Sergei M. Eisenstein worked on the project of writing a General History of Cinema during the last two years of his life;the project remained unfinished at his death in February 1948. Eisenstein'slast theoretical endeavour can be read from several different perspectives: as an overview of cinema’s intermedial relations with the other arts; as a vast genealogy of all the media that can be considered as “forerunners” of cinema’s “expressive possibilities”; as an attempt to develop an anthropology of images which situates cinema in the context of a wide spectrum of media (death masks, casts of body parts, mummies) "Trieb” to “record phenomena”; finally, as a media archaeology trying to work with different models of historical development in order to understand cinema’s historical position as a medium: its pre-history, its present (in 1946-48), and its future developments with the advent of 3D cinema and television.