Join us for an evening with Joan Neuberger whose book ‘This Thing of Darkness’ has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2020. Joan will be in conversation with Serhii Plokhy, chair of the 2020 Prize judges and twice winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize in 2015 and 2019.
Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film.
Neuberger's bold arguments and daring insights into every aspect of Eisenstein's work during this period, together with her ability to lucidly connect his wide-ranging late theory with his work on Ivan, show the director exploiting the institutions of Soviet artistic production not only to expose the cruelties of Stalin and his circle but to challenge the fundamental principles of Soviet ideology itself. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the 20th century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.
This Thing of Darkness is published by Cornell University Press.
REVIEWS
"A superbly informed, comprehensive reading of the films that may fairly be said to be the first fully to unpack and contextualize this still controversial masterpiece." - Cinéaste
"Joan Neuberger has given us a wonderful book. Anyone interested in Eisenstein, in Soviet film, in the ways Soviet artists and the institutions around them interacted, or in what happened to Soviet art during World War II will want to read this lively, well-researched, thought-provoking monograph a couple of times over—and then will be sure to keep it somewhere readily at hand, for easy access while teaching classes on film or Eisenstein or Russian history." - The Russian Review
"This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger's engrossing production history of Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, is a major contribution to the study of Eisenstein and thus informs the history and theory of cinema and the study of Soviet culture and politics. Neuberger's ability to mine, interpret, and connect Eisenstein's voluminous, intriguingly digressive writings makes this book exceptional." - Karla Oeler, Stanford University
"Joan Neuberger's study combines her background in Russian history with a deep awareness of Eisenstein's incredibly wide-ranging research and speculation while making his last film. A real tour de force that reaches a new level in Eisenstein studies—making a strong case for Ivan the Terrible as the crowning achievement of his career." - Ian Christie, Birkbeck College, University of London
Joan Neuberger is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She has written extensively in print and online about Eisenstein, film, and modern Russian cultural history.
Serhii Plokhy is a Ukrainian-American historian and professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, where he also serves as the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He has won the Pushkin House Book Prize twice - in 2015 for The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union and in 2019 for Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy.
