Zoe Beloff’s 2015 essay film, Glass House, probes Eisenstein’s notes and drawings for this never-produced film, imagining what might have sprung from them and seeking the kernel of something prophetic. The film tracks the development of Eisenstein’s idea, giving voice and body to a succession of the director’s knotty thoughts en route to a climactic speculation on what Eisenstein’s Glass House might imply about the breakdown of public and private under global capitalism. Ultimately, Beloff posits Eisenstein’s rough cinematic panopticon as a linear harbinger of satellite surveillance, data mining, “the universal eye.”

Before reaching this ambitious hypothesis, Beloff’s film dances through a number of presentational modes to develop its story: birds-eye newsreel, Brechtian reenactment, cabaret-style interludes, dramatized psychoanalysis. Much of it is compelling, if scattershot; certainly it contains attractive audiovisual experiments. Her Glass House works best when it focuses on the optical possibilities of glass as a material. An early chapter of the work animates several ecstatic drawings from Eisenstein’s archive. Through line and movement Beloff vividly demonstrates how Eisenstein meant to propose his visual theses by means of layered glass playing spaces, a deep montage within the frame. Another section features a carefully built multi-level glass model that substitutes for Eisenstein’s high-rise. Beloff’s actors improvise the movement of various objects about the planes of this structure, distorting, directing, sometimes blocking the gaze of the viewer. The camerawork here is meticulous and complex, upending and challenging standard perspectives. Later this vertical model is made horizontal, a compartmentalized glass house in which miniature sets have been arranged, now with the glass walls doubling as screens, footage from films (Chaplin, Disney) that may have influenced Eisenstein’s thought projected onto them.

Beloff’s Glass House is less convincing, however, in its overarching attempt to orient the potential energy of Eisenstein’s notes toward an easily negotiable end. It purports to be neither history nor documentary, yet it leans on archival data and historical narrative rife with chronologies, locations, and causalities. In Beloff’s telling, the tangle of glass ideas that Eisenstein wrestled was ultimately clarified through psychoanalysis, only to be dashed from above by a Hollywood studio wary of employing a Bolshevik. Yet this isn’t true: Eisenstein decided to halt work on Glass House early in his North American journey, still obsessed with the optical and rhetorical possibilities of the glass building but utterly unable to form from it a coherent story. He moved on to two other large-scale projects (Sutter’s Gold, An American Tragedy) for which he composed powerful screenplays that impressed the studio. In the elliptical narrative teleology of Beloff’s film however, the failure to produce Glass House in Hollywood is followed hard: by Eisenstein’s death and the apotheosis of his vision as an orbiting mechanized omnipotence, surveillance from above. Watching Beloff’s Glass House, one is led to ask what the aim is, generally, of interrogating or demystifying Eisenstein’s original, unrealized film. To unravel the knot that kept it from production? To observe the method of the knot’s contortion?

In 1929, Eisenstein wrote that a film script is “shorthand for an emotional impulse straining to be incarnated in a pileup of visual images,” and that it is the energetic charge of preproduction material (not its verbal specificity) that the camera ought to translate. And for scholars or filmmakers who come upon these notes and drawings a century later? Sensitivity to their two-dimensional energy appears even more paramount.

Bio Dustin Condren is associate professor at University of Oklahoma. His research focuses range from the cinema of Eisenstein and his contemporaries, to the experimental theatre works of Sergei Tret’iakov, to the concept of ideological “truth” in representational media. He is the English-language translator of two recent volumes of Eisenstein’s writing published by Berlin’s Potemkin Press: Disney (2013) and The Primal Phenomenon: Art (2017), as well as of Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief (2011), published in New York by HarperCollins.