In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

fi lmic issues in Eisenstein’s theory and practice. Many of these issues
center around the fi gure of the “primitive” and how it connects to the
developments in Eisenstein’s theories, especially in the last decade of his
life, as a result of his Mexican experience.
In recent years, a number of scholars have addressed the way in which
Eisenstein’s experience in Mexico infl uenced his work and theory—
most notably Oksana Bulgakowa in both her articles and biography of
Eisenstein, and Anne Nesbet in her recent book. 16 Nesbet in particular
emphasizes the importance of such concepts in Eisenstein’s writing as
“prelogical thought” and “Mlb”—“the return to mother’s womb”—and
has allotted an extensive focus to the Mexican period as formative in this
respect. 17 Mikhail Iampolskii’s articles provide the most thorough and
subtle theoretical analysis of Eisenstein theories, but they place Eisenstein
in the context of purely European philosophical tradition(s) and do not
take the Mexican milieu into account. Yuri Tsivian’s highly informed
reading of Ivan the Terrible deals with many of the Eisensteinian motifs
elaborated in this book; however, Tsivian never explicitly deals with ¡Que
Viva México! and its role in the progression of Eisenstein’s ideas. I hope to
put this book in a fruitful dialogue (and sometimes polemic) with all of
these scholars. At the same time, their work informs mine in many ways.
The paradigmatic question for most Eisenstein scholars has become
that of Eisenstein’s development, and specifi cally how to relate his early
(1920s) work to his later (post-1932) work. The fi rst to address this issue
was David Bordwell in his two essays, both published in Screen in 1974–
75, “Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift” and “Eisenstein’s Epistemology:
A Response.” 18 Bordwell developed his thesis in The Cinema of Eisenstein,
still the most fundamental piece on Eisenstein’s theory and practice, in
which he showed how dramatic shifts of interest and emphasis distinguished
Eisenstein’s early writing from his “mature poetics.” 19 Bordwell
showed that Eisenstein’s later aesthetic theory was centered thematically
on synthesis and organic unity, a shift away from the constructivist and
formalist biases of his early theoretical work. Bordwell’s thesis highlights
the need for a good account of the striking changes that Eisenstein’s fi lmmaking
style underwent between the 1920s and the late 1930s. The French,
English, and U.S. fi lm theorists of the 1960s who preceded Bordwell had
prepared the way here for the generally accepted outline of Eisenstein’s
career. These theorists (some of whom were also directors) were in part
responsible for uncovering Eisenstein’s theoretical legacy, but, for their
own reasons, they made Eisenstein’s work a captive of the Soviet avantgarde
of the 1920s, of which they were ardent partisans. Consequently,
they could only see Eisenstein’s later works as a retreat to something
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