SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

the trivial example of the lists he creates, especially the ones of technical inventions:
it seems as if he is copying them from the book by Lewis Mumford, Technology
and Civilization (1934), while in reality he reorganizes them according to
new arrangements; for the falsely neutral initial chronological list, he substitutes
othermeaningfulrelationships.
IV.
Eisenstein developed a program that the “New History” of cinema partly set out
to realize, unknowingly, after 1978. This program includes not only experiences
of vision, optical machines and toys, visual apparatuses (panoramas, dioramas,
stereoscopes), the photographic snapshot, and chronophotography, but also visual
spectacles (phantasmagorias, Grand Guignol, wax museums, automatons,
shadow shows of the Chat Noir…), spectacles of light and fountains, pyrotechnics,
and even rarely considered examples (the “model” of stained glass, a transparent
image requiring the projection of light and suggesting developments on
the side of color processes). It is a program whose examination of exchanges
between media echoes some aspects of the current theory of remediation. The
New Historians had already built bridges between Eisenstein and early cinema, 22
butheretheapproachofthishistoryitselfisinvolved,tothepointthatthiseffect
of “anticipation” leadsone towonder not onlywhatis similar andwhatis different
in the two methods, but also to what extent Eisenstein’s may have a present
valueinthecontinuationofthese works,beyond theirdelayed“encounter.”
Suchanteriorityalsobringsupthequestionoftheintellectualcontextinwhich
Eisenstein found himself while formulating this type of program. What were his
sources, the contemporary works he used? This concerns the history of cinema
aswellasacertainnumberofanalyticalpositions–thequestionofmovementin
painting, for example, which was present at the same time in the films on art by
Emmer, Ragghianti, and others, in Auriol’sarticles, 23 andwas introduced earlier
byVachelLindsayandLéonMoussinac.Whichhistoriesofcinemawereavailable
to Eisenstein as he set out on his own? Or, more simply, what were the contemporary
historiographical tendencies concerning the history of cinema? In the
USSR, there were none. Nikolai Lebedev (whose book came out in 1947) devoted
himself only to (silent) Russian and Soviet cinemas and began with the first LumièrescreeninginRussiain1896.Internationally,
24 therewasBardècheandBrasillach’sHistoireducinéma,whichhehadread,
25 andin“Dickens,Griffithandthe
Film Today,” he cited a number of books on American cinema. 26 All these histories
of cinema had their historical narrative start in 1895 or 1896, except Coissac’s
Histoire du cinématographe (1925), which focused on technical evolution and,
in Germany, that of Liesegang (1926), who published a history of the magic lantern;itisnotcertain,however,thatEisensteinconsultedthem.
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272 françois albera