Oksana Bulgakova: Eisenstein in Mexico

"Que viva Mexico!", is the film Sergei Eisenstein came to shoot in Mexico, and he would tragically be excluded from editing it. The film's hybrid images depict Mexican life as a simultaneity of past and present. Reminiscent of, and yet surpassing the modern 'primitivist' fascination with the 'archaic', Mexico presented for Eisenstein a tableau of dialectic imagery that allowed him to re-conceptualize the role of modern art and revolutionary cinema in traversing the modern dichotomies of subject and object, rational and irrational, inside and outside, individual and collective, and even death and life. Oksana Bulgakowa is Eisenstein's biographer and, together with Anselm Franke, co-curator of Sergei Eisenstein: The Mexican Drawings. The lecture has been recorded on April 3, 2009 in MuHKA_media, Antwerp. http://www.extracity.org