In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

ultimately, very autobiographical, as all of Kahlo’s paintings tend to be.
Just as Eisenstein famously claimed that he does not create cinema, he
creates Mexico and himself (“Je ne fais du cinema, je fais du Mexique et
moi!”), and in line with his claim that he saw in Mexico an externalization
of his internal states and interests, Kahlo’s little girl with a death
mask is an externalization of her own world, but a very conscious and
intentional one. Thus the two masks are also references to the various
pre-Columbian artifacts that Kahlo was ardently collecting, and of
the “mask” of indigenousness that she created for herself through her
elaborate Tehuana costumes (exactly like the ones worn by the women
in the “Sandunga” episode of ¡Que Viva Mexico!) and reinforced in her
many self-portraits. Much like Eisenstein, Frida Kahlo was no stranger
to the metaphors of autovivisection, autopsy, (self-)mutilation, and sadomasochism,
which were all intended for a subversive radical effect.
She was not only an active member of the Mexican Communist Party,
but an avid reader and an ardent follower of the “true dialectics” and,
like Eisenstein, in her copious diaries and letters applied the term to
the analysis of her personal life and relationships with Diego Rivera and
Leon Trotsky. 66 Largely due to her closeness to the surrealists, the visceral
affective and aesthetic shock her paintings are intended to produce
in the viewer is not entirely unlike the shock of Eisenstein’s “montage of
attractions.” Finally, her own bisexuality and obsession with reproduction
and motherhood make these issues as much of a common theme
for Kahlo’s work as they are for Eisenstein. But in radical contrast to
Eisenstein, sexual difference for Kahlo is simply not resolvable, and is utterly
unsynthesizable, even in the face of death, as is evident in the painting
of Girl with Death Mask. It is precisely the difference, and not the
synthesis and the absolution of the differences, that creates the stark and
shocking effect of this work. The boundaries and differences are blurred
and crossed, shown to be culturally and personally unstable and relative,
and yet persistently refuse to be resolved. Similarly, the commodifi cation
and objectifi cation looming behind the death mask, which turns
human into nonhuman, and the violence that turns people into objects
and things that is also behind the imagery of the Day of the Dead as interpreted
in Posada’s work, is present with even more terrifying force in
Kahlo’s painting. Behind the theatrical performativity, aesthetisization,
and even, arguably, religious ecstasy of Kahlo’s mutilation (very real for
her, of course, and not merely a metaphor or symbol) is real pain, both
physical and emotional. The extrasemantic quality of death and violence
are acknowledged. The dead fetus, which Eisenstein so lovingly holds
in his palm in the famous photograph from Zurich taken in 1930, and
the “epilogue” : 175