In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

for future Mexican productions.” 13 In an ironic twist, Eisenstein’s fi lm is
seen here as “more Mexican” than any fi lm a Mexican artist could aspire
to make as a defensive gesture against the accusations that foreigners
degrade Mexico in their work. In actuality, this “authenticity” of Eisenstein’s
fi lm is largely due to the recognizability of the images in the fi lm—
especially in “Sandunga”—as based on the already established system of
representation created after the Mexican revolution.
Eisenstein, on the other hand, was concerned both with the authenticity
of the Mexican fi lm (hence all the assurances from the censors that
what was represented was historically accurate) and with its novelty, as
was constantly emphasized by all members of the crew:
In Tehuantepec we shot exclusively new material, such material has
not been seen on the screen before. In general, no one had fi lmed
in Tehuantepec before, so this is completely new material for the
screen. We have enough fi lmed material for half of one part, so we
still have three and a half parts left to shoot. Mexico as such had never
been fi lmed before, so it’s our fortune to be the fi rst to fi lm the real
Mexico, and this country is terrifi c in the sense, in the sense of the
cinematographic material; it’s too bad we cannot use color fi lm, that
would have been a hundred percent more successful. 14
While this preoccupation links this fi lm to the overall trend in the early
cinema for representing the “as yet unseen,” it also puts ¡Que Viva Mexico!
in the context of fi lms that function as visual documents in the construction
of history: it is intended to be a proof, as it were, that Eisenstein’s
theories and his versions of history are correct. So while in the “Prologue”
the juxtaposition of the faces of Indians with the stone gods prove the
continuity of indigenous life in Mexico, in “Sandunga” the ethnographic
material shot by the crew is intended to demonstrate the co-presence
of different epochs within Mexico (an uneven development, not unlike
what we see in Russia during that period).
Once again, a reading of the fi lmic structure of ¡Que Viva Mexico! (and
of “Sandunga” specifi cally) is contingent on constant tensions between
the abstract (and mythological) and the historic, as indexically specifi c,
exemplifi ed by the documentary quality of the footage, implying a dialectical
relationship between them. We will address this tension later in
the chapter, but fi rst it is necessary to return to the fi gure of the indigenous
in “Sandunga” as not only the embodiment of the authentic past
in the sense of the precolonial cultural origin for the foundation of the
postrevolutionary Mexican nation, but also as the embodiment of the
revolutionary present, and of the utopian future.
62 : chapter two