Landscape and Politics in the Writings of Russian Film Director and Theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)

FAIN: FEL-268126-20

Joan Neuberger
University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX 78712-0100)

Research and writing leading to a book on Soviet film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and his late writings about art, landscape, and politics.

Sergei Eisenstein is one of the most famous film makers and theorists in the world but outside of a small number of specialists, few know about the second half of his career, which significantly modified the ideas that made him famous. My book establishes a new foundation for understanding his work of that period. It shows that his film theory was embedded in a larger framework about the production and reception of all art, which he linked with the human feeling for immersion in nature, and the individual's feeling for immersion in the collective. These ideas prefigured and speak to issues we care about today: the place of immersion in new media, inter-subjectivity between humans and nature, and between humans and the endangered landscape of the Anthropocene, and the revived possibilities for non-Soviet socialism and socialist activism.