A book that approaches a much-examined figure like Sergei Eisenstein from a new direction discovers aspects generally overlooked and leaves its readers eager to take some of the offered threads and follow them further. A book, in short, like Dustin Condren’s An Imaginary Cinema is a rarity and a gift. Instead of returning yet again to Ivan the Terrible or The Battleship Potemkin, Condren chooses to focus on six of Eisenstein’s unfinished projects, “the unrealized work as such” (13), organizing these projects quite elegantly into three pairs, each of which represents, in Condren’s terms, a “conceptual opposition.” Thus Part I gives us, under the rubric of “Ideal/Material,” a discussion of two rather early projects, the “Glass House” idea that came to Eisenstein in Berlin in 1926 and his proposal to make a film version of Marx’s Capital, despite (as Condren points out) his notes showing little evidence of Eisenstein’s ever having read Capital himself. In Part II we find a discussion of the two projects that dominate Eisenstein’s imagination during his sojourn in California (rubric: “Objective/Subjective”), and in Part III (“Sequence/Simultaneity”), Condren tackles two unrealized efforts from the thirties, MMM and Moscow. This structure is tidy, but the brilliance of the book lies in the way that its specific examples escape—and even threaten at times to explode—the book’s stated “intention,” which is “to frame these unfinished works together, as a series, and as a comprehensive body” (13). In other words, in An Imaginary Cinema, we are invited to explore a kind of ongoing struggle between “parts” (fragmentary, unruly, digressive, fertile) and “wholes” (elusive, imaginary, longed for). It can certainly be very tempting to take, as Condren does, Eisenstein’s fantastically motley scraps (“the archival remnants of the unfinished Eisenstein projects,” 13) as “characteristic parts that can make possible not a literal reconstruction, but an imaginary projection of their absent whole” (13). It may be, however, that the container into which these scraps are organized (the “absent whole”; the particular film project; the book’s strict, overarching structure) sometimes finds itself reining in or dampening the brilliantly digressive energy of the examples Condren brings to us from the archives.

Almost every illustration in the book is a digressive gem from Eisenstein’s notes, often containing a mix of sketches, phrases, and, sometimes, “found images” Eisenstein pasted in from newspapers. (These images are sometimes not as clearly printed as they could be.) Each illustration demands and rewards close scrutiny. On pages 109–10, for instance, we find pages from Eisenstein’s 1928 notebooks, pages whose glorious incongruities Condren describes as “dialectical montage”:

“… on the one hand, images of wax figures from a London museum disfigured in a fire and, on the other, the small metal cage on wheels in which Sultan Abdelhafid of Morocco kept pretender to the throne Bou Hmara imprisoned before his execution in 1909 …” (108). Another page links “mass-produced Easter bunnies” with “a row of Catholic priests” (108). These images are just as challenging, puzzling, and exciting in visual form as Condren’s descriptions here suggest, and they cry out for an analysis that allows itself to be led (perhaps very far) away from the main point. Each could easily generate an article or little chapter in its own right. But Condren feels obliged in the next paragraph to pull back from digression (from the explosive potential of these “parts”) to serve the needs of the tamer container (the “whole”). This disciplined turning-away from digression can sometimes feel like a great loss: in the middle of a discussion of the unfinished MMM, we are shown Eisenstein’s stunning sketches of a little character and tiny microphone pictured within an x-ray of the character’s own skeleton. Condren nods to the question of the “interior monologue” raised earlier in the book, but has to leave the many other directions suggested by these images unexplored in order to move to MMM, the chapter’s ostensible focus.

Eisenstein’s digressive way of thinking about things sometimes may lead to more productive and surprising places than any attempt to contain those digressions within a particular “project” file, but I think it is to Condren’s infinite credit that his book gives us so many rabbit holes for future exploration. Reading An Imaginary Cinema is an exhilarating experience; it is a book that will fuel many future explorations of the gloriously “unfinished” ideas of Eisenstein’s fertile imagination.