This Thing of Darkness

Reviews / Votes

A superbly informed, comprehensive reading of the films that may fairly be said to be the first fully to unpack and contextualize this still controversial masterpiece.

(Cineaste) Joan Neuberger has given us a wonderful book. Anyone interested in Eisenstein, in Soviet film, in the ways Soviet artists and the institutions around them interacted, or in what happened to Soviet art during World War II will want to read this lively, well-researched, thought-provoking monograph a couple of times over-and then will be sure to keep it somewhere readily at hand, for easy access while teaching classes on film or Eisenstein or Russian history.

(Russian Review) This fine monograph under review is an excellent addition to both Eizenshtein studies and to studies of Stalin-era Soviet films.

(Slavonic and East European Review) Impressive in its profound scholarship and brilliant insight into Eisenstein's filmic and historical achievement, Joan Neuberger's This Thing of Darkness provides the most wide-ranging account to date of Eisenstein's classic and controversial film.... This book provides a scintillating new perspective not only of this film and director, but more broadly of how art was produced within the political culture of Stalin's Soviet Union.

(Citation from the 2020 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize Committee) "A beautifully written microhistory of Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished cinematic trilogy, Ivan the Terrible. By means of a wide variety of sources, from Eisenstein's diaries and notes to archival materials, Neuberger ties in international and national politics to her analysis of the characters, content, and production of the film. Her brilliant analysis admirably demonstrates what happens to aesthetic theory and practice in the hands of a genius at an existential political moment."

(Citation from the American Historical Association's 2020 George L. Mosse Prize Committee) Joan Neuberger's beautifully written and meticulously researched book tells the story of this film with a focus both on Eisenstein's creative process and his quixotic attempt to reconcile the official historiography and the aesthetic of socialist realism with his aspiration to make a film that critiqued Stalinism using the cinematic language of modernism.

(Journal of Modern History) While one hopes that this meticulously-researched, empirically-rich, and theoretically-informed study will indeed inspire a greater appreciation of the complexities of Eisenstein's film, the volume will surely become essential reading for anyone interested in early Soviet cinema or Eisenstein's oeuvre. Interdisciplinary in its scope and combining 'historical, political, cinematic, and cultural approaches,' the volume has much to offer to historians, as well as film and culture scholars.

(Slavic Review) Neuberger's book on Ivan the Terrible is a welcome addition to Russian film studies. She collates readings of archival sources with novel interpretations of published ones to create a text that offers a thorough explication of the complexity, nuance, and depth of Eisenstein's lifelong development of his montage theory and its final culmination in Ivan the Terrible.

(American Historical Review) Joan Neuberger's dazzling, absorbing history of Eisenstein's film explores the artistic truths the director presented. This Thing of Darkness reveals Neuberger's wide interests, incisive thinking, creative approaches, and brilliant approaches to film analysis.

(Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema)