SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

“teleological” default for which the first historians of cinema were reproached. For
him, “The coming of the motion picture was inevitable” (ibid., p. 2) and everything
heralds and prefigures it: “That hole in the wall of a chamber in Hellas was the
pinhole aperture which cast a true image of the sun, and that darkened room was in
truth a camera” (ibid., p. 2); “Leonardo observed that if he cut a small circular hole
in a shutter of a darkened room there would be an image on the wall opposite […]:
This room was in reality the camera obscura […] and it was indeed too the camera of
to-day” (ibid., p. 4).
29. Ibid., p. IX.
30. Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. I, L’Invention du cinéma, 1832-1897
(Paris: Denoël, 1945; 2nd ed., 1948), vol. II, Les Pionniers du cinéma, 1897-1909 (Paris:
Denoël, 1947).
31. Thiswas,however,thetitleofa“summarizing”workthatSadoulpublishedin1949:
Histoire d’un art. Le cinéma des origines à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1949), regularly
reprinted but with the title Histoire du cinéma mondial. Des origines à nos jours, until
1990, as well as in paperback under the title Histoire du cinéma (Paris: J’ai Lu,
“Connaissance 1,” 1962). Unfortunately, it is this work that will be the most
frequently translated, and the one that researchers comment on (Bordwell or Lagny)
when they want to define Sadoul’s procedure.
32. See François Albera, “First Discourses on Film and the Construction of a ‘Cinematic
Episteme,’” in A Companion to Early Cinema, pp. 126-130.
33. The RussianFormalists(especiallyEikhenbaumandTynianov),for instance,take up
this schema.
34. In the first issue of Revue internationale de filmologie (1947). In 1951, he announced a
book about the origins and developments of the “filmic syntax” from 1895 to 1930.
35. Les Lettres françaises 477 (August 6, 1953), p. 5.
36. Mary Seton refers to one of these letters, whose content Sadoul must have
communicated to her. See Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein, p. 466. The letters are kept at
the Cinémathèque Française, but not filed; I published a few of them in “Eisenstein
dans la ligne,” in Eisenstein, L’Ancien et le nouveau, pp. 96-97.
37. “Close shots of heads and objects were not so rare in the pre-Griffith film as is
generallyassumed;closeshotscanbefoundusedsolelyfornoveltyortrickpurposes
by such inventive pioneers as Méliès and the English ‘Brighton School’ (as pointed
out by Georges Sadoul).” Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form (London: Dennis Dobson,
1963 [1949]), pp. 224. The note may also be found in the Italian edition, Forma e
tecnica del film (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), p. 196, as well as in Armand Panigel’s French
edition, Le Film: sa forme/son sens (Paris: Bourgois, 1976), p. 408, but not in the
Russian edition of the Selected Works, Izbrannye proizvedeniia v shesti tomakh, 6 vols.
(Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1964-1971), vol. 5, 129-180. The third volume of Richard
Taylor’s edition of the Selected Works provides another version of it: “The logically
informative close-up can be found even earlier, e.g. in [Edwin] Porter’s The Life of an
AmericanFireman(USA,1903)wherethefirealarmisshotinclose-up”(SW3,p.215).
Written in 1942 and published in 1944, “Dikkens, Grifft i My” was revised by
Eisenstein in 1946-1947 when Leyda was preparing Film Form (see Seton, Sergei M.
Eisenstein, p. 472), as were the texts he sent to Panigel for the French edition
492 notes