It's settled: we're going to film CAPITAL, on Marx's scenario-the only logical solution. N.B. Additions ... those are clips pasted to the wall of montage.1 October 13, 1927.. . To extend the line (and to explicate it, step by step) of dialectical development in my work. Let us recall: 1. STRIKE. The order-educational and methodological film on the methods and processes of class and of underground work. Whence-serial film structure and detachment from a specific place (in the project there's a whole series of escapes, prison life, rebellion, body-searches, etc.). 2. POTEMKIN. I'm emphasizing, just as the film's direction does, the dialectical result: a pathos of the ordinary and the psychologically concrete: tarpaulin: mourning-par excellence. "Suddenly". ..2 the abstract emotion of the lions:3 a [leap] from representation of ordinary life to abstract and generalized imagery. 3. OCTOBER Harnessed lions-speeches of Mensheviks, the bicycles, (N.B. the second derived from the car and motorcycle races that were cut into the mowing sequence of our GENERAL) led to a complete departure from the factual and anecdotal-the events of OCTOBER (in that section) are accepted, not as OCTOBER events, but as the conclusion of a series of theses; not the fact that the Mensheviks are 'singing' while the battle is in progress (a purely cinematic method of intercutting), but the historical nearsightedness of Menshevism. Not that a sailor finds himself in the bedroom of A[lexandra] F[yodorovna], but rather the "execution of the petite bourgeoisie and that which it represents," etc. Not an anecdote about the Wild Division, but "methodology, of propaganda." "In God's Name" becomes a treatise on deity. After the drama, poem, ballad in film, OCTOBER presents a new form of cinema: a collection of essays on a series of themes which constitute OCTOBER. Assuming that in any film work, certain salient phrases are given importance, the form of a discursive film provides, apart from its unique renewal of strategies, their rationalization which takes these strategies into account. Here's a point of contact already with completely new film perspectives and with the glimmers of possibilities to be realized in CAPITAL, a new work on a libretto by Karl Marx. A film treatise. Nov. 4, evening. In America even cemeteries are private. 100% Competition. Bribing of doctors, etc. The dying receive prospectuses: "Only with us will you find eternal peace in the shade of trees and the murmur of streams," etc.
