We have forgotten the revolution. We have forgotten the very idea of the revolution, but also  the most dramatic revolution of the last century — the October Revolution in Russia. This is the sober diagnosis that Helen Grace takes as the point of departure for her piece, The Future Within Us. The piece itself is conceived and organised as an experiment to test this proposition. Can we understand the words that the female voice with a Slavic accent is uttering in the background of the animated sequence? It is an opening paragraph from Andrey Platonov's “Happy Moscow,” describing how a little girl witnessed the beginning of the revolution and then fell asleep and forgot all about it. Why is it in Russian? Couldn’t Grace have at least subtitled it? The answer is no, as enigma is a part of her strategy — a strategy that places the onus of knowing and understanding on us. Can we recognise under the anonymous  “he”, used repeatedly, Vsevolod Meyerhold — Eisenstein’s mentor and the master theatrical innovator, who moved from symbolism to biomechanics, staged Vladimir Mayakovski’s plays, and engaged artists  such as Malevich, Popova and Stepanova to create “a spectacle of heroic proportion, a spectacle for the multitude”? Perhaps we can. But it’s even less likely that we will identify Sergei Tretyakov, the poet, director and critic who travelled between Russia and China and wrote experimental plays to be staged by Meyerhold and Eisenstein. Both Meyerhold and Tretyakov were executed by the Bolshevik regime they so passionately supported — the revolution is a dangerous business, and it might end up eating its own children. However, we are more likely to recognise Sergei Eisenstein — he lived longer, managed to survive the terror of the late 1930s and died in his own bed in 1948, though it is said that it was Stalin’s campaign against his late masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, Part II,  that brought about his second and fatal heart attack.

And all along, while bringing these forgotten faces, fates and feats to the screen, Grace recaptures the tremendous energy that the Russian revolution generated. Her fast cutting, the intense rhythm of her montage, not only pays homage to Eisenstein, Vertov and other masters, it is also a model of a particular temporality and a metaphor for a period when time intensified,  rushed ahead, seemed to be pulsating with possibilities, seemed to be on the brink of a transformation, of witnessing the birth of the New. It is an attempt to recreate the dimension of the revolution as an event, as an interruption and break.

Yet, to remind us about the revolution, its emancipatory promise, its loaded dreams and its thwarted hopes, as well as the colossal release of creative energy that it generated, is not the only aim of Grace’s work here: rather, she urges us to remember the revolution differently. The history that Grace retrieves in The Future Within Us is not organised in a linear and teleological fashion around the established hierarchy of historical figures and discourses, rather, she aims for a ‘thick’ description, a restoration of horizontal connections, as she brings new geographical locations, bodies and names, artistic practices and movements into consideration. She is particularly focused — given her own personal trajectory — on the ‘eastern connections’ that unite Mei Lanfang, the Chinese theatre director whose work captivated Eisenstein’s imagination in the 1930s, and Chen Si Lan — or Sylvia Chen — a dancer and the future wife of Jay Leyda, whose efforts brought Eisenstein’s writings to anglophone audiences for the first time. It is Chen’s figure, and her light dancing steps, that animate The Future Within Us, giving it a fresh perspective and projecting a new constellation of characters, forces and lines of action, which Grace is promising to develop in a feature film for which her current piece is no more than a teaser. Both her piece and her creator’s statement are open-ended — no doubt, a testimony to their status as a sketch for something bigger and more developed, but, arguably, also a revelation of Grace’s vision in which revolution remains an open project.

Bio Julia Vassilieva is Australian Research Council Fellow working on the project “Cinema and the Brain: Eisenstein–Vygotsky–Luria’s collaboration”. She is based in Film and Screen Studies, Monash University. Her research interests include film and philosophy, cinema and neuroscience and film narrative. She has published in Camera Obscura, Film-Philosophy, Senses of Cinema, Rouge, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Screening the Past, Film Criticism, Critical Arts, History of Psychology and Kinovedcheskie Zapiski as well as edited collections, including Film/Philosophy (Minnesota UP, 2017). She is an author of  “Narrative psychology” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and a co-editor of “After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image” (Routledge, 2013).