SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

positories of relics,” Tsar Peter’s cottage, Roosevelt’s home, souvenirs, the collectionsofsignaturesoffamouspeople,etc.
This idea of “dynamic mummification” constitutes another one of the “unexpected
junctures” that we find in the Notes. We have already underlined the similarities
between Eisenstein’s “formula of pathos” and Warburg’s “Pathosformel,”
and in section 7 of this text we will discuss the analogies between Eisenstein’s
“obraz” and Benjamin “dialectical image.” Now it is the time to analyze the unexpected
convergence between, on the one hand, what Eisenstein writes about
the “urge to record phenomena” and the way that Kracauer, in the preparatory
materials to his Theory of Film (1960), describes the “instincts” and the “primordialimpulses”towhichcinemawasresponding;andontheotherhand,between
Eisenstein’s idea of cinema as “dynamic mummification” and Bazin’s idea, in
“The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), of cinema as “momie du changement,”“changemummified.”
6. “Urge” and “Instinkt,” “Dynamic Mummification” and
“Momie du changement”: Eisenstein, Bazin, Kracauer
Kracauer worked on a book on the theory and the aesthetics of film for more
than twenty years before publishing Theory of Film in 1960, and in one of the first
stages of elaboration of this project – the so-called “Marseiller Entwurf,” written
in Marseille between 1940 and 1941, while he was anxiously awaiting a visa to
leave France with his wife and escape the Nazi occupation – we find a number of
elements that can be compared to Eisenstein’s project for a “general history of
cinema.”
Written in the form of fragmentary notes arranged in six vertical columns
(“From where?,” “Observations,” “Examples,” “Keywords,” “Composition,” “To
be developed”), the “Marseiller Entwurf” presents the same attempt to identify
some of the fundamental causes that have lead to the historical appearance of
cinema. Just like Eisenstein, who had written that his “general history” was not
supposed to be a “portrait hall of characters,” Kracauer did not want to write a
book based on a factual history of films and directors: he was interested instead
in understanding “the phenomenon of film” (das Phänomen des Films), an expressionthatremindsusofEisenstein’s“Urphänomenofcinema”:
Here we need to understand the “phenomenon of film” [Phänomen des Films].
How can we explain its appearance around 1885, its development, and its
present hegemony? What are its specific characteristics? What meaning do
they have? 216
If Eisenstein was trying to identify the “urges” and the “Triebe” to which cinema
had responded, Kracauer was trying to identify the “instinct” (Instinkt) and the
eisenstein’s media archaeology 77