SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

total,environmentalworksofartcapableofuniting“thenaturalsurroundingsof
the urban complex with the masses that have their being in the city and the individual
protagonists of the drama taking place within it; with a sea of color and
light, music and radio; with theatre and sound film; with steamers on the Moscow-VolgaCanal;andwithsquadrons
ofaircraft.” 312
This tendency to imagine the future of montage beyond the present state of
cinema at the end of the 1940s also appears in all the sections of the Notes dedicated
to television, a development of the cinematic dispositif that Eisenstein clearly
wantedtoincludeinhis“generalhistory.”
9. “An Excursion into the Future”: “From Dionysus to Television”
Aswehaveseenintheopeningsectionofthistext,Eisenstein’sNotesmayberead
with a whole series of issues that are currently debated in film and media theory
in mind. The status of cinema as a medium and as a dispositif in a rapidly evolving
medialandscape;cinema’sintermedialrelationswithotherartsandothermedia;
its “anachronic” nature and its “plural temporality” as a medium suspended between
its past genealogies and its future developments; its historical appearance
within the context of several different, intertwining “cultural series”: the way we
approach all these issues in contemporary film and media theory may find a new
reference point in a “general history of cinema” that seemed to be engaged, duringthesecondhalfofthe1940s,withmanyofthesameproblemswearedealing
with.
Mediaarchaeology,inparticular,seemstometobeanappropriateperspective
from which to approach the Notes. The archaeological understanding of the history
of culture that Eisenstein developed in Mexico and that informed his vision
of history as the overlapping of several coexisting “layers,” and the way the Notes
appear to have been written, just like the book Montage, from a double vantage
point that is at once a “retrospect” (Rückblick) turned toward the past and a “prospect”
(Ausblick) turned toward the future, present significant analogies with a
research field, media archaeology, that has developed in recent years with the
objective of reminding us how “new” and “old” media should never be studied
separately,butratherthroughaconstantsearchfor“theoldinthenew”and“the
newintheold.” 313
Oneofthegoalsofthisresearchfield,aswehavealreadyseen,istoshowhow
the history of cinema and of media in general should be conceived not so much
asalinear, chronological, teleologicallyorientedone, butrather as“an archaeology
of possible futures and of the perpetual presence of several pasts.” 314 The
different genealogical “lines” that we find in the Notes seem to point exactly toward
these two directions. Each of them – whether one of the histories of “cinema’s
expressive means” or one of the “routes to the chronicle” – produces a
100 antonio somaini