In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

strangle a live turkey—there are twelve dancers, the one who does
not succeed in wringing his turkey’s neck is beaten up by the other
eleven! We could not fi lm it!!! And other similar attractions). If only
I had time to explore Quetzacoatl, Kukulcan, and other Mexican gods,
to be able to set it all down in a book. 26
idols behind altars
While the primitive in “Sandunga” was filtered through Christian
myths of paradise and of the birth of Christ, in a characteristic reversal
the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe is mediated through Aztec
mythology with its Awesome Mother of Gods. The Catholic celebration
itself is inscribed in the physical and symbolic space of pre-Columbian
civilization, thus once again emphasizing the constructed nature of this
part of the Mexican national identity, and simultaneously reinforcing the
organic myth of nationhood and subverting it by showing it as carefully
constructed. Eisenstein chose the images, which are now commonly
attributed to what is known in Mexican art history as the Indian Baroque:
the Indian dancers celebrating the Virgin of Guadalupe with ritual dances
that preceded the conquest by many centuries; and images of the church
of la Virgen de los Remedios in Cholula, Puebla, which was built on the
foundation of the largest pyramid on the American continent, and where
the faces of the cherubs decorating the walls of the interior have distinctly
Indian features. The episode serves as an illustration to Anita Brenner’s
thesis in Idols Behind Altars that the primitive indigenous culture and the
criollo neither coexist nor fuse; instead, they are inscribed one within the
other and are mediated through each other, both in constant confl ict and
yet inseparable from each other. 27 The spatial construction of the scenes
seems to reinforce both at once, explicitly the continuity of Mexican
culture, and implicitly the rupture brought by the conquest and the confl
ict between the indigenous and Hispanic cultures (and, conversely, the
modern and premodern modes of life). 28
While visually the episode is characterized by the representation of the
sensuality of male bodies, the whole section of “Fiesta” is framed conceptually
by a female fi gure of the mother: the Virgin of Guadalupe; the Aztec
Mother of Gods, alluded to in the Aztec ceremonies; and the “mother”
of the matadors, all of whom imply a mutual equivalence. According to
Marie Seton’s biography of Eisenstein, the mother of the matadors was
chosen to look exactly like Julia Eisenstein, to emphasize the fact that she
was to be his prototype of a mother. 29 Seton also comments that he often
mentioned that since childhood he had completely identifi ed images of
“going all the way” : 105