Almost fifty years after the first publication of Sergei Eisenstein's “Notes for a Film of Capital ” in the pages of October , “The Capital Diaries: A New Selection” presents extensive new extracts from the Soviet filmmaker's notebooks from 1927 and 1928, drawing from over five hundred pages of notes, images, press clippings, drawings, and diagrams in which Eisenstein puzzles over his (unrealized) film based on Karl Marx's Das Kapital . This new selection emphasizes the experimental, diaristic, and proto-cinematic character of the material to present both a fuller sense of Eisenstein's work on the film and the central use of images to the process. What emerges is an autotheoretical experiment involving psychoanalysis (including the filmmaker's own), “intellectual attractions,” typage (non-professional actors), the film October , and the many ways in which James Joyce's Ulysses , especially the “inner monologue,” served as creative resources and experimental instruments for the Capital project.

Sergei Eisenstein's Paris Diary, a fragment of which is presented here for the first time in translation, traces two months of the filmmaker's sojourn in Paris between December 1929 and February 1930. It captures the singular way in which he interwove theoretical reflections with free associations, political remarks, and random observations. Containing drawings and notes, these pages also bear witness to significant encounters with the biologist and micro-cinematographer Jean Painlevé, the ethnographer Georges-Henri Rivière, and, the subject of speculation for many decades, the philosopher and cultural theorist Georges Bataille. Critical discussions of Surrealism, including Luis Buñuel's and Salvador Dalí's film Un chien andalou , are also reported. The diary's fragmentary notes and metamorphic associations perform Eisenstein's transposition of experimental Surrealist techniques, such as free association, onto his own autotheoretical writing.