SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

would be capable of recording a “total history”: a continuous, uninterrupted recording
of historical phenomena made by cameras which, during the 1940s, had
reached a state of “omnipresencein space and time.” This is what we readin the
essay “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel,” written in
1946 as a commentary to the seven propaganda films that had been produced
between 1942 and 1945 under the supervision of Frank Capra, and which edited
together documentary footage from the war: 255 an example of “cine-chronicle”
similartotheonesmentionedbyEisensteinintheNotes.Commentingontheway
inwhichWorldWarIIhadseenthedeploymentofavastmediaapparatus,Bazin
assigns to cinema thecapacity ofcapturing andrecording onfilm aworld whose
skin “peels off” daily in front of thousand of “countless Bell-and-Howell lenses
placedallovertheworldwhereimportanteventstakeplace”:
The taste for such documentary news, combined with that for the cinema,
reflects nothing if not modern man’s will to be there, his need to observe
history-in-the-making, not only because of political evolution, but also
because of the evolution as well as irremediable intermingling of the
technologicalmeansofcommunicationanddestruction.Thedaysoftotalwar
are fatally matched by those of total history. […]
We live more and more in a world stripped bare by film, a world that tends to
peel off its own image. Hundreds of thousands of screens make us watch,
during the news broadcasts, the extraordinary shedding performed each day
by tens of thousands of cameras. As soon as it forms, history’s skin peels off
again. […]
Up to the discovery of photography, the “historical fact” was reconstituted
from written documents; the mind and human language came into play twice
insuchreconstitutions:inthereconstructionoftheeventandinthehistorical
thesis it was adduced to support. With film, we can refer to the facts in flesh
and blood, so to speak. 256
The anachronic comparison between photography and cinema on one side, and
mummies and death masks on the other, is therefore interpreted by Bazin as a
way to reinforce the idea of cinema as “total and complete representation of reality”
that has as a consequence the possibility of recording a “total history” withoutanygapsorlacunas.
In his notes for a “general history of cinema,” Eisenstein presents us with a
very different vision of the relationship between cinema and history. If Bazin
conceived cinema as a medium through which historical events are immediately
embalmed, mummified and preserved, Eisenstein studies the “general history of
cinema”throughanotheroneofcinema’sdefiningtraits,montage,intendedasa
toolfordisassemblingandreassemblingthesequencesofhistoricalphenomena.
Cinema, in other words, is not a historiographical tool thanks to its embalming
eisenstein’s media archaeology 83