In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

27. We will return to this observation in great detail in the analysis of the
“Epilogue”—the Day of the Dead—in ¡Que Viva Mexico!
28. Metod 2:562.
29. This notion must have resonated strongly with Hertzen’s ideas of the
peasant as the protosocialist, and the late-nineteenth-century tradition of
“khozhdenie v narod.”
30. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace &
World, 1949), 144.
31. Ibid., 143.
32. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 82.
33. Ibid., 83.
34. Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution.”
35. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 96.
36. Sergei Eisenstein, Immoral Memories: An Autobiography, trans. Herbert
Marshall (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Co, 1983), 260.
37. Joseph Freeman’s article from the Hoover Institute Archive, Joseph Freeman’s
fi le, quoted in Debroise, “Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein,” 65.
38. Laura Podalsky, “Patterns of the Primitive: Sergei Eistenstein’s ¡Que Viva
Mexico!” in Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas,
ed. John King, Ana López, and Manuel Alvarado (London: BFI Publishing,
1993), 33.
39. Morris Helprin, Close Up, reprinted from Experimental Cinema (February 1933),
144.
40. For a thorough exploration of this topic, see Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary
Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005).
41. A good example of this would be the attacks on Salvador Novo (who would
become another friend of Eisenstein’s) by the estredentistas—an avant-garde
group in Mexico that was infl uenced by the Soviet futurists and Mayakovsky
in particular—and their polemics on revolutionary virility as opposed to
“decadent” homosexuality.
42. Tina Modotti, Una mujer sin pais: Las cartas a Edward Weston y otros papeles
personales, ed. Antonio Saborit (Mexico: Cal y arena, 1992), 185.
43. The only historical evidence of this comes from the accounts of Xavier Guerrero’s
daughter, who accompanied Modotti on her visits to the Soviet Embassy,
and through memoirs of Modotti’s lover, the notorious Soviet spy Vittorio
Vidali. See Pino Cacucci, Tina Modotti: A Life (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1998), 169–70.
44. See Kathleen Morgan Drowne and Patrick Huber, The 1920s (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), 278.
45. While this reference to fi lm noir is somewhat anachronistic, I would argue
that the link between urbanism and the emergence of the “new woman” is
very much part of the genealogy of the “femme fatale” iconography, as is the
destroying-woman archetype of the 1890s, the Salome type. This is where
fi lm women like Pabst’s Lulu, or Marlene Dietrich as Lola in The Blue Angel,
notes to pages 72 – 83 : 187