In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

In the baroque tradition, death is seen as marking the beginning of life
as it truly is, that is, eternal life. Paradoxically, then, it is death itself that is
the origin of life, while all living things in the mundane world are marked
by decay. The various allegorical representations of the baroque body
and even more specifi cally of the skull or skeleton refl ect this duality. In
Mexico, the death skulls that were used as part of the rituals were, in part,
a legacy from pre-Hispanic times, but their allegorical use coincided with
themes endogenous to the European baroque. Historically, the baroque
as a style can also be seen as a reaction to the crisis of authority which
led to the formation of the modern state in the seventeenth century—in
the case of the Spanish baroque it was the Spanish absolutist monarchy,
which, according to Schlegel, served as a prototype for all the modern
states in Europe. 16 The baroque corresponds to a moment of radical reorganization
of the social sphere, when the confl icts between the old
and the new forms of economic production and state power produced a
major crisis. According to Jose Antonio Maravall’s infl uential study of baroque
culture in Spain, it was a “culture of crisis,” expressing a hegemonic
response to the threat posed on both the ideological level, by challenges
to the monopoly of the church’s ultimate authority over all domains of
knowledge, and the political level, by newly assertive combinations of
nobles and the great bourgeois families. Maravall famously argues that
baroque culture and aesthetics were essentially rearguard, conservative
movements aimed at preserving traditional society. 17
If we follow this formulation of the sociohistorical preconditions for
the baroque, it may not be surprising that this culture of crisis and the
aesthetics associated with it were repeatedly re-evoked in the twentieth
century, starting from the interwar period in Europe and later in Latin
American culture, where it became almost synonymous with the culture
of hybridity and uneven development. Eisenstein’s use of baroque aesthetics
and, in the case of the “Epilogue,” specifi cally his use of the allegory
of the skull and the representation of death associated with it is
consistent with such a reading. The solidifi cation of central feudal power
in the seventeenth century, stimulated as a reaction to the spirit of early
modernity and the advent of capitalism, may have been conservative and
even reactionary. But the appropriation of baroque styles and a baroque
hermaneutic in the twentieth century came, in a dialectical turn, to be
seen as progressive, as providing a powerful critique of the hegemony of
the modern state. In the twenties and thirties, when aggressive modernization
(in particular of the countryside in Russia) became the characteristic
task of the state agenda, a critique of modernity and of the modern
state inherent in the baroque ethos could be seen by an avant-garde in
the “epilogue” : 147