SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

Handwritten in the form of multilingual notes (the prevailing Russian is interspersed
with terms and phrases in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian,
and Latin) which are arranged in vertical and diagonal sequences of historical
examples, with a constant mix of words and drawings, lists and diagrams (see
Ill. 1), the Notes presented in this volume are at once a synthesis of Eisenstein’s
previous writings, and the opening toward new, unexpected directions in his
theoretical reflections. The use of montage as a heuristic and hermeneutic strategy
in order to find and compare phenomena belonging to different cultural and
historical traditions, which constitutes a defining trait of most of Eisenstein’s
textssincetheendofthe1920s,reacheshereanunprecedentedlevelofcomplexity.
Moving freely forward and backward in time, using montage as a writing
style capable of establishing anachronic connections and sequences that do not
follow any linear chronology, Eisenstein invites the reader to conceive cinema as
aformof“dynamicmummification”relatedtoRomandeathmasksandEgyptian
mummies; to consider early documentary “cine-chronicles” in relationship to
body tattoos and wax museums; to see in the colored light that flows through
the stained glass windows into the nave of medieval Gothic cathedrals a precursor
of the floating images of stereoscopic cinema; finally, to interpret television
as a medium that allows a direct participation in historical events which finds its
origins in the reenactments of the life, death, and rebirth of Dionysus that were
staged in the Dionysian mysteries. Such “unexpected junctures” – to quote the
title of a 1928 essay in which Eisenstein had highlighted a whole series of analogies
between the future of Sovietsound cinema and theancient tradition of Japanese
Kabuki theater 15 – appear throughout all the genealogical lines traced by
Eisenstein in the Notes. For him, they were the only way to discover and analyze
the various “recurrences” 16 in a history of images and media that had to be approached
with a gaze that was at once a “retrospect” (Rückblick) and a “prospect”
(Ausblick). 17
In the following pages I will try to underline some of the central ideas of this
“general history of cinema,” while at the same time locating this project in the
context of the rest of Eisenstein’s oeuvre (films, film projects, writings, drawings)
and in the context of other attempts, during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s,
toreflectontherelationshipsbetweencinema,time,andhistory.
Section 1 (Cinema, Montage, and the “Vertical Column of History”) argues
that the montage-based approach to history writing that we find in the Notes
mighthavebeeninfluenced byEisenstein’sexperienceasafilmdirectorworking
on several occasions on historical films. A special attention is dedicated here to
films and film projects such as The General Line (1926-1929), Que Viva Mexico!
(1930-1932) and Moscow 800 (1947), since they all deal with the problem of how
to use montage to portray historicalprocesses that are characterized by thecoexistenceofseveraldifferenthistoricallayers.
eisenstein’s media archaeology 23