SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

through 1925 (1926), Bardèche’s and Brasillach’s Histoire du cinéma (1935, 1943),
Lewis Jacobs’s The Rise of the American Film (1939), and even Sadoul’s Histoire générale
du cinéma, whose first two volumes (L’Invention du cinéma, 1832-1897 and Les
Pionniers du cinéma, 1897-1909) came out while Eisenstein was working on his
Notes, and from which Eisenstein probably derived the title of his own project. 10
Judging from what we find in the six texts published in this volume, Eisenstein’s
“general history” was not centered around film directors and films and was not
supposedtobeorganizedaccordingtoalinear,continuous,chronologicalorder.
Instead,hechosetodevelopavast,loosegenealogymade ofunexpectedconnections
between temporally distant phenomena, and to search for all the ruptures
and the “revolutionary leaps” introduced by those whom Eisenstein considered
as the “pioneers” and the “innovators” in a centuries-long history of representational
forms, media, and techniques. 11 Furthermore, this “general history” was
notconceivedasateleologicallyorientedprocessleadingfromsomeclearlyidentified
origins (be it Edison’s discovery of the kinetoscope, or the first public projection
of the Lumières’ cinématographe) to the gradual but inevitable affirmation
of a single, guiding aesthetic principle (be it “realism,” “narrative form,” or the
full mastery of a supposed “film language”): on the contrary, Eisenstein mentionsseveralpossible,distantoriginsor“cradles”ofcinemaandfollowsthrough
historythevarious,interwoven“lines”thattakezigzagpathsfromthesemultiple
originstothepresent,showinghowcinemashouldbeconceivedofasamedium
with many roots and many possible future developments. In fact, even though
Eisensteininsistsrepeatedlyontheideathatcinemaisthe“heir”andthe“synthesis
of the arts,” he did not consider the cinema of his own times to be a final
stage of development of the history of the arts. On the contrary, he believed that
cinema was a medium in constant development, never reaching a final, fixed
stage, and various passages of the Notes open up to a still unexplored future by
highlighting the potential of the most recent technical developments of the cinematic
dispositif: color film, stereoscopy, and even television, which Eisenstein
consideredtobeafurtherstageofhis“generalhistoryofcinema.” 12
Writing from the vantage point of a film director and film theorist who considered
cinema the “most perfect apparatus [apparat] for research and assessment
of the aesthetic principles of art,” 13 “a magnifying glass, through which
themethodofeachof[thearts]isvisible,” 14 Eisensteinusedasaguidingtheoretical
and historiographic principle the same process whose forms and whose
artistic and epistemic potential he had investigated in most of his previous writings:
the process of montage, which in the Notes is interpreted as a tool for disassemblingandreassemblingtheflowofhistoricalphenomenainordertoproduce
connections, sequences, and constellations capable of revealing morphological
analogies between apparently heterogeneous forms that are distant from one anotherintimeandspace.
eisenstein’s media archaeology 21