ABSTRACT
The difficulty of Sergei Eisenstein’s Notes for a General History of Cinema lies not so much in their fragmentary and unfinished nature as it does in the fact that they present us with a text in which the history of cinema is itself achieved by cinematic means. Cinema appears in Eisenstein’s note-taking as both an object of historical analysis and as the set of operations or means by which this analysis is composed. By submitting his historical account to the work and the form of montage, 1 Eisenstein aims at something other than merely the production of knowledge claims or judgments about cinema’s historical status: he also wants to produce an image (obraz) of cinema’s history. The history of cinema can, for Eisenstein, be put in relief only if it itself becomes the subject of what he called imaginicity (obraznost’); only if time as something historical is made to pass through and lets itself be affected by the temporal experience of the image. The texts of the Notes are, therefore, characterized by a certain tension, a split between two rival temporalities, of which one rests on the tasks of a film historian – to stabilize time in chronologies and periodizations, to establish causal links in the form of interpretation and narrative organization – while the other takes the shape of a demand made on the historical material of astonishing breadth by the filmmaker in search of an image. We might therefore orient ourselves with respect to Eisenstein’s Notes by saying that image and history do not necessarily make sense of time in the same way. This is perhaps a strange claim to make in relation to Eisenstein, but he was not alone among the great filmmakers with his belief that the appearance of cinema meant that from now on history (including cinema’s own) must make a necessary detour through the heterogeneous terrain of the (cinematic) image.
