SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 4 the project quickly developed beyond
theboundaries of anintroductory volume, and this“general” or “universal” (two
possible translations of the Russian vseobshchaia) history turned into an independent
work characterized by the same drifts toward endless development, the
same oscillations between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies, that are typical
ofmostofEisenstein’stheoreticalwritings. 5
Afterhavinginvestigated,sincetheendofthe1920s,therelationshipsbetween
cinemaandthehistoryofthearts,EisensteintriedtoestablishintheNotesavast,
double genealogy, organized into different meandering “lines” (linii). 6 On the
one hand, the genealogy of “cinema’s expressive means” (vyrazitelnye sredstva
kino), that is, the history of all the media and all the forms of representation that
had explored, before cinema, the same “expressive means” that cinema would later
employ: the recording of images onto a light-sensitive surface, the composition
offormswithinaframe,theprojectionofimagesontoascreen,aswellasallthe
possible forms of visual, audiovisual, and chromatic montage. On the other
hand, the genealogy of all the media and all the forms of representation which
had been invented, once more before cinema, in order to respond to the same
“urges” (Eisenstein alternates this English term with the German “Trieb,”
“drive”) to which cinema had responded: in particular, the “urge to record phenomena,”
7 that is, to register, preserve, and reproduce a variety of phenomena
whichwouldotherwisebedestinedtodisappearwiththepassingoftime.
Rather than a history of cinema conceived as a “portrait hall of characters”
(portretnaia galereia personazhei) 8 – a history centered on authors and works, directors
and films – Eisenstein chose to construct his “general history” as a vast
genealogy of all the “forerunners” of which cinema could be considered as the
“heir,” 9 searching for these “forerunners” in the history of the arts (drawing,
painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, theater, music), the history of popularforms
ofentertainment(fairground showsandGrand Guignol theater, cabaret
and circus), the history of displays and exhibitions (Kunstkammern and cabinets
de curiosités, wax museums and world exhibitions), as well as the history of funerary
practices and religious rituals (Egyptian mummies and Roman death masks,
Dionysian cults and Catholic processions). Entire sections of the Notes are then
dedicated to finding the “forerunners” of cinema in the history not only of visual
media (camera obscura, magic lanterns, microscope, panoramas, and dioramas)
butalsoofothermediasuchasthetypewriter,themicrophone,thephonograph,
and the radio, highlighting the idea that cinema as a form of representation and
as an audiovisual medium can be fully understood only within a broad history of
techniques,devices,anddispositifs.
The double, meandering genealogy that we find in the Notes sharply distinguishes
Eisenstein’s “general history” from other histories of cinema written
during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s such as Léon Moussinac’s Naissance du cinéma
(1925), Terry Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture
20 antonio somaini