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Beginning in 1999, works by Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster, and Kohei Saito have resurrected the centrality of nature for both Marx and Engels after a century of neglect in western Europe and the US. In the Soviet Union, however, marxist ideas about nature found their way into radical thinking in the social and natural sciences, as well as in the arts. Pioneer film maker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein was acutely aware of Marx’s and Engels’ writings about nature and incorporated them in his own writing, especially his last major theoretical work, Nonindifferent Nature. This presentation will both survey the literature on nature in Marx’s and Engels’ critique of capitalism before turning to the ways that Eisenstein used Marx and especially Engels in formulating his theories about the role of nature in cinematic form and visual cognition.
Joan Neuberger is Earl E. Sheffield Regents Professor of History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin. Her most recent book This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (2019) won the American Historical Association’s George E. Mosse Prize. She is currently at work on a book about Eisenstein and nature.
