The Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s sojourn in Mexico and the shooting of footage for his project Que Viva Mexico! (1930-1932) are widely believed to have been a transformative, liberating moment for the filmmaker, who drew inspiration from Mayan and Aztec archeology, Mexican folklore, and connections to Mexico’s intellectual avant-garde, as he pushed the boundaries of the cinematic medium’s expressive potential and political thrust. Eisenstein’s contacts with Anita Brenner, Diego Rivera, Adolfo Best-Maugard, and other Mexican intellectuals and artists, who looked to the past in their quest for the national spirit revival and decolonial liberation, has been well documented by scholars. A much lesser known fact from Eisenstein’s biography is that prior to Mexico, on his way to Hollywood, he stopped in Arizona, making a point of visiting the Grand Canyon and meeting Native Americans, noting in his diary how much he had been dismayed by the poverty and disenfranchisement of the indigenous community he saw. Eisenstein’s socialist political leanings combined, in his versatile and omnivorous mind, with a deep fascination for turn-of-the-century mythological, anthropological, and psychological research (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, James George Frazer; offshoots of Freudian psychoanalysis), which directed his attention to rituals, symbols, petroglyphs, ornaments, and performative gestures as an alleged gateway to innate, universal mechanisms of human perception, cognition, and emotion. After his trip to North America, Eisenstein’s writings on film theory have constantly returned to examples and case studies drawn from anthropological research, whenever he touched upon the topic of the spectators’ participation and mental absorption in the screen events, as well as questions of ecstasy and pathos – the ways in which the filmmaker’s structuring of the audience’s experience taps into the universals of human perceptual and cognitive processes, all the while destabilizing ossified social hierarchies, gender norms, and forms of political oppression. This conference brings Eisenstein specialists in dialog with researchers, who are rethinking the legacy of Eisenstein’s and other European Modernist artists’ quest for inspiration in the “archaic” and indigenous cultures of North America from a postcolonial perspective. Assessing the role of indigenous examples in Eisenstein’s film theory, we will also address his ideas on spectatorship as a modern form of ritual, as well as his ideas on the relationship between archetypical symbols and culturally-contingent, politically effective messaging.
The conference will feature two keynote lectures and 22 panel presentations by scholars from ASU and universities across the USA, Mexico, Germany, France, and the UK. Additionally, we will be screening a rare archival film “Eisenstein’s Mexican Film: Episodes for Study” held at the MoMA Film Archive. The screening will take place in two parts with a scholarly commentary and a live musical accompaniment.
Free and open to ASU faculty, staff, and students, with pre-registration.
Panels and keynote lectures will be held in-person and broadcasted live via Zoom. Film screenings will be held in-person only.
Pre-registration is required for all events. A detailed program of the conference with abstracts and presenters’ bios can be provided upon request.
Conference contact: Ana Hedberg Olenina, ana.olenina@asu.edu