Actions
A 2 day conference was funded, developed and organised by Kino Klassika in collaboration with Dr Natalia Murray of GRAD London and Maria Mileeva of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art. Attendees from the spheres of psychology and neuroscience, film history and media were present as well as noted film makers such as Sally Potter, Laura Mulvey and Margie Kinmouth. Attendees arrived from the US, Germany, Italy, France, Russia and the UK. Private views of both drawings exhibitions were also hosted during the 2 day conference.
Results
New research papers were presented by Prof Joan Neuberger of University of Texas, Prof Oksana Bulgakowa (Film History, University of Mainz), Anna Kolesnikova (Sorbonne, Nouvelle Paris, Birkbeck London), Prof Antonio Somaini (Professor Film, Media, And Visual Culture Theory Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris) psychoanalyist Igor Kadyrov, Ada Ackerman (Research Fellow NYU / CNRS Paris). Topics covered included Neuberger on ‘The Ambition of Ivan the Terrible: what the film might have included’, Oksana Bulgakowa on ‘Eisenstein as Curator’, Anna Kolesnikova on ‘Eisenstein on Kinaesthesia and Empathy’, Prof Antonio Somaini on Eisenstein, Archeology and Images, Igor Kadyrov on ‘Eisenstein and the Soviet Suppression of Psychoanalysis’ and Ada Ackerman on ‘Eisenstein and Art History: The Case of Daumier’.
Ian Christie chaired a round table discussion with filmmakers Laura Mulvey and Margy Kinmouth about Eisenstein’s film legacy. Film Director Sally Potter, (OBE) gave a wide-ranging talk about the influence of Eisenstein on her career. The conference also included rare screenings of Laura Mulvey’s Disgraced Monuments, Sally Baines’ The Last Dance on Eisenstein’s ballet of Carmen and Renny Bartlett’s Eisenstein as well as the launch of Antonio Somaini and Naum Kleiman’s new book ‘Notes for a General History of Cinema’.
Partner Feedback
In the summary of conference learnings, both Professors Joan Neuberger and Antonio Somaini commented on the revelatory emphasis Eisenstein’s drawings had been given in the exhibitions ‘Unexpected Eisenstein’ and ‘Love, Lust and Laughter’ and how this had given fresh insight to the papers delivered at conference.
For Prof Neuberger the exhibitions and two days of discussion highlighted how much Eisenstein remains yet to be explored. She observed that having listened to the psychoanalytic papers delivered by Igor Kadryov and Anna Kolesnikova how little intellectual history of Russia is available from this period and how much she would like to see Eisenstein placed within the intellectual context of his peers.
Prof Somaini expressed a wish to see the drawings considered with the same scholarship as the film and theoretical work. Somaini also made a plea for film historians to enter into stronger dialogue with disciplines including art history, philosophy, psychology and vice versa as evidenced by the success of this inter-disciplinary conference.
GRAD had a very successful collaboration with Kino Klassika over the course of the exhibition of Eisenstein drawings. The conference at the Courtauld became a magnificent culmination of that collaboration…
Ada Ackerman
Paris-New York
Research fellow at CIRHUS (joint research centre between NYU and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS). A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), Ada is an art historian and has published Eisenstein et Daumier, des affinités électives (2013). She collaborated on the exhibition 1917 at the Centre Pompidou in Metz (2012) and has taught art history at Paris Nanterre, La Défense and the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon. She is currently editing a book on Eisenstein’s library, Reading with Eisenstein (Montreal).
Oksana Bulgakowa
Berlin
Professor of Film history and Film Analysis at the University of Maintz; formerly teaching at the Humboldt and Freie universities of Berlin, and visiting professor at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley. Author of Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography (1998/2001), and editor of Eisenstein on Disney, Malevich: The White Rectangle, co-curator of the exhibitions Moscow-Berlin, Berlin-Moscow (1995) and Eisenstein’s Mexican Drawings (Antwerp, 2009).
Igor Kadyrov
Moscow
Igor Kadyrov is a supervising psychoanalyst of the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society and a past president of the society. Currently he is the director of the Han Groen Prakken European Psychoanalytic Institute of the International Psychoanalytical Associations and European Psychoanalytical Federation. He is an Associate Professor of clinical psychology and Director of the Master Degree program on Psychoanalytic Psychology and Psychotherapy at Lomonosov Moscow State University. He is the chair of the psychoanalytic Cinema Festival in Moscow and a consultant of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival in London. He has published many works on psychoanalysis.
Anna Kolesnikova
Paris
Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III. Currently working on parallels between contemporary cognitive science and Eisenstein’s theories of perception.
Laura Mulvey
London
Professor of Film and Media Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, and Fellow of the British Academy. Her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, played a major part in establishing the field of film studies, and within it feminist film theory as an important direction. Among the films she has co-directed, the conference will include a rare screening of Disgraced Monuments, which she co-directed in 1991 with Mark Lewis. This film examines ‘the fate of revolutionary monuments in the Soviet Union after the fall of communism’.
Joan Neuberger
Austin, Texas
Professor of History, University of Austin at Texas. Neuberger studies modern Russian culture in social and political context, with a focus on the politics of the arts. She is the author of an eclectic range of publications, including Hooliganism: Crime and Culture in St Petersburg, 1900-1914 (1993), Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion (2003); co-author of Europe and the Making of Modernity, 1815-1914 (2005); and co-editor of Imitations of Life: Melodrama in Russia (2001) and Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (2008).
Sally Potter
London
Sally Potter OBE is the award-winning director of seven feature films, and a number of shorts and documentaries. A dancer and musician before she became a filmmaker, she has had a longstanding interest in Russia, and her Academy-award nominated Orlando (1992) was partly filmed in Russia and Uzbekistan.
Antonio Somani
Paris
Professor of Film and Visual Studies and Theory of Media at Paris 3, he is joining director of the research group LIRA (Laboratoire International de Recherches en Arts). Among his many publications, one of the most recent is an edition of Eisenstein’s Notes for a General History of Cinema, which will be launched by Amsterdam University Press during the conference.
Ian Christie
London
Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History, Birkbeck College, University of London, and Fellow of the British Academy. Co-curator of the GRAD exhibition Unexpected Eisenstein, he also co-curated Eisenstein: His Life and Art (Oxford Museum of Modern Art/Hayward Gallery, 1988), and co-edited Eisenstein Rediscovered (1993) and The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (1988), both with Richard Taylor.
