Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic adaptation of Karl Marx’s 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 Eisenstein’s Capital, presenting for the first time material from the full scope of the film project’s 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 Eisenstein’s artistic choices, and argues that its brilliant adaptation of Marx’s Capital relied on the fragmentary and nonlinear state of its material. Published here for the first time, sequences from Eisenstein’s archival materials are presented in this volume not as mere illustrations but as arguments in their own right, a visual theorization of value.

Elena Vogman is a visiting assistant professor of History at NYU Shanghai. She holds a PhD in general and comparative literature from Free University, Berlin and was a postdoctoral fellow at Peter Szondi-Institute for General and Comparative Literature, Berlin and International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy (IKKM, Weimar), as well as a guest professor at École Normale Superieure, Paris.

— Choice