In Sergei Eisenstein’s vast legacy there is a long list of unrealised projects. Among them, perhaps the most famous of the unmade is an adaptation of Marx’s Das Kapital. Eisenstein worked on it for two years, in 1927–1928; the archives hold numerous notes, drawings, and collages for the film that was to come.
According to Naum Kleiman, in the first sketches the film “was defined as a ‘cine-treatise’ in which a ‘fairly trivial “backbone” plot’ was to serve as a canvas for associative offshoots.” In other words, it was not to be a literal adaptation so much as a demonstration of how Marx’s dialectical method itself works. For that, Eisenstein wanted to use the narrative lessons of James Joyce. The plan was never carried out.
This year Message to Man has joined the Kinopoisk platform for a radical experiment: an attempt to imagine how Eisenstein would have moved from that idea to its film form had he had the tools of artificial intelligence in his hands. We have studied in detail what the archives give us in that respect, and, at the Festival’s invitation, the media artists Fyodor Maksimishin and Darya Suslova have proposed — with the help of AI — a hypothetical reconstruction of one fragment of Eisenstein’s Capital, the fragment set down most clearly.
The result is the short film Scenes from Capital, which will have its premiere at the 36th Message to Man IFF. Later the work will also be available online to millions of Kinopoisk users.
Of Eisenstein’s original Capital, nothing remains except scattered diary notes, drawings, and newspaper clippings — no script, no storyboards. The film Eisenstein envisioned, intended to teach the viewer to think dialectically through montage, remained an unrealized project of montage-based philosophising. From the surviving materials, it is impossible to fully reconstruct the concept, or even to know whether montage could have become an instrument of materialist dialectics, as Eisenstein hoped.
In our film, we took one of the most developed episodes of Capital and asked new thinking machines to extend some of the associative chains only sketched by Eisenstein, using his films, notes, drawings, and the visual context of the period. Eisenstein’s Capital was meant to test cinema’s ability to function as an instrument of dialectical thought. Our film, in turn, asks whether artificial intelligence can serve cultural history. — Fyodor Maksimishin:
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| Fyodor Maksimishin
Artist and filmmaker; PhD in history, University of Michigan. Winner of the In Silico experimental film competition at the 32nd “Message to Man” International Film Festival (2022). |
Darya Suslova
Architect and graphic artist; she completed a master’s degree at the HSE Art and Design School. |
The film premiere will take place on 22 October at the Avrora cinema.
The online premiere on Kinopoisk is on 15 November.
Message to Man Film Festival thanks Naum Kleiman for his help on the project.
Project team
Directors: Fyodor Maksimishin, Darya Suslova
Concept: Mikhail Ratgauz
Producers: Anna Vasilyeva, Asya Dunaevskaya, Maria Gribova
Archive research: Maria Bessolitsyna