In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

chapter four
1. Geduld and Gottesman, The Making and Unmaking of “Que Viva México!” 150.
2. See Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein.
3. See Metod 1:323–28, 241–45, 427–31.
4. Brenner, Idols Behind Altars, 209.
5. For an analysis of the use of lubok in the Russian/Soviet avant-garde, see Marjory
Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Gerald Janecek, The Look
of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton:
Prince ton University Press, 1984).
6. Báez-Jorge, La Afrodita Barbuda, 149.
7. Ibid., 150.
8. Quoted in Goodwin, Eisenstein, Cinema, and History, 137.
9. Quoted in Karetnikova and Steinmetz, Mexico According to Eisenstein, 137–38.
10. Ever since Bazin’s infl uential claim, deep focus has come to be seen as a feature
of fi lmmaking style quite unlike, and in Bazin’s work placed in opposition to,
Eisenstein’s montage.
11. Goodwin, Eisenstein, Cinema, and History, 136.
12. Quoted in Báez-Jorge, La Afrodita Barbuda, 180–81.
13. See Stanley H. Brandes, Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead (London:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 23. Also page 40: “To the question of European
versus indigenous origins, there can be no simple resolution until more
extensive colonial sources come to light.”
14. Báez-Jorge, La Afrodita Barbuda, 166.
15. See Tsivian, Ivan the Terrible, 24–27.
16. Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque.
17. Ibid.
18. Bolívar Echevarría, Modernidad, mestizaje cultural, ethos barroco (México:
UNAM, 1994).
19. This understanding of the modernist project is theorized in Clark, Farewell to
an Idea.
20. See Miriam Hansen’s two essays “Of Lightning Rods, Prisms, and Forgotten
Scissors: Potemkin and German Film Theory,” New German Critique 96 (Spring
2006): 101–18; and “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October
109 (2004): 3–45.
21. 1935 exposé in The Arcades Project, quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics
of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1991), 114.
22. There is a connection here between the baroque in its modern understanding,
and some of Levy-Bruhl’s ideas, which interested Eisenstein so much. Specifically,
the temporal dimension here is implied in the essence of the law of partic
ipation as well as, by some contemporary accounts of the baroque, the baroque
metaphysic, which is built on coexisting possible worlds containing
the same things but differently arranged. See also Buck-Morss’s The Dialectic
of Seeing for the way Benjamin adopts Blanqui’s version of the eternal return
notes to pages 140 – 151 : 193