DUSTIN CONDREN

An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2024.

An Imaginary Cinema is the first systematic study of Sergei Eisenstein's unrealized films as well as a deeply informed historical and theoretical inquiry into the role and meaning of the unmade in his oeuvre. Eisenstein directed some of the twentieth century's most important films, from the early classic of montage, Battleship Potemkin, to his late masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible. Alongside these, however, the Soviet filmmaker also toiled over a compelling array of unrealized projects, from ideas that never grew beyond complex, passionate notebook scrawls and sketches to productions that were mounted and shot to some degree of completion without ever being finished.

Working from the archival remnants of several of the director's most fascinating unrealized projects—from his bold vision to film Marx's Das Kapital to his time in Hollywood struggling to adapt Dreiser's An American Tragedy—Dustin Condren's book reveals new aspects of Eisenstein's genius, showing the filmmaker in a constant state of process, open to working toward impossible and sometimes utopian ends, and committed to the pursuit of creative and theoretical discovery. Condren's analysis of these unrealized projects in An Imaginary Cinema reveals Eisenstein at crucial moments of his personal and artistic biography, and it also tells the wider story of a canonical artist negotiating the political labyrinths of Stalinist Russia, the economic pitfalls of Hollywood, and the technological shifts of early cinema.

“Odd or Even: Eisenstein and Unfinished Work,” in The Eisenstein Universe, eds. Ian Christie and Julia Vassilieva. London: Bloomsbury, 2021, 15–25.

“Notes Toward an Untimely Soviet Comedy: Eisenstein’s MMM,” in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, v. 15 (2021), no. 1.

“Субъектив: Эйзенштейн и оживление вещей,” in Эйзенштейн для XXI века, Moscow: Garage, 2020, 96–111.

Introduction to The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus by Leo Tolstoy. New York: HarperCollins, 2011, vii–xiii.

“John Shade Shaving: Inspiration and Composition in a Selection from Pale Fire,” in Nabokov Studies, v. 10, 2006, 129–46.

“Tolpa / Chern’,” in Crowds, edited by Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, 328–30.