In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

announces that he is in love, and that he was fi nally able to “go all the
way” sexually. The object of Eisenstein’s love was, indeed, a man, a native
of Guadalajara, Jorge Palomino y Cañedo. They probably met sometime
in September 1931 through Best Maugard or Montenegro. It seems that
Palomino joined Eisenstein for the trip to Jalisco and Colima in October,
where some of the luscious imagery from “Sandunga” was shot. At the
time of this trip, Alexandrov was sick, so he did not join the party, nor, for
some reason, did Kimbrough. Thus, of Eisenstein’s entourage only Tisse
joined Eisenstein, and possibly Palomino for the trip to Colima, where
quite a long time was spent on the beach. Very likely, the sequences in
“Sandunga” of the nude girls with fl owers in their hair, and the boys in
hammocks, as well a quite a few of the landscapes and the wild animals,
were shot on the Colima coast, to be incorporated in the “Sandunga”
episode. 78
The details of Eisenstein’s actual erotic encounter count less for our
purposes here than the encounter’s effects on the way that Eisenstein
theorized his experiences, both in the notes to Brenner and later:
Eisenstein’s subjective erotic experience is described by him as happening
on the fi rst level of a “dialectical perception” (“dialekticjeskoi percepcii ”).
Eros is the connecting point between subjective perception and dialectical
materialism. In spite of its considerable length, it is worth citing the letter
to Atasheva in full, both for the light it sheds on Eisenstein’s own life
and, more importantly, as a brilliant example of how Eisenstein theorized
his experiences within the same framework that he applies to his
art and theoretical ideas in his notes to Anita Brenner. Eisenstein’s understanding
of the connection between the philosophical concepts of
“will” and “experience,” as explained in the notes to Brenner, provide a
key for comprehending this otherwise cryptic letter, and subsequently
the whole cluster of sexual and homoerotic allusions in Eisenstein’s work
and writing.
Eisenstein analyzes his neurotic inability to consummate sexual
acts in terms of the dialectic between prelogical thinking, in this case
associated with what he terms the “expressive movement,” and the logic
of the libidinal body: “Arms and legs (and something else!) don’t lie and are
not dependent on logic and its erroneous conclusions!” Here Eisenstein
extends the logic of sensuous thinking to the idea of the embodiment
of the ever-present memory of the primitive consciousness, of the body
itself as the main conduit of know-how, mediated through the analysis
of “rational” mind. While he analyzes his own sexual neurosis as “sickness
of the will” (“bolezn’ voli ”), this concept of the will itself acts as a
link between the subjective erotic-ecstatic experience, and dialectical
130 : chapter three