A Film between Joyce and Marx: Sergei Eisenstein's Documentary Poem about the Argentine Pampas

Sergei Eisenstein wanted to make a movie about James Joyce’s Ulysses. Well, not exactly. What he actually wanted was to create a film adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital, drawing on the linguistic experiments in Joyce’s work. Still fantasizing about the possibilities of non-narrative cinema, he arrived in the United States in May 1930. In New York, he met the aristocratic author and publisher Victoria Ocampo, who proposed traveling to Argentina to film a “documentary poem” about the pampas. This talk examines the unusual collaboration between the literary grande dame and the Bolshevik filmmaker. Aside from their admiration for Joyce, they disagreed on everything. Their project invites reflection on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in an epoch in which the Russian Revolution still elicited some interest among Western intellectuals. We cannot know how the film about the pampas would have turned out because, after several conversations, it was never made. Afterwards, Eisenstein would travel to Mexico where he shot the renowned ¡Que viva México! Does it perhaps contain some vestiges of the documentary poem?

David Oubiña has a PhD in literature with a focus on film from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He is a researcher at CONICET and a professor at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Universidad de Buenos Aires). He has been a visiting researcher at the University of London and a visiting professor at the University of Bergen, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He was a fellow of the Fulbright Commission, the British Council, Fundación Antorchas, and Fondo Nacional de las Artes. In 2006, he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. Among his recent books are Una juguetería filosófica: Cine, cronofotografía y arte digital (2009); El silencio y sus bordes. Modos de lo extremo en la literatura y el cine (2011); Ceremonias de lo invisible. Apuntes sobre el cine y la guerra (2020) and Caligrafía de la imagen. De la política de los autores al cine de autor (2022).

Sponsored by the Spanish, Russian, French, German, and history departments, the Division of LIterature & Languages, and the Film and Media Studies program. Free and open to the public.