SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

sublation. In fact one can even argue that Eisenstein’s conception of the history
of art is in a way as far from a historicist conception of empty, homogeneous
time as it is from the steady, revolutionary progression of history as process in a
Marxist sense. Instead, Eisenstein’s conception of history appears to be closer to
Benjamin’s idea of “Jetztzeit” of a past that becomes present and comes alive in
messianic splinters. 21 In his writings on cinema and the other arts Eisenstein
proceeds in what we might call the mode of prefiguration and epiphany: a moment
of epiphany reveals the prefiguration of cinema and of its specific esthetic problems
in other arts and media, and provides a solution for one or several of these
problems. Thus Kabuki is sound film in the sense that Kabuki prefigures the
problem of sound film and provides a template for the solution of this problem,
inthehistoricalmomentthattheproblemactuallyposesitself.Totheextentthat
the other arts survive in cinema, they survive not because they become absorbed
into some kind of conceptual totality, but because they contribute building
blocks toward the new art, messianic splinters that prefigure and eventually activate
the potential of the coming art of film. Rather than a paleontology of practitioners
of film art, then, Eisenstein’s genealogy of film is an archaeology of the
prefigurations of cinema, and rather than filiation his mode of inquiry is that of
historicalepiphany.
Godard’s paleontology of cinematic filiation succeeded Eisenstein’s archaeology
of prefiguration and epiphany, and the “nouvelle vague” certainly helped to
enshrine the auteurist approach to film history as the default mode of film historiography
in the decades since. Even in the Histoire(s) du cinema, where Godard
appears to engage in an archaeology of cinema of his own, the paleontological
model eventually prevails. At the beginning of episode 3A, for instance, Godard
arguesthatcinemabeginswithManetbecausethefemalefiguresinhispaintings
abandontheinteriorityofthefemalegaze,the“moid’abord,lecosmosensuite”ofDa
Vinci, Vermeer and even Corot. Instead, in Manet they start to look back with a
look that says “Je sais à quoi tu penses,” engaging the viewer in an exchange of
looks in which the “me” joins the cosmos, as Godard puts it, and which anticipates
– or rather begins – the patterns of looking of cinema. But while Godard’s
declaration “Et avec Edouard Manet commence la peinture moderne, c’est-à-dire le cinématographe”
may sound like a prefiguration of the Eisensteinian kind, the sentence
really translates as “lest we forget, before Griffith came Manet.” Godard was
merely the first to know that the paleontology of cinematic filiation stretches
backtoacertainwell-knownproto-Impressionistpainter.
Eisenstein’s archaeology, on the other hand, appears to have found a series of
postfigurations in the various media archaeologies that have sprung up over the
last twenty-odd years and presented themselves variously as alternatives to the
paleontologies of auteurist film history. The New Film history of the 1970s and
1980s integrated approaches from economic and social history to break with
what a new generation of scholars had quickly come to view as the stale pieties
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