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.

Poetry. "Diane Ward's new book ushers us into an imaginary movie, only to tell us we have never left. The precise declarative elegance of Ward's lines both critique the social forces of the spectacle and situate the reader in an autonomous milieau, at once public and private. Ward has discovered the means of exploiting poetic language which turns language into a moral force. She offers us, in our collaborative improvising as readers, a dignity equal to the authority of the writer. Her writing provides us with the means to name what otherwise impedes change. This IMAGINARY MOVIE is 'no skin deep technology/but a connected sifting of last things'" -Jerry Estrin.

This study argues the imaginary dialogue in Pasolini's La Divina Mimesis (1963-65), between two historical versions of the author and on the ground of Dante's Comedy, is a typical and recurrent structure in the work. From the civic poetry of the 1950's and 1960's, to the plays Calderón and Pilade, to the pastiches of Trasumanar e organizzar, the poet's recourse to various forms of polyphonic discourse and address, like his protean play with genres and myths and his polemical attack on the «institutions», aids in his continuous paraphrase of the compelling issues of his day.

Through the analysis of examples that range from cutting-edge Hollywood blockbusters to viral films on the internet, and from Victorian cinema to the present, the contributors to this volume discuss the ways in which thinking about technology is crucial to understanding cinema's forms, significance and impact upon audiences.

This book offers an accessible account of film theory for the student and the cinemagoer. It ranges from the late 1960s to the present, a period in which a number of conceptual strands--notably politics, semiotics and psychoanalysis--came together. Lapsely and Westlake chart the construction of this synthesis and its subsequent fragmentation and elucidate the various intellectual currents contributing to it. The first part of the book covers the conceptual background of film theory, dealing with historical materialism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, while the second part concentrates on particular topics--authorship, narrative, realism, the avant-garde and postmodernism.This second edition features an extensive retrospective introduction, as well as a fully updated and extended bibliography.