In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

earlier ideologies and cultures, as in the Old World. After Cortez’s conquest,
the crucial role played by the Jesuits in the social and cultural life of
Mexico promoted the spread of baroque culture, as happened anywhere
the Jesuits played a major role in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Jesuits were simply at the vanguard of the Catholic Church’s attempt
to counter the emerging individualist modernity of capitalism, and the
New World presented a fi eld for the Catholic alternative relatively uncontested
by the protocapitalist nation-states. Consequently, the (peripheral)
indigenous civilization was forced to affi rm the new (dominant)
culture and accept it in spite of the natural negation; it had to follow the
baroque process of making something out of (and with) the negation
itself, turning the negative into the positive by displacing, transgressing,
and exaggerating it. It is this mixed regime of negations that allows us to
read baroque aesthetics and ideology in the twentieth century, especially
in Latin America, where these negations were most rooted, as a form of
cultural subversion of existing (capitalist) modernity. 18
Thus, the renewed focus on the baroque aesthetic can be understood as
another way to subvert the reality of modernity and imagine it otherwise.
Politically, this links such diverse thinkers as Eisenstein and Benjamin,
who were, albeit in different ways, engaged in this same project as part
of their modernist avant-garde ethos. 19
While bringing Walter Benjamin into a discussion of Eisenstein’s
Mexican fi lm may seem like a strange choice, bringing Eisenstein’s text
into dialogue with Benjamin brings out with additional force some of
the major themes Eisenstein’s fi lm explores: the baroque, and the subthemes
of allegory, the emblematic centrality of the skull, myth, prelogical
thinking, and dialectics. Moving between an artist and a critic who
shared a fascination with the baroque, a heretical form of Marxism, and
a keen sense of themselves as fi gures on the side of the modern, allows us
further to bring ¡Que Viva Mexico! out of the critical isolation it suffers
from by being considered as referring, constantly, to Eisenstein’s intentions,
instead of referencing the conceptual milieu in which Eisenstein
was working. Systematically counterpointing Benjamin to Eisenstein in
the section that follows makes the introduction of Benjamin a real aid to
understanding Eisenstein and the way his orientation to the Mexican baroque
catalyzed his thinking and the art he did afterwards. What follows,
then, is a discussion of Benjamin’s highly theorized notion of allegory,
the baroque, and the tie between the prehistoric and the modern for the
light it throws on Eisenstein’s project.
We don’t know that Eisenstein, in fact, ever read any of Benjamin’s
work. We do know that Benjamin saw and commented on Eisenstein’s
the “epilogue” : 149