The Different Faces of Sergei Eisenstein (1998, with Dietmar Hochmuth).
Oksana Bulgakowa’s lecture will take place on October 21 at 9:00 PM in the Marble Hall of the Rodina Cinema Center.