In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

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