International Conference "Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico and the American Southwest: Indigeneity, Ritual, Immersive Environments"

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, [email protected]

Location for the Thursday panel and keynote lecture: 

ASU Hayden Library, Room 236

300 E Orange St., Tempe, AZ 85281

1:00 pm – 1:30 pm               Conference registration; light refreshments

1:15 pm – 1:30 pm               Opening remarks by Ana Hedberg Olenina

1:30 pm – 3:30 pm               Panel 1 (three presentations)

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm               ASU Hayden Library Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection: “Mexican Materials, 1900s-1950s” [Hayden Library Rm. 138]

A book exhibit with commentary by Seonaid Valiant, ASU Library Associate Curator for Latin American Studies                                              

5:30 pm – 6:45 pm               “When Avant-Garde Meets Archaic Culture: Eisenstein’s Mexican Odyssey as an Artistic Experiment and Conceptual Exploration”

A keynote lecture by Oksana Bulgakowa, Professor of Film Studies Emerita, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany 

Pre-register to view on Zoom: https://asu.zoom.us/meeting/register/sIvRbyLOTgWFelhGtpWzVQ

Immersed in a Mexican cultural landscape where modernity, colonial history, and pre-Columbian mythology coexisted, Eisenstein developed a new visual language. He experimented with the simultaneity of time, the collapse of opposites, and the corporeal foundations of meaning.  His drawings and the Mexican film reflected his "materialized unconscious," merging Christian iconography, ritual violence, and pagan mythologies into images of dismemberment, sacrifice, and rebirth. Simultaneously, he absorbed the anthropological and ethnographic debates of Mexican artists and his collaborators, such as Miguel Covarrubias and Anita Brenner, while reading the works of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, James Frazer, Alexander Luria, and Lev Vygotsky. From these influences, Eisenstein developed the central idea of his final book, Method (1932–1948): art reactivates prelogical, sensual modes of thinking by breaking through rational consciousness, thereby allowing access to universal structures of conflict and ecstatic experience. This theory paralleled psychoanalytic and Marxist searches for fundamental conflicts by interpreting art as a return to the basic trauma of humanity's transition from mythical to rational thought. In this framework, film appeared as a privileged medium, capable of collapsing linear causality into spatial simultaneity and connecting modern technological perception with archaic mythological experience.

Though the film was incomplete, it was decisive for the evolution of his aesthetics and theory. The film revealed art as an anthropological necessity that mediates between nature and history, myth and modernity, and archaic structures of perception and the new media environment. The Mexican project, in both its visual fragments and its afterlife in Method, remains key to understanding Eisenstein’s vision of cinema as a place where the avant-garde and archaic culture could converge in search of a new architecture of the senses.

Oksana Bulgakowa is a professor of film history at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Maintz, Germany. She is the author of multiple books on the Soviet avant-garde, including Fabrika zhestov (Factory of Gestures), Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2021; Fabrika zhestov 2 (Factory of Gestures 2), Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2021; and Sovetskii slukhoglaz: film i ego organy chuvstv (Soviet Hearing Eye: Film and Its Senses), Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010. Dr. Bulgakowa is the author of the definitive biography of the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (German edition, 1998; English, 2001) and a study of his theoretical works Eisenstein – Three Utopias: Architectural Drafts for a Film Theory (in German, 1995). She has also prepared for publication the filmmaker’s writings (Sergei Eisenstein, Method/Methode. 4 Volumes, 1555 pages, Berlin: PotemkinPress, 2009; and Sergei Eisenstein, Stenogrammy rezhisserskikh seminarov. 1933-1935 (Shorthand Notes of Seminars at VGIK). Tbilisi: SaGa, 2017. 

Location for the Friday panels and keynote lecture: 

ASU Humanities Institute, Ross-Blakley Hall, Rm 196 and 197
1102 S. McAllister Ave, Tempe, AZ 85287-1601

8:30 am – 9:00 am               Conference registration; refreshments

9:00 am – 11:00 am             Panel 2 (three presentations)

11:15 am – 1:15 pm             Panel 3 (three presentations)

2:45 pm – 4:15 pm               “Eisenstein, Revolution, and Ancient Mesoamerica”

A keynote lecture by Jesse Lerner, Documentary Fillmmaker and Professor of Media Studies, Pitzer College.

Pre-register to view on Zoom: https://asu.zoom.us/meeting/register/aHZy5DZiRECF0MCzMIqZKQ

Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished Mexican film was conceived and filmed as part of an active dialogue with a group of outstanding modern artists, and under the spell of Mesoamerican archaeology and architecture.  Drawing on the filmmaker’s writings, a close reading of the film footage, a range of artworks, eyewitness accounts of Eisenstein’s time in Mexico, and the remarkable, often erotic or scatological, drawings, and focusing on the filmmaker’s engagement with Mexican muralists, printmakers, illustrators, and photographers as well as artifacts from the Pre-Columbian past which profoundly impacted the entire artistic milieu, this presentation will unpack the web of influences and ideas the inform the frustrated epic interpretation of national history that would have been Que Viva México! 

Jesse Lerner is a filmmaker, curator, and writer. His documentaries Frontierland/Fronterilandia (1995), Ruins (1999), The American Egypt (2001), Atomic Sublime (2010), The Absent Stone (2013) and The Fragmentations Only Mean … (2021) have screened at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Sundance, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles Film Festivals, among many other venues.  Washington’s National Gallery, the Anthology Film Archives, and Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional have presented mid-career surveys of his films.  His books include The Maya of Modernism, F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, The Shock of Modernity, Ismo Ismo Ismo, and The Catherwood Project.  As a curator, he has organized exhibitions for the Robert Flaherty Seminar, Mexico’s National Palace of Fine Arts, the MAK Center, the Museo Carrillo Gil, and the touring series Mexperimental Cinema.  He is a professor in the Intercollegiate Media Studies program of the Claremont Colleges. 

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Location for the Friday, Nov. 7, Film screening: 

Rm 201, ASU Media and Immersive Experience (MiX) Center 

50 N Centennial Way, Mesa, AZ 85201

6:30 pm                              Door opens

7 pm- 9:30 pm                    “Eisenstein’s Mexican Film: Episodes for Study” (compiled by Jay Leyda, 1955), from the MoMA Film Archive. Part I. 

Film screening with a live commentary by Ana Hedberg Olenina and musical accompaniment by Haptic. 

Location for the Saturday Panels: 

ASU Humanities Institute, Ross-Blakley Hall, Rm 196 and 197
1102 S. McAllister Ave, Tempe, AZ 85287-1601

8:30 am – 9:00 am               Conference registration; light refreshments

9:00 am – 11:00 am             Panel 4 (three presentations)

11:15 am – 1:15 pm             Panel 5 (three presentations)

2:45 pm – 4:15 pm               Panel 6 (three presentations)

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Location for the Saturday Film screening: 

Rm 201, ASU Media and Immersive Experience (MiX) Center 

50 N Centennial Way, Mesa, AZ 85201

6:30 pm                                Door opens

7 pm- 9:30pm                       “Eisenstein’s Mexican Film: Episodes for Study” (compiled by Jay Leyda, 1955), from the MoMA Film Archive. Part II. 

Film screening with a live commentary by Ana Hedberg Olenina and musical accompaniment by Haptic

Location for Sunday panels: 

ASU Humanities Institute, Ross-Blakley Hall, Rm 196 and 197
1102 S. McAllister Ave, Tempe, AZ 85287-1601

8:30 am – 9:00 am               Light Refreshments

9:00 am – 11:00 am             Panel 7 (four presentations)

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This conference was made possible through the generous support and administrative assistance from the following units at ASU: 

• Humanities Institute Seed Grant
• Desert Humanities
• The GAME School
• Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center, Herberger Institute for the Arts
• Dean’s Office, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
• Hayden Library
• School of Human Evolution and Social Change
• School of International Letters and Cultures
• Central European Cultural Collaborative
• Melikian Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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Image credit:

Sergei Eisenstein’s drawing “Jeux” [“Games],” 1931. Image courtesy: Eizenshtein-Tsentr, Moscow. An unofficial logo of the Eisenstein International Network.

“Sergei Eisenstein and an Indigenous Dancer in Mexico City. December 1930.” The Lilly Library, Indiana University. Upton Sinclair Papers. Document VAD8556-00438.

For a full listing of all the Humanities Institute events visit https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/events