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Dustin Condren, "An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film" (Cornell UP, 2024)
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Dustin Condren
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Marshall Poe
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Eva Gli
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Eva gli, the host of the channel. Today, we'll be talking to Dustin Condren about his New book, An Imaginary Cinema, Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film, was published by Cornell University Press last year. Now, my guest is an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma. He's a scholar of Russian literature and culture with a primary research focus in early Soviet cinema. So welcome to show and thank you for being here today.
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Dustin Condren
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
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Eva Gli
Now, I was wondering if you can tell us a bit about yourself before we jump onto the book.
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Dustin Condren
Yeah, well, as you say, I'm an associate professor of Russian at the University of Oklahoma, and I also work there in the Department of Film and Media Studies and am a member of the Romanov center for Russian Studies there. And, yeah, I've been there for about seven years. And my background is primarily in early 1920s, 1930s Soviet culture. And primarily I work on Soviet cinema and questions of how cinema interacted with the sort of heavy and interesting, fascinating cultural changes that happened through the 1920s into the 1930s.
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Eva Gli
Yeah, terrific. And this project, An Imaginary Cinema, explores the unfinished cinematic projects of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. They were all. The suite of films that you look at, were all developed and then abandoned between 1927 and 1937. Why unfinished films? How did you come into this area of research?
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Dustin Condren
Well, it's a complicated question. There are a couple reasons. On the one hand, apart from my academic work, I also have a background doing creative work as well. And for many years I lived in New York and I worked both in theater and in photography. And so I got to know really well what it was to start projects that never went anywhere. And this is sort of a fundamental process. Process. I think, as any creative person or academic can. Can testify, people have ideas all the time. They start working on that. They either don't go anywhere at all, or they start to go somewhere. And so, in part, this has always been a kind of question. A personal question for me is what to do with these projects that. That represent a great deal of intellectual and creative labor, but that because they don't have any sort of finished, easily digestible product, we don't necessarily count them as work. Right. So how can we begin to count them as work? That's on the one hand. And then on the other hand, from my earliest days in graduate school, so I went to graduate school at Stanford, and I worked with the Russian German scholar of Soviet film, Oksana Bulgakova, who's a great expert in Eisenstein, one of the leading experts on Eisenstein. And initially in graduate school, I was Sort of intimidated by Eisenstein. I was sort of, you know, everyone knows Patyomkin, everyone knows Strike. You know, I was sort of relatively interested in those films, but wasn't the sort of thing I necessarily wanted to work on myself. But during a pause in my work, I began a couple of different projects with Oksana as a translator, translating book length theoretical writings by Eisenstein. And in that process, I started to realize just how many projects, other than the very well known ones that we all study and talk about, how many of these sort of amazing ideas he had that never really wound up going anywhere. And how many of those ideas felt so very different from the films that I had known from his finished work. So to me, that was fascinating. And it was also fascinating to see how he conceptualized these films as part of his sort of body of work. They weren't just these things that he sort of mentioned off to the side, but rather often they became these sort of very important locations of theoretical and creative and methodological development. Things that he returned to again and again through his writings in the 1930s and the 1940s. And I came to see that for him, these unfinished projects were sort of vital aspects of his creative biography in general. And so it occurred to me that it was really worth working on them. And it wasn't that no one had ever done anything with these projects before. Of course, everyone. Well, anyone who studies Eisenstein, knows about his big Mexican project that was never finished. But I just thought, you know, why not really approach this question of the unfinished as the sort of central topic? And it wound up being, from the very beginning, very rewarding.
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Eva Gli
Yeah, no, of course. And that sounds like a really fascinating area to focus on now for our listeners. I will note that I will share your personal webpage as well in our notes where they can see some of your creative work, which is really, really interesting. But talking about studying unfinished work and unfinished films, how do you do that as a researcher? What are your sources? How do you. Something that was actually never made.
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Dustin Condren
That's another thing that sort of made me love this project from the beginning too, is that I, apart from being a scholar of film, I also did a lot of my master's thesis. I wrote on Mayakovsky. And so I really am sort of devoted in a certain sense to text and to written text and to documents. And luckily, unlike several other visual art forms, cinema leaves quite a. Usually leaves quite a big paper trail. And so for most of these projects, I was able to find pretty significant archival holdings either in Moscow, or. Well, for the most part in Moscow, but also some in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. And what. What sort of fascinated me about working on several different unfinished projects is seeing the ways in which these different projects produced different types of material. And, of course, this often has to do with the degree to which they approached completion or approached production, even. So, you know, some films developed to the point where there were only notes or sort of sketches in Eisenstein's diary. Other film projects got to the point of having sort of. Of handwritten, sort of treatments that were approaching screenplays. Others became fully elaborated screenplays that went through various different drafts and stages all the way up to director scripts, which is a sort of more detailed version of a screenplay that includes notes on shots and actors and things like that. And some of the projects go all the way up to screen tests and so on. So some of the documents that I worked with included photographs of actors doing screen tests and so on. So. And I. This is one of the things I talk about in the book, too, is that what's really so fascinating about this question of the unfinished in cinema particularly is that there are these stages that films must go through in order to reach production and reach completion. Right. The artists, whether it's the director themselves or just a sort of independent writer, you know, they sort of conceptualize, they develop. They write one document. Document that is meant to produce another document that is meant to produce another document. Often composed or developed or reconceptualized by another artist altogether. So even from the movement, from the director to the set decorator, for example, you can see these changes happening. So really, all of these forms sort of coming into being and then vanishing as they get to the next stage and the next stage. And for some of these projects, these different stages are archived and kept very well. And for others, we only have a few traces. And that's one of the wonderful things about working on the Unfinished. Is that it sort of incites your imagination to fill in the gaps quite a bit. And so something that I try to do as a scholar of this, I try not to do too liberally. But there's a requirement to sort of imagine the leap from one stage to another.
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Eva Gli
Yeah. And our documentation, historical documentation, is, in a way, I guess, always unfinished. So it's always a bit of a struggle and a bit of a leap, isn't it? Can you tell us a bit more about the theory or how do you approach this concept of unfinished more broadly in art history? You know, a couple of artists like piranesi and other 19th century authors who theorized about the unfinished in art. Can you just tell us a bit more how you see this idea in art but in filmmaking specifically?
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Dustin Condren
Yeah, well, I think the roots of the question of what to do with the unfinished go back to the very beginning of people writing about art in general, to the sort of origins of art history and. And especially, you know, in. Beginning in the Renaissance, when people started to really sort of value the labor of individual artists and begin to sort of mourn the sort of question, what would have been if we could have seen all of the work of this particular artist, you know, Leonardo da Vinci or, you know, Michelangelo? And this sort of starts to be theorized, but very, you know, like many sort of important questions, really a lot of energy in the 19th century. And this is a field. One of the great pleasures for me is that this is a field that Eisenstein pays attention to as well. And that he's really interested in the thoughts that other artists and thinkers have about the question of the unfinished. And so he, for example, is more than happy to kind of discuss in his theoretical writing the sort of distinction between what he sees in Michelangelo's work versus the work of Rodin, for example, where the unfinished has completely different values, right? Where in Michelangelo it's sort of historically or practically enforced, right? Michelangelo left things unfinished because he had to. But then it produces this sort of amazing conceptual form of something arising out of stone, for example. And that this then becomes a style that is used starting in the 19th century and into the 20th century. And I, as the epigraph to my book, I use a quotation that Preaud, an engraver, used in the dedication to an engraving of Delacroix. He says, I'm not for the finished. I'm for the infinite. Use better intention. I'll leave the French, those who read French and speak it better than I do. But the question is that there's this sort of wonderful theoretical link between the infinite and the unfinished, right? And so there is this almost romanticized version which appears maybe in other forms, such as the fragment and so on, where there's this idea that there could have been so much more, that there's this infinite possible work that was never made. We see this in, you know, for example, in Coleridge's work, right? The English poet. So in what sense does the finite, limited work represent this other vast unfinished work which is just beyond sort of the veil of our understanding and possibility to actually read? So this is sort of the sort of conceptual basis from Which I approach these films. But then, of course, we need to work with very specific, finite material. And I think that with some of these projects. And I had to limit myself to really working on just six specific projects, though I addressed the larger corpus of Eisenstein's unfinished work in general quite a bit. Some of these projects, because of the degree to which they were finished, they lend themselves to a kind of more sort of it could have been kind of approach, whereas others were so close to being finished that we almost know exactly what they would have looked like.
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Eva Gli
Right, right, yeah. As you mentioned, you focus on a set of these unfinished projects. So the book is structured around three pairs that you go through. And then you also talk about another project in your conclusion. And of course, you touch upon various. Because he had a lot of unfinished work. There wasn't just the films, but across his opus. So it's wonderful that the way that you kind of meander into these other areas. But the core of the book are these three pairs of projects. And so the first pair is A Glass House and Capital. Reading these chapters, I mean, they sound like projects that would be complicated even today in many different ways. So how about if you just tell us about this first pair and where his mind went with these two.
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Dustin Condren
Well, I think it's very important to sort of historicize a little bit where he was when he began these two projects. He was in his mid-20s when he started these, and he had sort of suddenly become immensely successful as the director of what to that point was considered basically the greatest film that had ever been made, Battleship Potyomkin. And so his response to that was essentially to try and create something that was not the same as Potyomkin, but to go beyond, to push further into conceptual territory that would maybe help him to answer questions related to the actual mechanics and methods of cinema that he felt he could uncover and sort of lead cinema to its truest form. And so he began working on the film the General Line, which would eventually become the Old and the New. And he began working on October, a film that most of us know, but at the same time, just about the same time, he had a number of other ideas. And the first of these is the idea for a film called the Glass House, which was, at its most basic, meant to be a sort of satirical, tragic, sort of soap opera drama about residents of sort of high rise apartment building in which all of the construction material was made of glass. So the walls, the ceilings, the floors, everything is made of glass and is therefore transparent to various degrees. And so for him, the sort of basic idea was that this would allow for a kind of dramaturgical approach to the question of montage, where different spaces are sort of confronted and thrown into contrast with one another, but in the same shot, as opposed to having to cut between shots, allowing for an sort of approach to camera work, where depth of field is able to be used not just to highlight objects within a certain scene, but where the frame can then open up into what would otherwise be a different frame. Right. And so there was this sort of conceptual basis for the film that was really heavily based in a question of materiality, like specific material, glass, and what its material possibilities were, both in terms of physics and in terms of optics. And this, I think, you know, when you read Eisenstein's notes about this project, he's so enthusiastic when he starts writing down notes. And it sort of an idea that arose for him when he was visiting Berlin for the premiere of Battleship Batomi. And he was sort of appreciating new ideas about architecture that was related to larger movements in German architectural theory and practice, where glass was used heavily by architects like Mies van der Rohe, Bruno Taut and so on. And so he was fascinated with these actually quite real possibilities of how new buildings could be constructed. And his father, as it happens, was a well known architect in Riga when Eisenstein himself was growing up. And visitors of Riga today can still walk down the streets and see buildings built by Eisenstein senior, but in a totally different style. Right. In a sort of late 19th century, sort of more decorative style. And so what's fascinating to me about this project is that it allowed Eisenstein to think along a completely new axis of theoretical possibilities. But what he really came up against was the sort of incarnation of these possibilities. And we have records of him eventually trying to even order some sort of example glass cubes from a glass manufacturer, I believe in Michigan or something like that, somewhere where he felt like, okay, if we can just get a hold of a little bit of this, we can figure out how would actually work. So there are some sort of some actual physical and material limitations that would have made it hard even for, you know, a very well funded American studio, for example, to finance. And there was the possibility from the beginning, through his contact Mary Pickford and what eventually became United Artists, to possibly produce the film in the United States. So that was one difficulty. But then the other difficulty was that with this immensely sort of ambitious conceptual basis for the film, he just couldn't come up with the right story. He had all of these sort of scenes in his mind. You know, the conflict between one room where there's this opulent feast going on, and then on the other side of the glass wall there's a, you know, a destitute mother and child, right? Sort of basic, kind of contradictory juxtapositions. One of the, you know, most favorite of these is the sort of love scene through a water closet, as he describes it. So on the upper floor there's a bathroom with the toilet and everything. And down below you can see a couple embracing and the high and the low mixed together, or different types of low, let's say. So he could. He. He. He was just there. He felt like there was an idea, but he could never quite get to, was that he could sell to either to a Soviet production committee or to a Hollywood studio. So eventually the project just sort of ran out of gas. But it remained for him quite an important idea. And he refers to it as. Later in his career as something quite meaningful. His sort of, like, mystery that he was never able to produce. So while he was doing that, what's so fascinating to me is that he had this one, let's say, crazy idea to make a film about a glass house. And almost simultaneously he comes up with the idea that he's going to make a screen adaptation of Karl Marx's Capitol. There's a lot of good scholarship that's been written on this project, and recently too. But what's to me, most fascinating about it is, first of all, it's a crazy idea because how do you. Something that is so complex and is so sort of vast in its. In its sort of specific scientific, economic set of sort of processes and examples and so on. How do you turn that into an actual film? And he went through sort of register of different approaches. A lot of it was sort of just sort of conceived to be the description of movement of various commodities through. Through various spaces and with different people. But this project is. Is fascinating because of how it pairs. And this is these two films was sort of what gave me the idea that. That my chapters needed to be paired together because I saw how these projects actually worked together as a sort of dialectic in order to help him move his ideas further along. And so with these two films. And I even found a couple places in his notebooks where he described the fact that if he ever wanted to make capital, he would first need to make Glass House because he would need to achieve a certain type of dirty work with the Glass House, which is to stay still, conceiving of film as a sort of drama based medium. Whereas with Capital, he wanted to get to a place where it was purely intellectual, where he could essentially have what we would maybe today call an essay film. Like basically just make a film that was a series of sort of statements and concepts rather than needing to anchor them in a love story or in a sort of tragic drama of human personality. Right. He wanted to sort of move beyond that. And again, with the Capitol project, just like with Glass House, the idea kind of was too big for him to actually. The sad thing with film and, you know, and I sort of addressed this in the introduction, is that it's an industrial medium and it's one in which immense resources are required. And the only way to get those resources is to convince people that they'll be able to make their money back at the end. And this is true in the Soviet Union as much it is as it is. So, yeah, there was very little interest from above in finance. And not that we have evidence of him having had a lot of specific meetings about this project. I think he was a little shy of bringing it to. To the film boards, possibly just because he hadn't quite found the kernel that he needed. But this idea was one also that became a little bit politically dangerous, as you can imagine too. You know, he's working on the project essentially in 1927, 1928, which is the very beginning of Stalinism. And it's a time when what we thought everything meant begins to change a little bit and where the direction of how we interpret. But Marx, for example, is mobile, let's say, and it's being dictated from above. And so it became, I think, a little bit too touchy. And what's interesting is that even later on in the 1930s when he very frequently referred to his unfinished projects, he almost never mentions capital. I think for this reason, I think it's just a little bit too. A little bit too sensitive.
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Eva Gli
Yeah, I mean, you can see with both projects, the Glass House and Capitol, how they could be ideologically challenging and definitely a potential minefield at this point in time. Now I'm interested in the second pair of films that you look at. And now we're in Hollywood, we have two projects, There's Gold and American Tragedy. Tell us a bit about these projects and his engagement with the film scene in the U.S. the American culture, the technical and financial opportunities, or lack of in Hollywood. What does that look like for him?
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Dustin Condren
Well, the opportunity to be in Hollywood in the first place was something, I think that Eisenstein was thrilled about. And maybe that came along a little too quickly for him. He had gotten permission to leave the Soviet Union in 1929, presumably to go with his assistant director and camera person, that's Grigory Alexandrov and Eduard Tisset, to go to Europe and then to the United States to study sound technology. Because basically everyone realized they were on the cusp of sound cinema. And it was in the Soviet Union's better interest to be able to produce sound synchronized films. Already at that point they understood that the sort of ideological propaganda value, agitation value of a fully sort of immersive audio visual experience was going to far outdo just the sort of silent film experience. And so Stalin himself had a sort of stake in Eisenstein being able to sort of become proficient with burgeoning technologies. And so they were given permission. They went to Berlin, to Paris, to Amsterdam, to London, sort of made the rounds showing their films and giving talks and so on. Even sort of making a couple of short films, documentary films and sort of one sound film experiment in France. But all the while sort of entertaining offers to do bigger projects, right? Which was never actually part of the permission they were given, at least not initially. And while in Paris or in other parts of France, Eisenstein was sort of pursued by Paramount Pictures, by Jesse Lasky, the person running the studio at the time, and was essentially offered a contract and given a possible selection of adaptation materials that he could take as his first possible project in Hollywood. And one of these was the novel l' or by Blaise Cendrar, the sort of well known, primarily poet of French modernism, but who had written a couple of novels. This one, which translates as gold, had been published, I believe, just a couple years before, like in 1926. And this was, from what I can tell, Eisenstein's first exposure both to the book and the Sundar. And the book itself is a telling of. It's sort of a legendary telling of the true story of Johann Sutter, who would be sort of a key figure in the California gold rush of 1849 and who was an immigrant from Switzerland and who essentially is, at least in Sandrar's eyes and in Eisenstein's later, a sort of encapsulation of this 19th century version of the American dream. Where the European immigrant goes to the United States, you know, lands in New York, deals with the hubbub, crosses the plains, gets to California, sets up an empire for themselves, there's becomes rich, loses it all, that sort of thing. And it's a truly tragic story. The real life version of it as well as the way that Sandrar tells it. But what's interesting in Sandrar's novel is that it's heavily montage based, it's very elliptical, it's very seen shot juxtaposition, a lot of elements of kind of, let's say 1920s avant garde cinema, which was something that Sundar himself was quite familiar with. And so Eisenstein saw immediately how he was going to be able to stage this. And he knew, well, I'm going to be in California, in Hollywood if this all works out. So it's pretty good to tell a California story. I'm a Californian myself. And so I got to work on this project. I sort of was particularly excited. I'm from Northern California and so the gold rush is something I've been learning. I was in elementary school and yeah, Eisenstein and his crew, once they had made it to Hollywood, once they had settled in, they were sort of given a tiny budget to go up to San Francisco, to Monterey, to inland where the. Where gold was initially found in the hills near Sacramento. And they did a little bit of sort of location research. They met sort of the remaining survivors who had been around very old, old school, 1930s. So I guess they. In their 70s, 80s, 90s, and they did a ton of research and very quickly sort of banged out a screenplay sort of in this amazing kind of factory style where Eisenstein and Alexandrov would go in a room, they would sort of compose scenes, they would. Alexandrov would write them down, he would pass them to a typist who would type them out and they would translate it into English and you know, sort of this whole process, process. And the screenplay is really interesting, I think really exciting. And the reason why it never moved beyond screenplay is not something we have a ton of evidence for. The sort of official version is that it was going to be too expensive and Paramount didn't want to pay for it. But this seems pretty spurious because there were ways. Eisenstein was already thinking about how to save money in the production. They were to film it so that they didn't have to build sets and so on. So the thought could be that already at this point there was starting to be suspicion about Eisenstein as a Bolshevik, as a Jew. He wasn't really fully Jewish. His mother was Russian Orthodox, his father was Jewish. But with the last name Eisenstein, it's very easy to sort of have anti Semitic sort of cloud around you. And there were people you can find these still, quite easily, people who were sort of putting out sort of leaflets. And publishing letters to editors in Hollywood at the time. Basically saying. How can a major studio be entertaining the thought of letting a Bolshevik Jewish filmmaker. Make their films for an American audience? So something that Hollywood was already dealing with. With sort of Jewish question too. Since so many of the producers and managers of the studios came from Jewish backgrounds. So it was sort of an easy. An easy way maybe to. To see how. How this was. This initial idea was suppressed. Though it's not totally clear that that's. That's what it was. So essentially, Paramount said, no, let's not do this. Let's sort of put it on hold. It was eventually made a few years later by a different filmmaker. And they said, why don't you work on something else. Which is we really want to make an adaptation of Dreiser's American Tragedy. Which is great. So then the idea is, have the sort of quintessential American gold rush film. That's given to a Russian Bolshevik to make a film of. Now we have an American Tragedy, the Great American. So how are you going to do that? And I think that there was already a feeling. That the project was damned from the beginning. But nevertheless, Eisenstein and his team basically sat down and wrote. Wrote what? David O. Selznick, who was not quite David O. Selznick yet. But who was already in quite a position of responsibility at Paramount. After reading the script. Said was the best screenplay he had ever read, period. But that it made him want to reach for the whiskey bottle right away. Too depressing. And he said that there was no way that the studio should foist this. Upon the innocent young Americans who would go to see it. So the studio decided not to do anything with the screenplay either. But it's an amazing document, the screenplay itself. To see how Eisenstein developed an idea. That I think is without question. A very relevant theoretical and practical dilemma for film. Especially at this time. Which is how to make the soundtrack work. Let's say, beyond the frame of the film. And so from the very beginning of the question of sound in cinema. Eisenstein had wanted there to not necessarily be total synchronization. Sort of literal synchronization. Between image and soundtrack. And he began developing, based on his interest in James Joyce. The question of the internal monologue or interior monologue. And so he sort of used the possibility of a cinematic interior monologue. Where we have, say, for example, in the most basic instance. The sort of impassive face of the protagonist. But then the sort of sound world that he lives in. Whether it's his thoughts or his sort of, let's say, psychically enhanced version of the material environment. The sonic environment that he's living in. And where this sort of sound world is used to give the audience clearer perspective into both the sort of personality of the character. But also into the artist's vision for the sort of, let's say, tragic possibilities of the drama. And so questions of, like, privileged knowledge. What does the audience know that the character doesn't know and so on. Or what does the character know that other characters don't know? And so the idea in Eisenstein's hands, I would say, is something that becomes quite exciting. And, of course, by this point in film history. It's something that's quite. Not to say cliche, but is quite normal. Right. We have this. We're used to hearing a character's thoughts even when they're not moving their lips. And it. Yeah, it can be, let's say, quite mundane when we see this. Like, you know. But for Eisenstein, I think the possibility was sort of the first chance to. To bring the audience something bigger than just manifest on. On the screen. You can hear in the soundtrack as you read it. Or in the screenplay as you read it. You can sort of hear all the stuff that's going on. Extra to what's written on the page about. About the frame. And. And he does this not just with dialogue, but with music. With sort of soundscape, sort of very specific directions. About animal noises, about sort of elements, you know, wind, the sound of rain, et cetera. So things that are both diegetic and non diegetic. Sort of symphonies that he's composing. That would sort of bring a higher level of dedication to the drama.
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Eva Gli
That sounds fascinating. And I mean, even today we talk about the soundscape of a film as quite a special art. And to hear about this at this point and how he's thinking about it is quite interesting. Tell us a little bit about what stays with him from the US when he goes back to the Soviet Union. What are some of the technical or other aspects of his experience in Hollywood that really stay with him?
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Dustin Condren
Yeah. Well, what to me is wonderful. I mean, I should say. Maybe I should have said this earlier. But one of the reasons I chose specifically these six films to work on. Is that as unfinished films, none of them ever reached the production stage. So there was never any point at which cameras were rolling in sets. They were on set. And this is also what's fascinating to me about Eisenstein's Hollywood experience is that he never was on set in Hollywood. I mean, he visited other, other directors on set. He spent time with a number of sort of well known filmmakers, Charlie Chaplin and others. But he never really had like a technical Hollywood experience. He was certainly exposed to discussions, technical discussions. And I think that he probably got to see the way that, you know, sound recording, synchronized sound recording was. Was being developed at the time. But really I think that it was again, and this is Eisenstein all over, all the time, is that it was just a very conceptual, theoretical experience for him. And he really, what he held onto was the sort of idea, for example, of the internal monologue idea that he was, you know, he had been pushing in the 1920s so firmly toward the idea of a sort of non hero based cinema, a non drama based cinema. And his visit to Hollywood sort of turned him back around, but let's say dialectically in a different way, where he became interested in a kind of larger than life hero, a sort of Greek tragic figure sort of hero. And that's what his version of Johan Sutter and Clyde from An American Tragedy become. A figure that represents both a reality and a reality that's larger. And so when he returns to the Soviet Union, and we have to very emphatically state that he did not return directly from America to the Soviet Union, but rather spent a year and a half in Mexico having a completely wild and, you know, life changing sort of experience there. Life changing both personally and, you know, one might almost say sort of spiritually.
- [42:38]
Eva Gli
And a whole lot of great unfinished projects as well.
- [42:42]
Dustin Condren
As. Well, yeah, for sure, for sure. And yeah, as you said at the beginning, not just in film. Right. All sorts of projects, drawing, writing and so on. Yeah. So when he returned to the Soviet Union in sort of mid-1932, he came in the eyes of his colleagues and supervisors. He came back totally empty handed, which was for all the time that they had given him abroad, not, not good. But he came back with this sort of experience, cultural experience of Western Europe and the United States and Mexico. This sort of, you know, triad of very different sort of values. And then with these like, very clear artistic imperatives where he wanted to work more with the sort of depth of human experience, the sort of primal sort of urges and the possibility of sort of awakening primal aesthetic experience in the audience in a way that he had thought much more superficially in the 1920s and maybe much more materialistically, physiologically. Now he was interested in a sort of deeper, deeper experience. And one of the things that I always feel so sort of pleased to see is the first project that he started, and this is the first of my third pairs in the book is. Or the first of the third pair that I have in the book is this comedy film that he develops in 1932, 1933, called MMM, which, you know, I think to most Experts of late 20s, early 30s cinema and theater in the Soviet Union feels like a late. Like, sort of NEP era, New Economic Policy era. That's how. It's like a Mayakowski play where there's.
- [44:48]
Eva Gli
It is. And it's fabulous. And I wish it was realized because the story is terrific. You want to tell us a little bit. Yeah. About the plot as well.
- [45:00]
Dustin Condren
You can see this plot in Herman, in Mayakovsky, you know, the sort of bumbling Soviet bureaucrat who gets in over his head in some sort of scheme, and it involves time travel. So this character, whose name, Maxim Maksimovich. Maxim. Mmm, from the title, he gets drunk at a party after work one night and stumbles home, stopping off at a church and sort of weirdly looking up at the frescoes in the church and challenging them to come down and make themselves useful at the local prefs. I use the Workers Union. And as this sort of, like, drunken scene unfolds, one of the frescoes begins to move and says, I will come down. Which is sort of a moment stolen very obviously, and, you know, gleefully, from Pushkin's the Stone Guest, Right. Where then the frescoes, which just happened to be, you know, a sort of medieval priest, a few bogatyrs, you know, Russian sort of hero, knights, some boyars, a falconist, all these different sort of figures from medieval Russia come down from the paintings and follow Maxim back to his house. He thinks it's a dream, but when he wakes up the next morning, they're all still there with him. And so in the sort of concept, it's this conflict between two different time periods, two different eras, right? Contemporary Soviet Russia, 1930s. So like. And at this point, 1932, like, the five Year Plan works. So the question is, how does this new society deal with its past, which is anything but what its contemporary status is? And specifically for Maxim, how does he deal with these sort of religious fanatics, with these sort of egotistical heroes and so on, all of this impulse toward love stories, and it really. This sort of, in Eisenstein's vision of it, hilarious on the one level, hilarious story. But then. And in this, unexpected for the time, I would say, though, when you think about what, say, pirandello or Brecht are doing in Europe is not so surprising, sort of unexpected in the sense that it becomes sort of self aware formally. And so within the screenplay there are these moments where Eisenstein himself is meant to appear and sort of have these debates with himself in one scene, sort of across different sides of a chessboard where he's discussing what should I do with my characters next and what should they do. And at a certain point, and this is, you know, to answer your question about what he brings back from the United States, this was meant to be a sound film. This was going to be his first fully sound film. The main character, Maxim, is having this sort of extreme dramatic moment where he's trying to figure out whether his drive toward duty to the state is stronger than his sort of self involved love for one of the female characters. He loses control of his body and accidentally opens his mouth and swallows the microphone, which was just out of frame, recording his dialogue. So there's this moment where the film set becomes part of the action. He swallows the microphone and then we start to hear his internal monologue, right, his interior monologue. So there's this sort of joke that Eisenstein's making, I think more for himself than for the audience, but where we get to hear the sort of struggles that Maxim is having with himself inside of his body. And this is sort of made even more hilarious and strange when an X ray machine is brought in and we actually are able to look into Maxime's body and see like a little mini version of himself talking into the microphone and so on. So it's just amazingly sort of recursive and self reflexive and you know, when you read the screenplay, it's just thrilling and funny to read it from, you know, from the 2000s, but it's so obvious why it didn't get made in it.
- [49:25]
Eva Gli
Yeah, no, it is.
- [49:26]
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- [50:22]
Eva Gli
When you open this final pair of Discussion of this final pair of films, that's the MMM and Moscow, which we'll talk about now. You know that, you know, he returns to Moscow. He has this a lot of luggage, mainly books, but no films. Right. But the ideas that he comes back with, I mean. Mmm is really fascinating. I mean, as you know, like reading your discussion of this film, it's really funny and you can see it being. You can see it as you talk about it. But yeah, you can also definitely understand why that never kind of made it into a film. Although I really hope someone does do it because I think you might be just equally relevant in 2025 for good or bad reasons. But, yeah, go ahead and tell us a little bit about the film Moscow, which is, again, a completely. Yeah. If this is a comedy, this is meant to be this monumental history of Moscow. In a way, the idea is not dissimilar to capital. How do you make this, this thousand year story onto a screen? I mean, he definitely didn't give himself easy projects.
- [51:40]
Dustin Condren
He could say, yeah, well, I think this was always the thing for him. And there's this discussion about, are there some filmmakers who are more prone to having unfinished films than others? And I think that's definitely. You set the bar this high, there's very little chance that you're going to get it. Yeah. So in this case, to tell this long history of the capital city, Moscow, which was to sort of reinvigorate Moscow as the capital of the Soviet world, was a project that came from the top down. And artists all over the country were being sort of charged with this task of writing books about Moscow, making art about Moscow, and of course, making films about Moscow. And there were these calls published in all the major journals and newspapers. And so Eisenstein sort of answers this with his own sort of peculiar take on history and how to have it, or let's say, how to conceptualize it, how to represent it, how to formalize it in art. And what's so clear is that this sort of idea that he had been developing sort of all along, through the late 1920s and into the 1930s, then sort of picks up steam. And the idea is that far more fascinating than just dealing with one historical period, it's better to deal with multiple historical periods in one. And what I mean by that is you take the concept of montage, for example. For Eisenstein, we think of it as like a frame which contradicts a frame. They come together, their collision produces a third idea. And for Eisenstein, a similar dialectic is possible with time. And this is sort of at the root of mmm, the sort of time travel comedy. What he hoped was that something productive would happen in this clash between the Middle Ages and Soviet contemporaneity. And this project or this, let's say this concept really developed for Eisenstein when he was in Mexico. And he looked at the various regions, the different states of Mexico as each representing not only a different geographical locality, but also a different temporality. So he would say, you know, Oaxaca. I don't know specifically, but let's say Oaxaca sort of seems to exist in like a kind of 17th century agrarian state. And maybe, you know, some other place. Mexico City is this sort of contemporary place. And then we have things that seem to go back all the way to the sort of primal origins of sort of tribal life and so on. Of course, Eisenstein, like many early 20th century people, sort of had a, let's say, a loose relationship to anthropology and to sociology and so on. But nevertheless, I think the idea is that he. He saw with this Moscow project and the possibility of telling the sort of key stories of Moscow's history. To tell them in a kind of simultaneity, or at least in a sort of packed together sequentiality that would allow, let's say, 15th century Moscow to exist almost simultaneously with, let's say, Napoleonic era Moscow. And then with revolutionary 1905 Moscow. And then 1917 and 1934. And so the way that he did that was not to layer them on top of each other, but rather to connect them to one another and then sort of try to figure out a way to fuse them together through these sort of leaps in time that would be held together by the elements. And so he had this whole concept for how, for example, fire was going to be the key element that would connect, you know, the fires of Moscow in 1812. This fire would then be the sort of thing that would bring the audience through to 1905. The fire sort of built in the Krasnay Bresnaya area of Moscow. The barricades and so on. So there was this idea that the elements would help to sort of of bind these different eras together. But also that he would have the same actors play similar characters in These different eras. So that it was almost as though one person was living through these different periods. Later on, he would sort of compare how this project, even though he didn't know it at the time. Obviously prepared him to make Ivan the Terrible. Because he was able to sort of conceptualize the full life of Ivan. From the time he takes the throne until his demise. As a kind of one, sort of almost like a day in the life. That it would follow a sort of telescoped arc of dramaturgical process. Of sort of unity. Where time and place happen to be tightly tied together. Even though it covers 20 something years. So I don't know if telescoping is the right word. Or sort of compacting and fusing. But ultimately what he was trying to do was make sort of de. Emphasize sequentiality. In favor of simultaneity. Or at least to sort of force that tension to be almost unresolvable. When we watch a film, we know that sequentiality wins out over simultaneity. Though simultaneity plays a very key role. Even from the very basics. Where it's frame after frame after frame. Right. It's a sequence. And yet the simultaneity of images in our eyes. Is what allows for movement to happen. For Eisenstein, I think this is a very inspiring concept. Because it's the movement from the different historical era to the next. That allows for the sort of dialectical movement. That. That should bring about sort of proper response in the audience.
- [57:57]
Eva Gli
Yeah, I mean, it's very clear how these unfinished projects capture your imagination. They are really very complex and very attractive. Throughout your book, you talk about this, about Eisenstein as a filmmaker. But also a theorist. That throughout his career there was a tension or perceived by others as a tension of those two kind of areas of his practice. How do you see the theory, the practice of his work. And then the unfinished within that whole body? What comes after this book? How do you. How does that kind of work for you at the end of this research project?
- [58:40]
Dustin Condren
Yeah, well, you know, to go back to what I said at the very beginning. My. My preference in approaching Eisenstein from, you know, when I was much younger. Was not for his films. But rather for his writing. And for the way that he thought about his process and his status as an artist. His theory, essentially, which is vast and sort of messy and disorganized and unpublished itself. Much of what he wrote was never published in his lifetime. And much of it is still unpublished. And so. So on the one hand, I approached the project with a clear Preference for Eisenstein the theorist over Eisenstein the filmmaker. But then, of course, the deeper you go into it, you realize that for him, theory essentially is filmmaking. And this is one of the things that he sort of argued for, is that filmmaking is not just being on set, is not just working with actors and setting up the frame and everything. And. And in the book, I sort of formulate this in the first chapter or the introduction. Actually. In 1935, there's the very well known Congress of Soviet Film Workers in which Eisenstein was the keynote speaker, in which he was attacked quite soundly and almost unanimously by his colleagues, first of all, for not having made a film in, you know, seven or so years at that point, at a time when production not only in film, but all the country, the factories, the farm, production was the key. The key value. He was not being productive. He was, you know, wasting resources and being idle and not living in true reality. So this was one. One criticism is that he was unproductive. And. And two was that he spent too much time in theory and thinking about film rather than making it. And so his response to this, because he gave the keynote at the beginning of the conference. And then there were several days in which he was attacked. And then he got to give the final word at the end, or the almost final word. And his response was that he felt that all along he had been working in actual, actual practical filmmaking. And that it's tragic that the films he was working on didn't get made. And this is the whole point of the book. But. But that also he proposed that rather, that his colleagues, rather than seeing him sort of. And this was the accusation that he had been like in an ivory tower, working to no end. Rather than see him in an ivory tower, take that idea of ivory and rather see him in his theoretical work as existing in a tusk. Right. So like an elephant tusk that was like. Like beating its way, you know, charging.
- [61:40]
Eva Gli
What a great flip.
- [61:42]
Dustin Condren
Yeah, I mean, it's so. It's like. It's perfect. And. And I'm sure that most of his colleagues were like, completely by the sort of rhetorical cleverness. But, you know, sort of the idea is that theory is taking the path for. For new cinematic innovation. Is that whatever theory he busts through with allows his colleagues to come through with their practical work. But then he says, you know, okay, fair enough. I've been mostly working in this. This tusk, but I'm going to sort of pledge from this time on to also work in the other tusk. Which is practical filmmaking. So theory and practice tied together. So now we can sort of imagine Eisenstein trying to redeem himself. As this sort of, you know, mammoth or something. Bust through huge tusks. But for me, I mean, the idea is that there's this third tusk, right. Which is. Which is where theory and practice kind of come together. And that's these unfinished projects where you can see both of them sitting there. Kind of with equal value. And also to see their relationship. And, you know, if we really want to redeem him. Then see how all of these failures ultimately allowed him then to make Ivan the Terrible. Which, you know, is, you know, one of the great films of the 20th century. And if he had remained healthy and lived longer. I'm sure there would have been more. More to follow, at least. Remained healthy and lived longer and survived.
- [63:04]
Eva Gli
Exactly it.
- [63:08]
Dustin Condren
Yeah. So I think for me, at the end of the project, this idea of the tusks and Eisenstein's sort of attempt to sort of not, I mean, yes, justify himself. But also to sort of further theorize his methodologies as sort of working in these simultaneous two tusks. And then this sort of third space where they come together. Has really wound up, for me, being quite inspiring. And is kind of the thing I think of now when I think of Eisenstein.
- [63:41]
Eva Gli
Thank you so much for talking to us today about the Unfinished. About the value and the beauty on Unfinished. In a time that's also very relentlessly focused on productivity and outputs. I'm very glad that your project was finished. And that I got to read it and that we had a chance. They were there. Sure, sure. I can imagine. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, it was an absolute pleasure to read this work. Tell me, what are you working on at the moment? What comes after the Unfinished?
- [64:16]
Dustin Condren
Well, so right now I'm in Berlin. And I have a fellowship for the year. To do research at what's called the Film University in Potsdam. A place that is just next to the. What was the UFA and film studios. A place that Eisenstein himself visited when he came to Berlin. Where Fritz Lang was working. And he saw this and so on. So my project for this year sort of comes. It begins from my work with Eisenstein. And it has to do with the question of how animals are represented and used and sort of rhetorically employed in films of the late 1920s and early 1930s. And Eisenstein and, you know, one of the questions I have always had when watching his films is, you know, what is he doing with these animals. Because he's quite cruel to them. You know, everyone knows the sort of culmination of strike. The film where the slaughterhouse is juxtaposed with the killing of the striking workers and so on. So this is sort of a starting point for me. But I'm going beyond Eisenstein. I'm also working with Vertov, Dovzhenko, several filmmakers. And right now, my sort of question is how collectivization films both depict the sort of changing relationship between agrarian workers and animals. And so depict the actual process of how, let's say, raising animals changed from the sort of peasant model. To the sort of factory model or the collective model. But then also how animals in these representations become rhetorical figures that either, as probably in most cases intended, promote the ideology. But in many cases also sort of break down. Because animals, as signifiers are so multivalent. And so always sort of, in my mind, take us beyond the frame. Make us think about, like, where did that animal come from? How did they do that? Like, what's actually going on? So. So, yeah, this is sort of the beginning of a project that I hope will turn into a book on animals in Stalinist cinema.
- [66:45]
Eva Gli
That sounds really interesting. And I hope that it's finished. A, and B, that you'll be back with us on New Books Network for another conversation about film. Thank you so much for today. I really appreciate it.
- [66:57]
Dustin Condren
Thank you.