SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

The distinction is also now abetted by some previously absent terms. For one
thing, the language of “reproduction” as well as commemoration is applied to
bothlines.(Itisconceivablethattheadditionof“reproduction”intotheproblem
was inflected by theseveral intervening considerations and lineages of photography
within the Notes, especially nineteenth-century photography in relation to
both painting and cinema.) Also now added to the terminological mix is reflection.ThetermdynamicwasalwaysvaluedinEisenstein'saestheticandpsychological
theories, and it is indicative that a year earlier, Eisenstein had defined the
reenactmentlineas“dynamicreproduction.”Inthelaterentry,thetermdynamic
isassociatedwithreflection.
Reflection therefore denotes a positive cognitive outcome as opposed to mere
reproduction. It seems to me that there is an important and revelatory parallel
with an opposition crucial in other later Eisenstein writings: between the dynamismofobraz
(generalizedorglobalimage)andmeredepiction.However,ifthis
later entry opposes reproduction to reflection, this opposition is presented as
internal to both lines – reenactment as well as mummification. This implicitly
reinforces something I already observed about the mummification line. Insofar
as it leads to separability away from the depicted objects – and therefore toward
developed art forms – it must become something more than mere preservation
or, here, reproduction. The name for this “something more” in these sections of
the Notes is reflection, much as the name for it in other writings is obraz/global
image. In this later entry, the importance of the transition from death mask to
sculpture is also present and is, if anything, more elaborated: “the first stage is
notreflection,ratheritpreservestheobjectitself(mummification),butforeternity;the
second stage is the factual physical mold (commemorative death mask is the
proper beginning. Egypt, Rome).” 16 “Egypt, Rome,” is clearly shorthand for the
sculptural forms invoked earlier and completion of the transition through which
thepreservation lineleadstoart.
It is physical separability from the corpse that makes the death mask “the
proper beginning,” as this later fragment puts it. But the beginning of what? It
cannot be the arts tout court, because we know from the dithyramb and reenactment
that there are arts which start without preservation, “in themselves”; in a
sense, the arts stemming from reenactment are physically “separated” in their
very constitution from the remembered person or reproduced actions or events.
Perhaps,then,thisis“properlythebeginning”ofcinema?
This seems confirmed by one of Eisenstein's chronological strings in the
mummification line. This string moves from the removal of the death mask, to
castings, then photography, and finally to cinema as “cine-chronicle” (kino-khronika).
“NB. Probably, for the history of cinema. Chronicle [Khronika] as cradle.” 17 Crucially,however,thisendpointdoesnotdistinguishthemummificationlinefrom
thereenactment line,for hehadpreviously writtenof thereenactment line that it
leads to cinema through the chronicle. It appears that Eisenstein, with the term
400 philip rosen