In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

suffering on the cross is imitated by the believers as a way to salvation
and, hence, eternal life. Aztec sacrifi ces are prominently featured and are
one of the parallels between colonial culture and pre-Columbian rituals.
Finally, the execution of the peons in “Maguey” visually replicates the
representations of St. Sebastian as well as the crucifi xion, yet also refer to
primitive sacrifi cial rites.
Death and suffering are metonymically linked through the image
of a puncture of the body, which serves as a visual leitmotif. Baronita,
the picador, plays another important function in this respect: he infl icts
wounds on the bull by puncturing it, providing a link with the suffering
of the Christ imitators, who carry a cactus like a cross on their shoulders,
with sharp thorns piercing their bodies, and also with the punctures
of the maguey plants during the process of extracting juice in order to
produce pulque. Finally, there are the punctures of the bullets as they
penetrate both the maguey plants and the peon’s bodies during the uprising.
Eisenstein elaborates on these instances of physical cruelty:
Mexico is lyrical and tender, but also brutal. It knows the merciless
lashes of the whips, lacerating the golden surface of bare skin. The
sharp cactus spikes to which, at the height of the civil wars, they tied
those already shot to death, to die in the heart of the desert sands. The
sharp spikes that still penetrate the bodies of those who, having made
crosses from the cacti’s vertical trunks, tie them with rope to their own
shoulders and crawl for hours up to the top of the pyramids, to glorify
the Catholic Madonnas—de Guadalupe, de los Remedios, the Santa
Maria Tonantzintla; Catholic Madonnas since Cortes’s time triumphantly
occupying the places and positions of the cult of the former
pagan gods and goddesses. In order not to change the age-old routes
of pilgrimages, the crafty monks raised statues and temples on the
very same spots (heights, deserts, pyramids) where the overthrown
ancient, heathen gods of the Aztecs, Toltecs, or Mayas had once
reigned. . . . Physical brutality, whether in the “ascetism” of monk’s
self-fl agellation or in the torturing of others, in the blood of the bull
or the blood of man, pouring over the sands of countless Sunday corridas
after Mass, in a sensual sacrament; the history of unparalleled
brutality in crushing the countless uprisings of the peons, who had
been driven to a frenzy by the exploitation of the landowners. 53
The visual motifs of punctures and wounds and penetrations of
the fl esh carried over metonymically to the maguey cactus clearly create
sexual undertones. We begin with the juice of the plant, a milky substance.
But its breastlike connotations are combined and negated by the phallic
“going all the way” : 121