In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

To understand the function of the avant-garde both in relation to the
vernacular and in relation to modernization, we must take seriously its
intrinsic and self-conscious utopianism, within the program of which it
was able to provide imaginary possibilities for alternative routes—and
roots—for capitalist modernities. 12 This utopian potential is often, as this
book will show, linked to new formulations of temporalities as mediated
through the body on the screen, once again bringing us to the centrality
of the sensory and visceral mode of cinematic expressions. The emphasis
on the body as mediating between the individual and collective historical
experience is explored in Eisenstein through various modes: through the
fi lmic registering of the effects of biological time on human bodies, especially
those of women; through reference to the anthropological temporal
dimension (with the body of “the native” in its center); and through the
incorporation of the baroque affective regime (the hybridity of forms, the
proliferation of static tableaus, etc.) as another alternative temporality.
This book’s emphasis on the notion of divergent temporalities in
Eisenstein opens it up to important recent scholarly work addressing
the interconnection between temporalities formed by cinematic images
and the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century revolution
in understanding time. The changing cultures of modernity witnessed
the weakening of the dominant unity of Newtonian time, and, by inference,
phenomenologically given time. In its place came competing temporalities,
with fi lm acting both to generate and to codify them. This is
explored by a number of works, including Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence
of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive; Philip Rosen’s
Change Mummifi ed: Cinema, Historicity, Theory; Laura Mulvey’s Death 24×
a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image; and Garrett Stewart’s work on
modernism, as well as his most recent book on contemporary cinematic
temporalities. 13 Of course, this book is limited in the scope and the sheer
number of works necessary to make such historical claims, but while it
centers on Eisenstein, I am not working in the spirit of the auteur approach,
for as Garrett Stuart shrewdly notices, the demanding philosophical
work by auteurs “is not given privileged access to the psychic
drives . . . of an epoch,” 14 which is why the larger culture of Mexico in the
process of modernization has so much independent weight in this study.
Eisenstein’s Mexican project is an episode through which the historical
phenomena of a particular kind of modernism is materialized; it operates
as both an example and a limit on the discussion of the construction
of temporalities of modernity through cinema. Such a discussion
must necessarily make its way though heterogeneous sources without
getting too far from the reality of our example, placing at the center a
introduction : 7