In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

and its function in Soviet art, and specifi cally in cinema, can be found in
Eisenstein’s speech at the All-Union Creative Conference of Workers in
Soviet Cinematography in January 1935 (the English text of this speech is
translated in Film Form as “New Problems”). In it Eisenstein distinguishes
the “earlier,” “primitive,” or “sensuous” form of thinking from the “logical”
and “analytical” form. But once again, quoting Engels, he insists not
on a “return to the primitive” but rather on a dialectical pattern involving
a synthesis of all present stages of development:
One way or another, the study of this or that thinking construction
locked within itself is profoundly incorrect. The study of sliding
from one type of thinking to another, from category to category, and
more—the simultaneous co-presence in varying proportions of the
different types and stages and the taking into account of this circumstance,
are equally as important, explanatory and revealing in this as
in any other sphere: An exact representation of the universe, of its
evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the refl ection of
this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by
the method of dialectics, with its constant regard to the innumerable
actions and reactions of life and death, of progressive or retrogressive
changes. 30
Unlike many of his contemporaries and the thinkers who infl uenced
him, including Levy-Bruhl and Frazer, who were some of his main sources
of information on anthropology, Eisenstein did not accept the idea of a
linear evolutionary development. Instead he insisted that:
not only does the process of development itself not proceed in a
straight line (just like any other development process), but that it
marches by continuing shifts backward and forward, independently
of whether it be progressively (the movement of backward peoples
toward the higher achievements of culture under a socialist regime),
or retrogressively (the regress of spiritual superstructures under the
heels of national-socialism). The continual sliding from level to level,
forward and backward, now to higher forms of an intellectual order,
now to the earlier forms of sensual thinking, occurs also at each point
once reached and temporarily stable as a phase in development. 31
This position directly echoes Lenin’s postulates on the “underdeveloped”
or “backward” peoples as being capable of a leap into Socialism,
developed in his work on imperialism. Thus in Eisenstein the
premodern—or sensuous—was not seen as either an outdated and
outmoded form of existence threatening progress, or as a desirable
“sandunga” : 73