In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

search of a form of resistance to various kinds of monopoly power (of the
state, of imperialism, of corporate cartels, of hegemonic cultural institutions)
as offering a set of procedures that could be refunctionalized to
serve progressive ends.
While we have already explored the relationship of the baroque excess
to homoeroticism and Eisenstein’s theories of the bi-sex and protoplasm
as relevant to “Fiesta” and “Maguey,” the function of the skull within baroque
allegory allows us an opportunity to address another question, one
of major importance to Eisenstein’s conception of his Mexican fi lm. What
attracted Eisenstein, as well as other dialectical materialist thinkers, to
the baroque aesthetic? How does the baroque tie in with the “dialectical
image” that is so important to Eisenstein?
latin american baroque and
the culture of modernity
Mexican art historian Bolívar Echeverría frames his discussion of the
Mexican baroque by pointing to the main contradiction of modernity
as that of the value of work being subsumed under the exchange value
necessary for the accumulation of capital, a notion Echeverría evidently
takes from Marx. Ethos is what negotiates the multiple tensions arising
from the triumph of exchange value and harmonizes them—in other
words, ethos plays the function of ideology. From this point of view, the
baroque aesthetic of excess emerges as a way of submitting the riches of
emergent capital to another and older logic, one in which wealth no longer
disappears into the variable and abstract role it plays in the capitalist
framework, but reassumes its material and sacred existence. In the original
baroque aesthetic, which presupposes the traditional Christian point of
view, capital as merely the accumulative instance of exchange takes on the
value of death—in the same way that, as St. Paul says, the law is death—and
its redemption is a matter of returning it to the order of life. This affi rmation
in the historical age of the baroque (the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries) depends on the theology of the resurrection and the eternal life;
however, the same paradigm will function for the modern age.
According to Echeverría, the baroque ethos in Latin America is an especially
good example of a negation of the established cultural norms
because it arose from the destruction of another cultural system—pre-
Columbian culture—from which the Latin American baroque took the
materials to create its forms of excess. The violent rupture of colonization
gave an impetus to the baroque in the New World that allowed it to take
a purer form rather than that embedded in and more continuous with
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