On 12 October 1927, Sergei Eisenstein notes: ‘The decision has been made to film “Capital” based on the scenario of Karl Marx - that is the only possible formal way out'. The intention is as clear as the addition is enigmatic. Eisenstein's notes give little sense of how this titanic enterprise might have been realised. All he left us are keywords. A day later, he writes: ‘Here, we encounter completely new filmic perspectives, and the dawning light of possibilities that will be fulfilled in my new work - in “Capital”, based on the libretto by Karl Marx. In a film treatise'. Eisenstein, who had just finished shooting October, also mentions the ‘principle of de-anecdotalisation'. This principle had already been ‘fundamental’ for the finished film, but it also represents, ‘in essence, part of the “coming day”, i.e. the precondition for our next enterprise: C[apital]'. James Joyce's novel Ulysses served as a formal model for Eisenstein, primarily because it offered a model for narrating world history in the abbreviated timescale of a single day. Tn the external plot, it was to have followed a single day in the life of two people, from noon until night, much as Ulysses describes the day of Leopold Bloom […], while chains of association and subtexts were to evoke the history of mankind since Troy'. Joyce's novel, particularly the question- and-answer chapter, seems also to have inspired his willingness to further radicalise his own formal language and bid farewell to linear storytelling: ‘In Joyce's Ulysses there is […] a wonderful chapter written in the style of a scholastic catechism. Questions are posed and answers given. Questions on how to light a kerosene lamp. Answers from the realm of metaphysics. (Read this chapter. It could be methodologically useful.)’ On 8 April 8 1928, alongside the remark that the Capital film will be officially dedicated to the Second International, we read the lapidary sentence: ‘The formal side will be dedicated to Joyce'.

'81 years later,’ as we read in the blurb to NACHRICHTEN AUS DER IDEOLO- GISCHEN ANTIKE/NEWS FROM IDEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY, another film director created ‘a memorial’ to this unfinished project.