ABSTRACT
The story of how Eisenstein came to write his Notes for a General History of Cinema is wrapped up in a larger story of institution-building in the Soviet Union. That institutional backstory is worth telling for at least three reasons: to understand the peculiar interactions that shaped the state’s relationship to an art that was regarded as a preeminent Soviet achievement at the beginning of the postwar period; as an example of the kind of politics that revolved around film education in the age of the film institutes, out of which came many of the most influential directors of the postwar period; and to understand how these two factors affected Eisenstein’s project. The essay further places these developments into a larger international context of the institutionalization of film studies as part of the development of the film cultures in Europe.
