In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

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Figure 6. Sergei M. Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov shooting the burial of the peon, near Izamal, Yucatán, April 1931. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. follow the structure of a cubist painting. Although the shots themselves are static, their multiplicity appears to give an illusion of movement and varying perspectives that brings this image to life, while simultaneously performing a kind of a dissection of the shot, breaking it into fragments. The body in the coffi n is subjected to dissection by means of an almost perfect geometrical breakdown of the image into a series of shots from just about every possible angle in what looks like (potentially, since the sequence was never edited by Eisenstein himself ) a montage sequence reminiscent of the opening sequence of October. This is then followed by the only moving sequence in this section of the fi lm: the funeral procession. the funeral procession The sudden introduction of movement is startling: not only is there movement in the frame (as six men slowly carry an open coffi n) but the camera is moving too, forming tracking shots of signifi cantly longer duration than all the previous ones. As the six men carry the coffi n through cactus-covered terrain, groups of women stand in completely static poses, sometimes in the same shot as the men and the coffi n, sometimes in a separate shot, facing the direction of the funeral procession. This direction seems completely unmotivated; it is unclear where the procession began eisenstein’s ¡que viva méxico! : 47
Figure 7. Shooting the burial of the peon in an agave fi eld near Izamal, April 1931. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. or where it is going, and there is one shot in which the consistency of the screen direction is altered (instead of moving from left to right, the procession seems to be going from right to left). In these sequences women mark the direction of the movement, their faces, in separate shots, pointing and indicating the direction, almost motivating it (as in some cases their medium close-ups precede the moving shots) by looking into the offscreen space. This designates women as static and associates men with mobility (a fairly common phenomenon in fi lm), but what is much more interesting is the association of the movement and the progression, as a narrative otherwise enclosed by a series of static shots into a circular structure, with death. This is paradoxical since fi gural death falls outside the boundaries of narrative time and hence any temporal progression, implying permanence and therefore lack of movement and change. In a medium that gives an illusion of life primarily through movement, the association of movement and narrative with death is particularly striking. While the series of shots of the Aztec and Maya gods, and, by formal association, women, represent death in its most abstract, iconic form, the dead man in the funeral sequence is relatively concretized: he is not an icon but an instantiation and a fi gure of death. And while the previous shots could hardly be seen as producing a narrative, but rather stand as icons of timelessness, the funeral procession introduces some sense of 48 : chapter one
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IN EXCESS
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Masha Salazkina is assistant profes
Page 8: CONTENTS 1 2 3 4 Acknowledgments :
Page 11 and 12: Kern, Ilya Kliger, Brendan Moran, E
Page 13 and 14: which rearranges the material to cr
Page 15 and 16: Two books that deal with Eisenstein
Page 17 and 18: twentieth century modernism.” I w
Page 19 and 20: question, shared by all the authors
Page 21 and 22: dangerously close to Socialist real
Page 23 and 24: Trying to fi nd internal correspond
Page 25 and 26: etween roles), who either literally
Page 27 and 28: To this list of similarities I woul
Page 29 and 30: As a result of its revolution, Mexi
Page 31 and 32: of baroque excess and imagery to hi
Page 33 and 34: in a postrevolutionary Mexican disc
Page 35 and 36: the cultural ideology of postrevolu
Page 37 and 38: cultural relativism in anthropology
Page 39 and 40: vasconcelos and the arts: montenegr
Page 41 and 42: Figure 1. Diego Rivera, Portrait of
Page 43 and 44: and didactic application. Although
Page 45 and 46: young picador and his adulterous af
Page 47 and 48: twelve volumes of Frazer’s The Go
Page 49 and 50: static shots, this material lends i
Page 51 and 52: Figure 3. Coatlicue. Olivier Debroi
Page 53 and 54: Anita Brenner deserves a separate i
Page 55 and 56: “Corn for the pre-Hispanic cosmol
Page 57: a reference to a god of corn, whose
Page 61 and 62: Figure 8. David Alfaro Siqueiros, E
Page 63 and 64: he worked on exactly at the time of
Page 65 and 66: 2 ------------- “ SANDUNGA” ---
Page 67 and 68: mythical/utopian past, it is the do
Page 69 and 70: Figure 11. Alexandrov at camera, Te
Page 71 and 72: muted background of many shots of t
Page 73 and 74: for future Mexican productions.”
Page 75 and 76: However, this visual specifi city,
Page 77 and 78: The ornate dresses and decorations,
Page 79 and 80: cinema, in which spectacle is usual
Page 81 and 82: the patriarchal social norms and th
Page 83 and 84: of Rivera embodying the Tehuanas an
Page 85 and 86: alternative to the horrors and deca
Page 87 and 88: has a matriarchal society next to t
Page 89 and 90: At the same time, neither the Sovie
Page 91 and 92: Figure 16. Image from “Sandunga.
Page 93 and 94: own observations and experiences in
Page 95 and 96: appear in their place may be seen a
Page 97 and 98: It is obvious that “Sandunga” c
Page 99 and 100: Figure 17. Eduard Tisse, Sergei M.
Page 101 and 102: 3 ------------- “ GOING ALL THE W
Page 103 and 104: eligious, sexual, and artistic. Bot
Page 105 and 106: Figure 20. Sergei Eisenstein, Mexic
Page 107 and 108: audience of early cinema, especiall
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and statues, now as the mother of t
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A bullfi ght is a perfect attractio
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of his femininity. The positioning
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Eisenstein always strives for in hi
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the Virgin with his mother because
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Figure 22. Hacienda Tetlapayac, sum
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Figure 24. Sergei M. Eisenstein and
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in the period from 1919 through the
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the political implication of this m
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Figure 25. Sergei M. Eisenstein and
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Figure 26. Image from “Maguey.”
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He conceived the whole fi lm as a c
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Figure 27. Image from “Maguey.”
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While accompanying the crew on thei
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the image of the bisexual gods, and
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the two genders. Thus identity, bot
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announces that he is in love, and t
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phenomena in general: “The proble
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fullest and most fl exible realizat
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it as transference from the sexual
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efl ex; i.e., nondiscarded stimulus
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The obvious success of the visual i
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artists. They turned to lubok for r
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Figure 32. Image from the “Epilog
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epresentation of death in the fi lm
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search of a form of resistance to v
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fi lms, however, particularly Potem
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various commodities of the modern e
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aroque artists employed the allegor
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of natural time; but it also stands
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“the principle” (or, later, “
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sector can neither absorb completel
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striking as it was in the period be
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cement to sell and happened to comm
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Figure 35. Image from the “Epilog
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had located in the mechanization of
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only sees the corpse from the outsi
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In a similar leap, allegedly, he tr
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Figure 40. Frida Kahlo, Girl with D
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which he kept as a “souvenir” i
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attempts to comfort, papering over
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NOTES introduction 1. In 1950, Kenn
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very moments in cultural history—
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particular did research on orally b
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27. We will return to this observat
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horses. Here the revolutionary idea
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40. Katherine Anne Porter, The Coll
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chapter four 1. Geduld and Gottesma
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Mexico, 1923-1940 (Valencia: IVAM C
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BIBLIOGRAPHY works by sergei eisens
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Ivanov, Viacheslav. Ocherki po isto
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Beltran, Neftali. Poesia. México:
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Hanssen, Beatrice. Walter Benjamin
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Trexler, Richard. Sex and Conquest:
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aroque aesthetic (cont.) Viva Méxi
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death (cont.) Mexico, 145; spectacl
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“Epilogue” (cont.) focus, 144;
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jicaras, 44-45 Jiménez, Agustin, 1
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modernism (cont.) 149; fascination
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“Psychology of Composition” (Ei
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Strike, 6, 51, 100, 102, 107 “sup
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