In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

that is mainly fi gurative and poetic. All those fi gures from mythology
that we regard as no more than allegory, were at one stage an imagistic
summary of our knowledge of the world. Then science moved
away from fi gurative narratives and toward concepts, even though
the arsenal of earlier, personifi ed, mythological, and symbolic being
continued as a series of stage images, of literary metaphors, lyrical
allegories, and so on. They cannot endure in this role, however, and
end up in the archives. 38
myth
While the “mythical” in Eisenstein is, then, almost a synonym for “prelogical”
and an equivalent of the return to sensual thinking that is necessary
for a creation of a work of art, he is aware of the dangers that a
simple return to the mythical concepts implies. In the same speech he
formulated this as follows: “In addition to this we know also not just momentary,
but (temporarily!) irrevocable manifestations of precisely this
same psychological regression, when a whole social system is in regress.
Then the phenomenon is termed reaction, and the most brilliant light on
the question is thrown by the fl ames of the national-fascist auto-da-fé of
books and portraits of unwanted authors in the squares of Berlin.” 39
The importance of the demythifi cation of history against the backdrop
of rising Stalinist and Fascist myth-creating activity taking place in
Germany at the same time as the making of ¡Que Viva Mexco! can hardly
be underestimated. However, the accusation against Eisenstein’s work
in the thirties is precisely that he participated in the process of Stalinist
myth creation, ignoring his own admonition against psychological regression.
The same charge has been made against the muralists (Diego
Rivera in particular) who, it is claimed, encased the Mexican Revolution
in an ideological myth that legitimated the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI), just as it tended towards one party rule and the organized
corruption that undermined the progressive programs of the thirties.
Here it is again instructive to compare Eisenstein to Benjamin, who was
also struggling to distinguish the Fascist use of myth by Hitler from the
progressive moment in mythical thinking that he was trying to recover.
Many of Benjamin’s major infl uences, such as Ludwig Klages, leaned toward
or even embraced Fascism. In a review of a book by one of the leading
conservative revolutionaries, Ernst Jünger, Benjamin remarked upon
the “bad” use of the cultic to aestheticize the reality of war, which was
bound up with a technological system in which “. . . the increase in technical
artifacts, in power sources, and in tempo generally that the private
the “epilogue” : 159