In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico

During the 1920s and ’30s, Mexico attracted an international roster of artists and intellectuals—including Orson Welles, Katherine Anne Porter, and Leon Trotsky—who were drawn to the heady tumult engendered by battling cultural ideologies in an emerging center for the avant-garde. Against the backdrop of this cosmopolitan milieu,In Excess reconstructs the years that the renowned Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein spent in the country to work on his controversial film¡Que Viva Mexico!

Illuminating the inextricability of Eisenstein’s oeuvre from the global cultures of modernity and film, Masha Salazkina situates this unfinished project within the twin contexts of postrevolutionary Mexico and the ideas of such contemporaneous thinkers as Walter Benjamin. In doing so, Salazkina explains how Eisenstein’s engagement with Mexican mythology, politics, and art deeply influenced his ideas, particularly about sexuality. She also uncovers the role Eisenstein’s bisexuality played in his creative thinking and identifies his use of the baroque as an important turn toward excess and hybrid forms. Beautifully illustrated with rare photographs, In Excess provides the most complete genealogy available of major shifts in this modern master’s theories and aesthetics.

 

Charles Musser, Yale University

“Masha Salazkina’s brilliantly researched and interpretive study brings the never completed ¡Que Viva Mexico! to the center of Eisenstein’s work both as a filmmaker and theorist. Examining the rich cultural life of Mexico in which Eisenstein was operating, Salazkina lays out the three-sided circulation of people, artworks, and ideas among Russia, the United States, and Mexico in which Eisenstein actively participated. Salazkina enriches this achievement by showing the prominent roles of women such as Soviet ambassador to Mexico Alexandra Kollontai, cultural impresario Anita Brenner, writer Katherine Anne Porter, and artists Tina Modotti and Frida Kahlo. To Eisenstein’s male-centered world, she counterposes this one and in the process unveils previously unacknowledged aspects of Eisenstein’s theories of sexuality (and sexual experiences) in what must be seen as a breath-taking tour de force.”