SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

firstevertool,”thetaskoftheartist-theoretician-historianthatEisensteinwanted
to be was both that of “mobilising past experience in the interest of what is to
come,” and to “work, work, work” in order to produce “completely new and
unprecedented” art forms corresponding to “new forms of consciousness.”
What we find in this utopian text, is the same double orientation, Rückblick and
Ausblick, that animates Eisenstein’s “general history of cinema.” A “general history”
which did not consider cinema as having a single origin nor a definite end,
but rather as a medium whose many different genealogical lines of development
couldrun“fromDionysustotelevision”andbeyond.
eisenstein’s media archaeology 105