The Capital Diaries: A New Selection.

Almost fifty years after the first publication of Sergei Eisenstein's "Notes for a Film of Capital" in the pages of October, "The Capital Diaries: A New Selection" presents extensive new extracts from the Soviet filmmaker's notebooks from 1927 and 1928, drawing from over five hundred pages of notes, images, press clippings, drawings, and diagrams in which Eisenstein puzzles over his (unrealized) film based on Karl Marx's Das Kapital. This new selection emphasizes the experimental, diaristic, and proto-cinematic character of the material to present both a fuller sense of Eisenstein's work on the film and the central use of images to the process. What emerges is an autotheoretical experiment involving psychoanalysis (including the filmmaker's own), "intellectual attractions," typage (non-professional actors), the film October, and the many ways in which James Joyce's Ulysses, especially the "inner monologue," served as creative resources and experimental instruments for the Capital project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]