In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

is the real climax of the episode, and it contains some of the most memorable
and commented-on images from the fi lm. Despite the overt meaning
of the episode regarding the dehumanization of life on the hacienda
during the Porfi riato, where a woman is reduced to an object and a peon’s
life is worthless, visually it almost appears to be a mere pretext for a sadistic
display of male seminudity. In a story that deals with the treatment of
people as objects under the capitalist system of haciendas, one can argue
that men are aesthetically reduced to mere fetishes—and are, therefore,
also objects. Not only are the women mere stand-ins for abstract qualities,
allegorical representations of virtues or vices, but the men are as well,
serving primarily as allusions to baroque paintings of saints and martyrs
(in particular of St. Sebastian and of the suffering of Christ on the cross)
and Aztec sacrifi cial rituals. In contrast to “Sandunga,” in which pre-Columbian
culture is represented through the fi lter of the Christian paradise
myth, and unlike “Fiesta,” which makes the connections between the
Spanish and the pre-Columbian rituals apparent, in “Maguey” the Christian
baroque allusions are more obvious while the pre-Columbian ones
are comparatively hidden. However, as everywhere else in the fi lm, the
different epochs, civilizations, and stages of development coexist, interwoven
through the themes of death and sacrifi ce and the visual motifs.
Using “Maguey” as the title for the episode functions in a similar way as
it does in Porter’s story. It alludes both to the raw material for the economic
production on which the hacienda was founded (the making of pulque),
and to the ancient myths surrounding this cactus plant. In the hacienda
where the episode was fi lmed, one of the rooms is decorated with a fresco
of the pulque (maguey) goddess. The fresco is a copy of one of the most
famous nineteenth-century Mexican paintings, the fi rst painting done in
the academic style that incorporated Aztec visual motifs, the presentation
of maguey to Cortez by an Indian woman, thus providing a visual
demonstration of the fusion of colonial elements with the pre-Columbian
ones in Mexican culture as far back as the eighteenth century. At the same
time, by the early twentieth century in Mexico pulque, the alcoholic
beverage produced from maguey, became synonymous with rural poverty
and feudal (precapitalist) oppression. When the beer industry started to
pick up in Mexico, pulque, an agrarian product impossible to produce on
a mass scale, was not economically viable anymore, and the physical labor
necessary to its production was, in fact, a form of preindustrial economic
oppression. The middle classes preferred a more “elegant” (i.e., urban)
beverage—beer—while pulque was seen as a drink of the rural poor. This
is noticeable in the episode, when the hacendado and his friends drink
beer instead of the pulque on which their wealth rests. 49
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