ABSTRACT
As a whole, Eisenstein’s Notes for a General History of Cinema appears as the protean outline of a greater dialectical endeavor constantly animated by a double rhythm, something like a respiration or a perpetual heartbeat. On the one hand, Eisenstein understood cinema as a kind of gigantic diastole, an extraordinary opening of the field of the image: as a consequence, he called for an anthropology in which Greek dithyrambs and Christian pilgrimages, puppet theater and grisaille, Egyptians and Picasso, Chinese scrolls and Van Eyck’s altarpieces, Peruvian pottery and Verlaine’s poems, Javanese theater and Constructivist photomontage, among the countless examples brought up, would jostle together. This involved placing the cinema in the forefront of a general observation on the effectiveness of images and the – psychic, physical, social – movements they simultaneously required and gave rise to. This explains why Eisenstein, in spite of the “socialist” scientism and the party lines to which he constantly had to answer, never hesitated to conceive of images within the pluri-disciplinary perspective of a sort of mythopoesis found in many of his contemporaries (Aby Warburg and Marcel Mauss, Carl Einstein, and Georges Bataille, for instance).
