Dance of Values Sergei Eisensteins Capital Project

Sergei Eisensteins cinematic adaptation of Karl Marxs Capital was never realized, yet it has haunted the imagination of many filmmakers, historians, and philosophers to the present day. Dance of Values aims to conjure the phantom of Eisensteins Capital, presenting for the first time material from the full scope of the film projects archival body. This visual instruction in the dialectical method, as Eisenstein called it, comprises more than five hundred pages of notes, drawings, press clippings, diagrams, negatives, theoretical reflections, and extensive quotations. Dance of Values explores the internal formal necessity underlying Eisensteins artistic choices, and argues that its brilliant adaptation of Marxs Capital relied on the fragmentary and nonlinear state of its material. Published here for the first time, sequences from Eisensteins archival materials are presented in this volume not as mere illustrations but as arguments in their own right, a visual theorization of value.