Sergei Eisenstein and Immersion in Nature (with Joan Neuberger)

At a time when nearly everyone else was writing about nature as something to be conquered, Eisenstein was joining personal experience with Romantic and Indigenous tropes to write about self-immersion in nature as a a source of individual liberation, a model for understanding film reception, and a blueprint for a utopian socialist collective. This presentation will examine his 1945 essay, “The Music of Landscape,” to show how immersion in nature offered Eisenstein new avenues for further developing his ideas about self, art, radical politics, and the productive contradictions of montage.

Joan Neuberger is Professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin, which at the moment is located on the sofa in her living room. Her most recent publication is This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Cornell, 2019), which has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize and the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. In 2020, she received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center to complete a book entitled Global Eisenstein: Immersion in Nature, Art, and the World.

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.