Notes toward an untimely Soviet comedy: Eisenstein’s MMM

Abstract

ABSTRACT Between 1932 and 1933, in the context of a new mandate for cheerfulness in Soviet cinema, Sergei Eisenstein, recently returned from a frustrating sojourn abroad, undertook an exercise in genre: the beguilingly titled comedy MMM. The project, which was never completed, has been almost completely overlooked in studies of the director’s works. Against this tendency of Eisenstein scholarship, this paper presents MMM as a serious and highly developed experiment in genre, using archival material – including notes, screenplays, director’s scripts and drawings – to read the work as an expression of Eisenstein’s cinematic process at its most formally inventive and ideologically intricate. The script, composed entirely in verse, is the director’s only fully-conceived attempt at film comedy. It follows a sprawling series of incongruous historical encounters as visitors from medieval Rus’ materialise in contemporary Moscow. The absurd fantasia that ensues is not only Eisenstein’s attempt to probe an increasingly ideologically unstable Soviet reality, but is also his occasion to explore, through self-reflexive comedic techniques, the nature and limits of the cinematic medium, as well as the theoretical question of the mutability of static form and the implications of this conundrum for character, narrative and genre.