In the century since Sergei Eisenstein announced his plans to direct a film from Karl Marx's Capital, the unrealized project has come to radiate an almost legendary attraction. Figures from Georges Bataille to Alexander Kluge have been variously provoked by the concept, often despite a conspicuous scarcity of concrete information about it. Until 1973, when the journal Iskusstvo kino published a montage of pertinent Eisenstein notebook excerpts, little was known beyond that plans for such a film had once existed. And, rich as that publication has been for subsequent scholarship, it represents only a fraction of the material the director generated for the project. It is this deficit that Elena Vogman seeks to remedy in her monograph devoted to Eisenstein's Capital.

In Vogman's book, the archive presides tangibly. An immediately conspicuous contribution is the full-color reproduction of some forty complete Capital-themed pages from Eisenstein's 1927–28 notebooks, illustrating the director's recourse to seemingly limitless sources in the cultivation of his original (if sometimes abstruse) theoretical and aesthetic explorations. On one page, for example, Eisenstein's cinematic acuity may be observed in a photomontage of disparate newspaper cutouts: an Easter bunny atop a mound of eggs, a quartet of glumly identical Catholic priests, a pair of masked Sierra Leonean “devils” (192). The collaged images form a multivalent constellation that, Vogman argues, “reveals a crucial dialectic” in which “fetish and cult appear precisely within the historical complexity of their perpetuation and metamorphosis” (180).

When referring to his Capital, Eisenstein emphasized the objective to train viewers to think according to Marx's method—that is, dialectically. Vogman observes this key intention, treating such archival documents “not as mere illustrations, but as constitutive arguments in their own right” attempting to “make them act, to follow their entanglements” (11). Vogman demonstrates how exercises such as the photomontage described above—like the planned film toward which they strain—enact a quintessentially Marxian critique of value forms. In reading Eisenstein's Capital notes (the scope of which has been greatly expanded by her exhaustive research), Vogman goes further than previous scholars in surmising the specific visual mechanisms by which Eisenstein imagined his film might operate. Some readers may have trouble with the insistent acrobatics of their articulation, but Vogman's work presents many compelling arguments.

Throughout its four chapters, the volume inspects Eisenstein's Capital film notes, often cross-referencing them to landmarks of critical thought. Chapter 1 focuses on innovations of narrative form suggested in the documents, divining there a program similar to Walter Benjamin's in his slightly later writing on art and reproducibility. Chapter 2 correlates passages from the notebooks with recognizable Eisensteinian concepts (tipazh, inner monologue), demonstrating Capital's indispensability for the director's evolving practice. Chapter 3 evaluates polemics around the depiction of the real in Eisenstein's October (1928), excavating possible functions of symbolic value in Capital. The final chapter follows a circuitous route across Johann von Goethe and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to suggest how economic capital's metamorphic quality was central to Eisenstein's vision.

The difficulties in writing about Eisenstein's Capital project are many. Not least is the porousness of its conceptual boundaries. The notebooks in which the relevant ideas appear were not exclusively devoted to the project, and their contents surge with other activity. At the time, not only was Capital one of several films in development, but Eisenstein was also contending with the completion of both October and The General Line (1929), composing various essays, and teaching cinema courses. Notes on these things, and others besides, appear in the diaries, making it difficult to assign definitive independent value to Capital. Vogman gestures toward this textual complexity, engaging components of all the above in her analysis, if perhaps also over-insinuating Capital as their dominant factor. Another possible result of this rangy source material: some small but conspicuous redundancies across the book's chapters (quotations reintroduced as if for the first time) and some instances of imprecise translation and citation.

Vogman's book pulses with the tangible thrill of archival discovery, and such concerns do not diminish a publication that should be of substantial interest to Eisenstein scholars, not only for the prominence it accords its beautiful reproductions but also for the determination with which it interrogates in them just how Eisenstein imagined a Marxian cinema. For this reason too, the book will appeal to scholars in film and media studies, intellectual history, and critical theory.