SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

16. Unit 881, fund 1923, opus 2, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI),
Moscow.
17. Alma Law and Mel Gordon, Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in
Revolutionary Russia (Durham: McFarland, 1996), p. 86.
18. Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Tretiakov, “Expressive Movement,” trans. Alma Law,
Millennium Film Journal 3 (1979), pp. 30-38.
19. “The music of landscape and the fate of montage counterpoint at a new stage,” in
Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, p. 283.
20. Sergei Eisenstein, Montazh (Moskva: Muzei kino, 2000), pp. 157-169.
21. Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” in SW 2, p. 110.
22. Ibid., p. 111.
23. Ibid., pp. 110-111.
24. Ibid., pp. 120-121.
2. François Albera, “The Heritage We Renounce”: Eisenstein in
Historio-graphy
1. It would be appropriate to further question the very terms of “heritage” and “heir”
Eisenstein uses in these Notes on the basis of Vladimir Il’ich Lenin’s text, “The
Heritage We Renounce” (1897), in Collected Works, ed. George Hanna (Moscow:
ProgressPublishers,1972),vol.2,pp.491-534,andthisonebyWalterBenjamin:“In
authentic history writing, the destructive impulse is just as strong as the saving
impulse. From what can something be redeemed? Not so much from the disrepute
or discredit in which it is held as from a determined mode of its transmission. The
way in which itis valued as ‘heritage’ is more insidiousthan its disappearance could
ever be.” “Notizen und Vorarbeiten zu den Thesen Über den Begriff der Geschichte”
[Notes and preparatory material to the theses On the Concept of History], in Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 1, part 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), p. 1242.
2. Forapresentationoftheeditorialcriteriathathavebeenfollowedforthepublication
of Eisenstein’s Notes for a General History of Cinema, first in Russian and then in
English translation in this volume, see “Editorial Criteria,” here, pp. 9-11.
3. Eisenstein thus distinguished the phases of this cinema in “The Middle of the
Three” (Sovetskoe kino 11-12 [1934]), a complete version of which was recently
published by Richard Taylor in Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema 1.2 (2007), pp. 211-
233;andinhis“SpeechtotheAll-UnionCreativeConferenceofSovietFilmworkers”
(1935) for the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet cinema, in Selected Works, Volume III:
Writings, 1935-1947, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp.
16-26. (Hereafter Selected Works [4 vols.] is abbreviated as SW.) One might add
interventions such as “The Most Important” (Izvestia, January 6, 1935); “One and
Indivisible (Thoughts on the History of Soviet Cinema)” (1947), published
posthumously in SW 3, pp. 341-348; or, more punctual still, “Give Us a State
Plan” (Kinofront 14-15 [1927]), “What We Expect from the Party Conference on
Matters of Cinema” (Sovetskii ekran 1 [1928]), “Twenty” (20th Anniversary of Soviet
Cinema [1940]), etc.
4. “The cultural continuity of so-called ‘cinema specificity’ [spetsifika kino] from other
contiguous art forms is now more clearly recognized than ever. The theory of the
488 notes