In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

phenomena. At the horizon of this project, then, is the question of the way
Eisenstein’s own work (fi lmic as well as theoretical) and other works that
belong to this larger cultural context all shared the distinctly modernist
conceptions of nonlinear temporalities as alternative genealogies, altering
our understanding of historical temporality by means of an art that
absorbed the real temporal dislocations in society brought about by
technology—a project that is both shaped by and that shapes the new
culture of modernity in Russia and Mexico. This speculative investigation
must search, then, among a wider set of sources that are not all empirically
connected to Eisenstein’s Mexican fi lm, but are dictated by the theoretical
questions this view of modernism raises. Such an approach enables
me to make a more symptomatic reading of Eisenstein’s theories and his
fi lms by putting them in contact—anachronistically, as it were—with
more contemporary theoretical thinking on this subject, as well as referencing
those of Eisenstein’s contemporaries, such as Walter Benjamin,
who were involved in the shared intellectual and political quest to, as
T. J. Clark writes, “imagine modernity otherwise.” 7
Thus, this book shows the inextricability of Eisenstein’s oeuvre from a
larger framework of what has now become a separate object of study for
fi lm and cultural historians: the relationship between the global cultures
of modernity and fi lm. This point of view places my work within a larger
body of scholarship that explores this dynamic relationship. In particular,
Tom Gunning’s work on early cinema and cultures of modernity as well
as Miriam Hansen’s concept of the modernist vernacular helped me understand
how the changing collective sensory experience of modernity
was mediated and articulated through the language of cinema to become
a modern global vernacular. 8
The set of assumptions about the sensory embodiment and affective
visceral quality of cinematic experience, which fi lmmakers quickly began
to assume, is linked, as this scholarship has shown, to the global mass
cultural aspect of moviegoing; hence it is popular (classical) Hollywood
cinema that, according to Hansen, best embodies, in her famous phrase,
the “mass production of the senses.” Both Miriam Hansen and Yuri
Tsivian in their work on cinema, as well as Susan Buck-Morss in her
broader exploration of visual culture, show the connections to and the
historical infl uence of American cinema and the reception of American
culture on the Soviet avant-garde and on montage theory and practice
in particular. 9 Hansen, however, posits an opposition between the mass
(populist) aspect of Hollywood, which produced the vernacular aspects
of the global modern experience, and avant-garde modernism—and
the Soviet avant-garde in particular—as the “standard paradigm of
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