Online Lecture with Dr. Elena Vogman

“Values Resemble a Dance, Not a Statue”: Eccentric Values With Sergei Eisenstein and Georges Bataille

Toward the end of the 1920s, Eisenstein and Bataille were both experimenting with matter’s potential for alteration. Bataille had put his conception of “base materialism” to the test, critically confronting academic and aesthetic visions of art with anthropological and archaeological images in the journal Documents. Eisenstein had assembled visual material for his planned film Capital, associating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy with Joyce’s Ulysses. Eisenstein and Bataille met in Paris in January 1930 after Eisenstein’s lecture on Capital at Sorbonne University. In turn, Bataille showed the Soviet director a series of gnostic coins, later to be included in his article on “base materialism”. This talk will elucidate these authors’ exchange of such eccentric values drawing upon Eisenstein’s Capital project’s archive, which comprises over 500 pages of notes, drawings, press clippings, and expression diagrams.