Chapter 3 examines how American fears of “pernicious” Soviet propaganda threatened to undermine Soviet–American relations on the eve of Ilf and Petrov’s visit. The long history of American politicians and government officials equating advocacy of revolution and actual revolutionary violence made a Soviet promise to desist from distributing propaganda in the United States a requirement of the 1933 normalization of relations. In the summer of 1935, the participation of American communists in the Comintern (Communist International) congress in Moscow outraged American officials. But their desire for “friendly” relations prevented a diplomatic break. Still, as Ilf and Petrov found when they applied for visas, American officials exercised caution in allowing authors – even funny ones – into the United States.

In the past, architectural change in Archaic Greece was often explained as a somehow natural, coherent evolution from “primitive” wooden structures to sophisticated stone temples. Following the ancient writer Vitruvius, modern authors have attempted to demonstrate that the architectural orders, in particular the Doric, can be traced back to functional necessities typical of wooden buildings. While this explanation of the Doric order has long been questioned, few attempts have been made to explore alternative explanations. The chapter lays out a methodology to analyze architectural change by asking how the experience of sacred spaces and landscapes changed and who were the social groups interested in promoting such change. The chapter highlights the kinetic and multisensorial dimension of the experience of space and architecture, as stressed also by authors from other fields. Further, a survey of recent contributions to the study of the Doric and Ionic orders suggests that they emerged suddenly in the early sixth century BC, rather than evolving slowly over centuries. The emergence of the Doric order went hand in hand with the emergence of architectural sculpture on pediments and friezes. By looking at a series of case studies the book aims to shed light on the relation between the various transformation processes.

This chapter traces the history of the essay film from its origins in D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein (and theorizations by writers such as Hans Richter and Alexandre Astruc) to its manifestations in contemporary experimental cinema and video art installations such as John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea. The author argues that the essay film is uniquely positioned to incorporate and respond to political and social crisis.

A study of Elliott Carter’s aesthetics including the divided ensemble, his use of conceits, his engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, and the influences of Alfred North Whitehead, Nadia Boulanger, Sergei Eisenstein, Marcel Proust, and modernist lyric poetry.

This chapter considers how, in six successful Shakespeare films, exclusively cinematic formal methods of depicting battle serve to interpret and transform the plays’ perspectives on warfare. Special emphasis is placed on the concept (and deployment) of dialectical montage first developed by Sergei Eisenstein in his seminal 1929 essay, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” Though Eisenstein’s relatively rigid theory of montage has been endlessly appropriated, expanded and, at times, openly rejected by filmmakers and scholars alike, it remains ground zero for realist cinematic treatments of warfare and a key of sorts for deciphering individual filmmakers’ ideological orientations to their subject matter. The chapter argues that even the least overtly political film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays tend to reveal a certain preoccupation with the ethical, ideological, and, of course, hermeneutic implications of representing battle scenes in a medium that all but demands their representation.