“The Heritage We Renounce”: Eisenstein in Historio-graphy

Eisenstein’s Notes for a General History of Cinema, as they reach us today ² – incomplete, disparate, condensed, cryptic, but written within a specific timeframe, chronologically speaking (1946-1948), and assigning themselves a specific object – show an Eisensteinian approach that is both familiar and new concerning the history of cinema. Indeed, while historical developments abound in Eisenstein’s writings on films – along with the cultural and social phenomena he deals with – no project for a history of cinema as a medium proper may be found in them. Up to the point of the writing of the Notes, Eisenstein only projected cinema (and only Soviet cinema) forward, rather than considering it in its past or genesis, and its “history” took place within a political framework. ³ Only other arts had a past, and served as the past of cinema, since cinema inherited them and transformed them on its own ground (synthesis). ⁴ So, had this cinema – which Eisenstein, feeling a bit cramped by, ⁵ wanted to “outgrow” by the late 1920s – become, to paraphrase Hegel, a thing of the past for the Eisenstein of 1946, turned into an object of history within the Academy of Sciences? ⁶