Sergei Eisenstein on filming 'Capital'

Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) - a classic film satirising capitalism.

The outstanding Soviet film maker Sergei Eisenstein, whose life and politics are discussed here, was a towering artistic genius of the twentieth century responsible for classics such as October, Strike! and Battleship Potemkin. In the 1920s, he dreamed of turning Marx’s Capital into a film. When he initially mentioned his plan to an audience and was asked what it would be like, his inspired response was: 'It's a factory secret!'. However, in a lecture in Paris in 1930 he revealed more when set out his new method of film making - 'cinedialectic', the film of the future:

'My new conception of the film is based on the idea that the intellectual and emotional processes which so far have been conceived of as existing independently of each other —art versus science— and forming an antithesis heretofore never united, can be brought together to form a synthesis on the basis of cinedialectic, a process that only the cinema can achieve. A spectator can be made to feel-and-think what he sees on the screen. The scientific formula can be given the emotional quality of a poem. And whether my ideas on this matter are right or wrong, I am at present working in this direction. I will attempt to film Capital so that the humble worker or peasant can understand it.'

Sadly, this was just one of many films Eisenstein dreamt of but was never made, largely due to the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia. I don't think Stalin would have particularly been in favour of a film attacking the dark side of capitalist industrialisation somehow, espcially not if it was coming out at the precise moment he was trying to build up 'Socialism in One Country'.