2023-10-12 –, Create
How can digital technologies revive a place that no longer exists?
Until 2018, a film history landmark in Moscow attracted filmmakers and researchers from all over the world: the apartment of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein’s apartment had been, for decades, of enormous importance for Russian civil society because of its atmosphere of cultural exchange and diversity. Eisenstein was from Riga and his Jewish father’s family came from Ukraine. His understanding of cultural diversity, represented in his apartment, is especially timely in today’s world - a respectful approach to different cultures and their potential to inspire one another.
Over several decades, film historian Naum Kleiman had turned Eisenstein's apartment into a centre of Eisenstein research. The European Film Academy declared it a European Treasure. However, in the course of the political dismantling of the Moscow Film Museum, to which the Eisenstein cabinet officially belonged, the apartment was dismantled in 2018.
Our research project restores access to this unique space and to the intellectual cosmos of Sergei Eisenstein. The digital reconstruction of this cultural monument is a case study for our multidisciplinary research in Virtual Reality (VR), Information Visualisation and 3D-Sound. We explored new ways of representing and visualising it digitally. Our research lays the foundation for an international, interactive, constantly evolving web platform: Eisenstein’s House. We envision it as a digital meeting space for the entire international Eisenstein community – researchers, students, artists and interested non-professional users. Join this session to learn more.
Tatiana Brandrup is a screenwriter and director of film and new media and a research professor at Film university Konrad Wolf, Babelsberg. Her artistic research focuses on the creative use of New Media Technologies in cultural heritage and in narratives related to civil society. For her award winning film Cinema: A Public Affair which premiered at the Berlinale 2015, she accompanied Naum Kleiman’s research on Sergei Eisenstein over several years. The film was shown at 28 film festivals worldwide and in theatrical distribution in Germany.