SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

of the great-auteurs-from-great-nations paradigm of film history. New Film history
eventually branched out into a form of media historiography that tends to
dissolve the object of film into a Foucauldian media history. This new media
historiography can take the form of a media archaeology of film as proposed
variously by Thomas Elsaesser, Wanda Strauven, Michael Wedel or a historical
epistemology of the film dispositif as proposed by François Albera, Maria Tortajada,
and others. More radically, the media archaeology of Friedrich Kittler dissolves
the object of film altogether into a new Hegelian narrative not of the completeartwork,
butofthecompletemedium,thatis, thecomputer.This narrative,
which may best be described as Techno-Hegelianism, turns Hegel not only from
its head to its feet, but replaces the feet with the Heideggerian “Gestell” of technology,
or more specifically: media technology. In Kittler’s media archaeology,
the computer takes the place of the Hegelian “Geist” and becomes the medium
that can represent all other media. Thanks to the binary code, writes Christoph
Tholen in a seminal volume on the computer as medium that he coedited with
Kittler and Norbert Bolz in 1994, the computer is capable of “representing all
that presents itself” (alles zu präsentieren, was sich präsentiert). 22 While Tholen’s
claim echoes a similar claim made in 1962 by the then-head of corporate communications
of Krupp, a German steel corporation, 23 for the medium of film,
what is lost in the techno-Hegelian media archaeology of the computer in comparison
to Eisenstein’s archaeology of cinema is precisely the consideration of
film and cinematic specificity, but also the “Jetztzeit” dynamics of prefiguration
andepiphany.
Maybe now that the Techno-Hegelian media archaeology of the computer has
largely run its course and has come to its own end while film and media history
continue to raise methodological challenges is a good time indeed to return to
Eisenstein and to the archaeology of prefiguration and epiphany in order to find
outhowweshouldwritethehistoryofcinemagoingforward.
Oneofthechallengesforacominghistoryofcinema,aswellasforthehistory
offilmtheory,istoaccountforthewayinwhichfacing historyandbecomingan
art in Cavell’s sense changes cinema. In the view of one of his contemporaries,
Siegfried Kracauer, the effect of Eisenstein’s archaeology of prefiguration and
epiphany on his own cinema was paradoxical. “When Eisenstein the theoretician
begantostressthesimilaritiesbetween thecinema andthetraditionalartmedia,
identifying film as their ultimate fulfillment,” Kracauer wrote in Theory of Film,
“Eisenstein the artist, increasingly trespassed the boundaries that separate film
fromelaboratetheatricalspectacles:thinkofhisAlexanderNevskyandtheoperatic
aspects of his Ivan the Terrible.” 24 Kracauer, who had taken leave of the neo-Marxistphilosophyofhistoryattheendofthe1920sandwhosethinkingaboutfilmat
the time he published Theory of Film owed more to Lessing than to Hegel (or
Lukács), insisted that film could never fully become an art but that the aesthetic
value of the “filmic” lay in the right balance between the “formative tendencies”
archaeology vs. paleontology 355