A major new study of Sergei Eisenstein delivers fresh, in-depth analyses of the iconic filmmaker’s body of work

What can we still learn from Sergei Eisenstein? Long valorized as the essential filmmaker of the Russian Revolution and celebrated for his indispensable contributions to cinematic technique, Eisenstein’s relevance to contemporary culture is far from exhausted. In Movement, Action, Image, Montage, Luka Arsenjuk considers the auteur as a filmmaker and a theorist, drawing on philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles Deleuze—as well as Eisenstein’s own untranslated texts—to reframe the way we think about the great director and his legacy.

Focusing on Eisenstein’s unique treatment of the foundational concepts of cinema—movement, action, image, and montage—Arsenjuk invests each aspect of the auteur’s art with new significance for the twenty-first century. Eisenstein’s work and thought, he argues, belong as much to the future as the past, and both can offer novel contributions to long-standing cinematic questions and debates.

Movement, Action, Image, Montage brings new elements of Eisenstein’s output into academic consideration, by means ranging from sustained and comprehensive theorization of Eisenstein’s practice as a graphic artist to purposeful engagement with his recently published, unfinished book Method, still unavailable in English translation. This tour de force offers new and significant insights on Eisenstein’s oeuvre—the films, the art, and the theory—and is a landmark work on an essential filmmaker.

Luka Arsenjuk is associate professor of film studies and core faculty member in comparative literature at the University of Maryland, College Park.

"If Eisenstein, his cinema, and his writings sometimes threaten to become invisible, taken-for-granted figures in the history of cinema, Luka Arsenjuk's demanding and articulate polemic returns him and that work to a critical and crucial place in contemporary film culture. This is a book for all film historians and lovers of cinema."—Timothy Corrigan, author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

"A uniquely striking work of film theory and historical reflection by one of the most exciting film and critical theorists working today. Movement, Action, Image, Montage is the most important theory of cinematic movement to have emerged since Deleuze’s cinema books. The theory of figuration that accompanies this extraordinary conception of movement will not only change the way that we look at Eisenstein but also how we understand cinema and the related arts more generally."—Brian Price, University of Toronto

"Movement, Action, Image, Montage is a critical tour de force, combining brilliant close readings of Eisenstein’s films, drawings, and major texts with subtle speculative thinking. Its central concept, a ‘dialectic of division,’ emphasizes not ‘organic’ synthesis, but the fundamental negativity of Eisensteinian montage and its often-overlooked implications and effects. Drawing on archival material, Luka Arsenjuk succeeds in demonstrating the importance of Eisenstein’s thinking to our own critical moment."—Karla Oeler, Stanford University