Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network — New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies
Episode: Dustin Condren, "An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Host: Eva Gli
Guest: Dr. Dustin Condren
Date: November 19, 2025

Overview

This episode delves into the unfinished cinematic projects of iconic Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, as explored in Dustin Condren’s book An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film. Condren and host Eva Gli discuss what it means to study the “unrealized” in cinema: the creative labor that yields no final product, the archival traces left behind, and the conceptual frameworks of the unfinished in art and film history. The conversation revolves around six major Eisenstein film projects from 1927–1937 that, despite never being completed, illuminate the limits and possibilities of cinema, artistic ambition, and theory.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Significance of Unfinished Work

• Condren’s personal creative background (photography, theater) led him to ponder the value of uncompleted projects, both for artists and scholars.
  • “A personal question for me is what to do with these projects 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.” – Dustin Condren [04:06]
• Eisenstein’s unfinished works are not marginal but integral, incubators for theoretical and practical innovation.
• The notion of the unfinished as vital to understanding an artist’s creative evolution.

2. Researching the Unmade: Methods and Sources

• Studying unmade films involves sifting through varying degrees of documentation: notes, treatments, scripts, director’s scripts, screen tests, photographs.
  • “Luckily, unlike several other visual art forms, cinema leaves quite a... big paper trail... So for most of these projects, I was able to find pretty significant archival holdings.” – Dustin Condren [08:06]
• The scholarly challenge: filling in the gaps imaginatively but responsibly.

3. The Unfinished in Art and Cinema Theory

• Rooted in Renaissance and 19th-century art discourse; artists such as Michelangelo, Rodin, and writers like Preaud and Coleridge inspired Eisenstein’s and Condren’s thinking.
• The “unfinished” is seen as related to the “infinite”—art’s unbounded potential versus its finite outcomes.
  • “I'm not for the finished. I'm for the infinite.” — Preaud (via Condren) [12:09]
• For Eisenstein, as for other modernists, the fragment and the unrealized work become meaningful sites of artistic possibility.

4. Eisenstein’s Unfinished Projects: Three Thematic Pairs

Pair 1: Glass House & Capital

• Glass House: A drama set in an entirely glass building, inspired by modern architecture (Mies van der Rohe, Bruno Taut) and Berlin’s avant-garde.
  • Explores transparency, optical effects, and dramaturgy through material.
  • “He had all of these scenes in his mind... but he could never quite get to... something that he could sell to either to a Soviet production committee or to a Hollywood studio.” – Dustin Condren [16:59]
• Capital: An adaptation of Marx’s Das Kapital, intending to move cinema toward intellectual, essayistic forms.
  • The project fizzles amid political and narrative difficulties, compounded by the increasing danger of touching on Marxist economic critique during the Stalinist 1930s.

Pair 2: There's Gold & American Tragedy (Hollywood Years)

• There’s Gold: Adaptation of Blaise Cendrars’ novel about the rise and fall of California gold-rush magnate Johann Sutter.
  • Eisenstein and team embraced location research and rapid scriptwriting, but the project was likely derailed by costs and suspicion of Bolshevik influence and antisemitism.
  • “There were people... publishing letters... saying, ‘How can a major studio be entertaining the thought of letting a Bolshevik Jewish filmmaker make their films for an American audience?’” – Dustin Condren [28:14]
• American Tragedy: Dreiser adaptation, praised by Selznick as “the best screenplay he had ever read” but ultimately rejected for being too bleak.
  • Notably, Eisenstein’s screenplay experimented with the use of soundscape and the “cinematic internal monologue”—viewed as innovative for the early sound era.
  • “From the very beginning of the question of sound in cinema, Eisenstein had wanted there to not necessarily be total synchronization between image and soundtrack.” – Dustin Condren [28:14]

Pair 3: MMM & Moscow (Return to USSR)

• MMM: A satirical comedy. Maxim Maksimovich (MMM) stumbles home drunk, where medieval church frescoes literally come to life and accompany him, leading to time-travel farce and meta-cinematic jokes (e.g., swallowing the film’s microphone, launching internal monologue).
  • “[Maxim] swallows the microphone and then we start to hear his internal monologue... you can actually see a little mini version of himself talking into the microphone and so on. So it's just amazingly sort of recursive and self reflexive.” – Dustin Condren [44:59]
• Moscow: A monumental attempt to depict Moscow’s entire history via a dialectical-montage method that “compact[s] and fuse[s]” eras together using recurring themes and actors.
  • “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.” – Dustin Condren [51:40]

5. Theory, Practice, and the Value of Unfinished Art

• Ongoing criticism: Eisenstein as a theorist rather than a practical filmmaker; attacked at the 1935 Congress of Soviet Film Workers for not producing films.
• Eisenstein’s defense: theorizing is practical creative work; he likens himself not to an ivory tower recluse but to a “tusk,” charging a path for innovation.
  • “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… Like an elephant tusk that was… charging.” – Dustin Condren [61:42]
  • “For me, there's this third tusk... where theory and practice kind of come together. And that's these unfinished projects.” – Dustin Condren [63:08]
• The unfinished becomes a fruitful “third space” joining theory and practice—where many important innovations incubate.

6. Condren’s Next Project

• New research in Berlin on representations of animals in Soviet cinema, exploring how animals function rhetorically and ideologically, especially during collectivization and in the works of Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko.
  • “My project... has to do with the question of how animals are... rhetorically employed in films of the late 1920s and early 1930s... how collectivization films both depict the sort of changing relationship between agrarian workers and animals…” – Dustin Condren [64:15]

Notable Quotes

• “What to do with these projects 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.” – Dustin Condren [04:06]
• “I'm not for the finished. I'm for the infinite.” — Preaud, quoted by Condren [12:09]
• “He had all of these scenes in his mind... but he could never quite get to... something that he could sell to either to a Soviet production committee or to a Hollywood studio.” – Dustin Condren [16:59, on Glass House]
• “There were people... publishing letters... saying, ‘How can a major studio be entertaining the thought of letting a Bolshevik Jewish filmmaker make their films for an American audience?’” – Dustin Condren [28:14]
• “From the very beginning... Eisenstein had wanted there to not necessarily be total synchronization... between image and soundtrack.” – Dustin Condren [28:14, on American Tragedy]
• "[Maxim] swallows the microphone and then we start to hear his internal monologue... It's just amazingly... recursive and self-reflexive." – Dustin Condren [44:59, on MMM]
• “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.” – Dustin Condren [51:40, on Moscow]
• “Rather than see him in an ivory tower... see him in his theoretical work as existing in a tusk... charging.” – Dustin Condren [61:42]
• “For me, there's this third tusk... where theory and practice kind of come together. And that's these unfinished projects.” – Dustin Condren [63:08]

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:07] Introduction to Condren, his background, and the genesis of his interest in unfinished art.
• [04:06] Why study the unfinished? Creative labor and its value.
• [08:06] Research process: What kinds of sources document an unfinished film?
• [12:09] The unfinished in art theory: from Renaissance to Eisenstein.
• [16:10] Structuring the book: Three thematic project pairs; transition to first pair.
• [16:59] Glass House and Capital: Conceptual and political challenges.
• [28:14] Eisenstein’s Hollywood adventures: There’s Gold and American Tragedy, and reception in the US.
• [40:08] What Eisenstein absorbed in the West; lasting technical/theoretical influences.
• [44:59] MMM: Satirical time-travel farce, modernist self-reflexivity, and sound cinema gags.
• [51:40] Moscow: Montage and the representation of historical simultaneity.
• [58:39] Theory versus practice in Eisenstein’s career; criticism and response (the “tusk” analogy).
• [64:15] Future research on animals in Soviet cinema.

Memorable Moments

• Condren detailing the meta-cinematic joke in MMM, where the protagonist swallows the mic and his thoughts become audible (and even visible with an in-body miniaturized version): “[You] see like a little mini version of himself talking into the microphone... It's just amazingly sort of recursive and self reflexive...” [44:59]
• The “ivory tower vs. tusk” metaphor: Eisenstein’s witty rebuttal that his theorizing is not idle abstraction, but paves the path for practical creativity [61:42].

Takeaway

Eisenstein’s unfinished films are not creative dead ends, but vital sites where theory, technical ambition, and the limits of cinematic realization converge. Through imaginative reconstruction and archival investigation, they offer a unique prism for understanding both Eisenstein’s creative process and the broader dynamics of artistic innovation, failure, and legacy.