SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

ories continues to be present, and contributes to shape Eisenstein’s approach to
the construction of a “general history of cinema.” This history, as we will now
see,canbeconceivedofasanattempttoanswerthreekeyquestions:
1. How can we locate “the place of cinema” within the history of the arts?
2. How can we identify the “forerunners” of cinema within such a history?
3. How can we define the psychological “urges” and “Triebe” to which cinema,
like other art forms and media before its appearance, has responded?
3. “Heir” and “Synthesis”: The “Place of Cinema” in the History
of the Arts
Theanswertothefirstquestion–howtodefinethe“placeofcinema”withinthe
history of the arts – can be found at the beginning of the first text published in
this volume, “The Heir,” in a series of notes written on October 22, 1946, that
present cinema as both “the heir [naslednik] of all artistic cultures” and “a synthesis
of the arts [sintez iskusstv].” These two terms, writes Eisenstein, defined the
“perspective”accordingtowhich“thehistoryofcinemamust beestablished”:
Cinema is the heir of all artistic cultures, as is the nation itself that elevated it
for the first time in all history – both in estimation and creatively – to the very
heights of art, and it is the heir of all cultures of the preceding ages.
Cinema is the art of the USSR par excellence,* and it is so in a natural and
organic way.
It is according to this perspective that the history of cinema must be
established.
1. The historical place of cinema in the history of the arts
Its origins in the ruins of the “second baroque.”
Other arts disintegrate to level zero.
“-Isms.” Each based on one particular feature.
The collapse of bourgeois society.
Cinema begins from level zero.
Technical invention.
The social structure (USSR), seeking a type of mass art, etc.
The social pre-condition and [the] technical [one] coincide.*
As a new totality, social and aesthetic.
2. A synthesis of the arts
A real synthesis in the technique of film, and in our aesthetics.
Taking the place of “dreams” about synthesis.
Recurrence* of the idea of synthesis form the Greeks (at first morphological in
the dithyramb) – liturgies (architecture, organ, stained glass, plain chant,* the
merging of the audience with the action) – Diderot – Wagner – Scriabin –
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40 antonio somaini