ABSTRACT
The English translation and publication of Sergei Eisenstein’s Notes for a General History of Cinema is momentous, obviously, but for all the wrong reasons as well as for better ones. Yes, the Notes may tempt us to think for a minute that this could become a “history of cinema,” to imagine its completion, or even to champion it as a final authority and definitive lineage to which we can now attach “cinema today.” Or, worse, we may attempt to use the Notes as “lessons from history” for the present – how to proceed or not to proceed to think cinema in transition. The project has to do with us, certainly, but not in the ways we might think – least of all because if “[c]inema is the heir of all artistic cultures,” as Eisenstein proclaims at the beginning of the section of the Notes entitled “The Heir,” we can now know what is the “heir of cinema.” So we start by resisting the temptation to take Eisenstein’s Notes as secretly containing the historicist answer for us to the question it implicitly poses: “What made cinema the cinema that it is?” especially because that question leads too easily to the corollary: “Is cinema on its way to becoming something other than cinema?”
