SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

Conclusion
After this excursion through the Eisensteinian image, let us in conclusion briefly
return to the initial question posed in the introduction to this essay: namely, the
question of the tension between time-as-history and time-as-image in the Notes.
Itis strikingthat eachofthe fouroperations we havefound atwork intheEisensteinian
image could also be associated with a distinct type of temporality: the
everyday or the anecdotal (depiction), the event or the evental (defamiliarization,
which Eisenstein often called “de-anecdotalization”), the eternal (generalization),
and what we might call the excessive or the delirious in the sense of time
as sheer proliferation/loss (pathetization). We could perhaps think of the four
operations and their distinct temporal modes as moving in a kind of dialectical
synchronicity of the asynchronous, as four distinct tempi of the image that operatesimultaneouslyandyetdonotadduptoonesingletime.“Forawhilethereis
some uncertainty about this, but [Eisenstein] finally comes to insist on the plurality
of coded levels within the filmic image, and categorically rejects the dream
of univocality.” 23 The image with its montage of distinct temporal voices thus
importantly differs from the experience of time gained through historical interpretation,
whose achievement lies in the ability to render a multiplicity from a
temporal perspective that is more or less totalizing. In his historical writing, of
which the Notes offer an example, Eisenstein seeks to produce and place in tension
a certain totalizing narrative of the historical development of cinema as well
as a complex image of cinema, which he creates by assembling a montage of
anecdotal depictions, 24 statements of conceptual generality that turn on what is
essentially, eternally the case, 25 instances of evental defamiliarization, 26 and also
acertainsense ofdelirium, whereonegetsthe feelingthatthiscapacioushistory
of cinema could include and digest absolutely everything just as it could all of a
sudden collapse around its empty center and evaporate in front of our eyes (a
kind of caricature or parody of historical totalization). One of the lessons of Eisenstein’s
unfinished project is that, to grasp the phenomenon of cinema, it is
sometimes necessary to interrupt the historical mastery of time with a form of
construction in which one builds the time of cinema not by unifying it, but, on
thecontrary,bymultiplyingitacrossitsdiscontinuouslevels.
I would like to thank Abe Geil, Keith Jones, Michelle Koerner, Liz Papazian, Natalie
Ryabchikova, and Eric Zakim for reading and commenting on this essay in its various
stages. I also wish to express my gratitude to the Graduate School at the University of
Maryland for its support. Its Research and Scholarship Award, which I received in the
Summer of 2012, greatly supported the writing of the essay.
298 luka arsenjuk