In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

1920s and 1930s that were produced at a time of social movement and
radical change for women betray an anxiety regarding female subjectivity.
The absence of any modern “new women” from ¡Que Viva Mexico! and
instead the insistence on the most essentialist representation of women
betrays that anxiety.
At the same time, this anxiety needs to be understood as essentially
modern—and modernist. I contend that the inability of some critics
to recognize the modern in Eisenstein’s later work is a measure of the
ideological dominance of constructivism over our retrospective frame
of reference for modernism in general and the avant-garde in particular.
This dominance fi lters out the strong organicist tendency that inheres
in modernism from the beginning, failing to connect an international
style to the global infl uence of ethnography on twenties modernism,
to which Eisenstein was strongly attuned. It is here that the modernist
reconception of the baroque gains its centrality, functioning, in
Eisenstein’s case, to reconcile his revolutionary sympathies, so often an
excuse to obliterate traditional societies, to the primitive by imagining
a model of history outside of that of “progress” over time. Thus, when
Eisenstein, in the “Prologue” to ¡Que Viva Mexico! juxtaposed the primitive
and the advanced, he was taking the logic of modernism to its furthest
extreme, and in doing so he aligned himself with other of the great
modernist projects of the decade, whether politically on the right or the
left. The great monuments of twenties modernism ( Eliot’s The Wasteland,
Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, the Mexican muralist program, the
cultural relativism promoted by students of Boas like Margaret Mead
in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), to name just a few) are all extraterritorial
endeavors unleashed by the attempt to get outside of the positivist
program of progress—which had so evidently led to the catastrophes of
war and immiseration—and to collapse its masculinist, productionist,
Eurocentric norms. It is within this model that some of the key tensions
of the modern(ist) age reveal themselves with particular force—those
of the simultaneous desire for and the impossibility of a stable identity,
sexual or national.
I understand ¡Que Viva Mexico! then, also as an attempt to reconstitute
and imagine the whole of a nation over its various ruptures (historical
and epistemological) and fragmentations. I see the fi lm as an effort to
cover for and “imagine over the lack: of the essential origins of the nation.”
As is often the case, it is easier to imagine such a totality from a
distance, whether geographic (from a different continent) or cultural
(addressing a different nation), by looking at a foreign phenomenon
through a fetishistic gaze. The classically Freudian fetishistic gaze
the “epilogue” : 177