Sergei Eisenstein: METHOD. Edited and commented by Oksana Bulgakowa

First complete edition from the original [RGALI] manuscript in Russian, German, English, French etc. – transcribed, edited and widely commented by Oksana Bulgakowa. Second extended edition, recently published!

In his biggest and last theoretical project METHOD (1932-1948) Eisenstein was trying to elaborate an analytical model that would enable him to describe and classify all art practices and forms: cave painting and Cubism, 17th Century’s Japanese graphics and American film, ornament and musical counterpoint, different schools of acting and plot construction in Shakespeare’s dramas, circus and music, Dostoevsky’s novels and Disney’s animated cartoons. But his main point of preoccupation was the genealogy of modernism and film, which was for Eisenstein the quintessentially modernist medium.
Eisenstein explored art – literature, theater, painting, architecture, music, film – in its relation to archaic mentality and conceived artworks as collective dream images. This oneiric subject and the method of ecstatic illumination needed for its perception obliged Eisenstein to follow a visual logic instead of a linear one. He constructed his never finished book according to the associative principles of montage that replaced the traditional scholarly narrative. He searched for new forms of a book that should be closer to associative, spherical, and labyrinthine thought structures, which so far had only found expression in modernist art experiments. His theory emerged as a hybrid work of an artist who was able to conceptualize a new form – a hypertext – before the appearance of a new medium for it.
Please note: This edition provides the extensively commented transcription of METOD by Sergei Eisenstein - mainly in Russian, so it is not translated. Translations from it (into German and into English) appear gradually in separate editions, for example "Disney" and more recently "The primal phenomenon: Art". You can find them on our website.

[ 4 volumes · ca. 1660 pages · numerous illustrations · large registers · ISBN 978-3-9804989-4-4 for Softcover | 978-3-9804989-3-7 for Hardcover ]