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ABSTRACT
Peter Greenaway’s recent biopic of the great Russian film director and master of montage Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, forms an important addition to filmic life writing. Greenaway ‘writes’ Eisenstein on screen through the film director’s actions as documented across an array of sources—including Eisenstein’s own autobiography—but he also reveals Eisenstein’s inner thoughts and feelings, using Eisenstein’s own voice (that is, his theories and film practice). Rather than portraying the Russian director at work, Greenaway opted to present Eisenstein’s directorial film philosophy, attempting to capture the essence of being ‘Eisenstein’. The film focuses on fourteen crucial months in the director’s life: the period he spent in Mexico, from where he was banished without completing what could have been his directorial masterpiece, the film Que Viva Mexico! Greenaway is laudatory of Eisenstein’s importance for the history of cinema, whilst depicting him in carnivalesque and corporeally grotesque terms. Thus, Greenaway simultaneously portrays Eisenstein as a great man and an anti-hero, in truly dialectical form. These apparently contradictory images of the cinematic master, functioning as thesis and antithesis, build up into something larger: a synthetic Eisenstein. The result is a larger-than-life, entirely ecstatic Eisenstein and an ode to his synaesthetic and dialectical approach to life and cinema. In doing this, however, Greenaway doubles his subject’s ‘voice’ with his own and also ‘writes’ himself through Sergei Eisenstein’s theory and practice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Fátima Chinita has a PhD in Artistic Studies (Film and Audio-Visual Media), an MA in Communication Sciences, and BAs in Lecturer and Cinema. She is an Senior Lecturer at the Theatre and Film School of the Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon, but is currently on leave in order to pursue post-doctoral research in Intermediality and Inter-arts Studies at IMS—the Intermediality and Multimodality Centre at the University of Linnaeus, in Sweden (Växjö)—and Labcom.IFP, the Communication and Arts Centre, in Portugal. She is the author of The (In)visible Spectator: Reflexivity from the Film Viewer's Perspective in David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE [published in Portuguese].
Notes
1 The film was funded by the American left-wing writer Upton Sinclair and his wife Mary, with Upton’s brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough, running the production in Mexico. After several delays, the film was running massively over budget and Kimbrough shut the production down. The film’s negative, processed in the US, was seised by the Sinclairs.
2 This term is meant to include women as well. See Custen (Citation1992, chapter 4).
3 With Darwin (1993), a television project on the life and work of the naturalist Charles Darwin; Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), a film whose protagonist is the historical character of Hendrik Goltzius, a Dutch printmaker and engraver; and Nightwatch (2007), starring a version of the historical Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn, Greenaway began approaching historical personalities. However, in all these films, particularly the latter two, the facts are adulterated to generate, respectively, a more prurient and a more conspiratorial account of both personalities.
4 He was one of the directors who were commissioned by the State to direct a commemorative film of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia.
5 In his autobiography ([Citation1964] Citation1983), Eisenstein confesses to desiring ‘success’, ‘acclaim’ and ‘[artistic] victory’ (9) and relishing fame (‘What a thrill to wake up famous’, 81). He recounts how he dismissed a police raid at the Sorbonne, where he was giving a guest lecture, with witty answers and ‘bursts of laughter’ (93), whereupon he was considered dangerous because of his personal charm (129). He also admits to being a narcissist (50) and writes ironically both on others and himself.
6 Eisenstein’s entrance into the theatre is preceded by some images from the same film, filling the entire frame of Greenaway’s film. Likewise, the orchestra, in solemn attire, continues to play after Eisenstein and his party have left the theatre. Greenaway also intersperses shots from the orchestra, playing to an empty house, with Eisenstein already making himself at ease in his room.
7 All the film quotations are from the original English DVD version of the Salzgeber Medien GmbH edition, 2015.
8 Chapter 6 of Bakhtin’s book is entirely devoted to what he calls ‘the material bodily lower stratum’.
9 Greenaway recounts the Russian director’s well-documented love of Mexico and its sensorial quality, his suspicion of the Sinclairs, the meetings he claims to have had with famous people, the financial problems he encountered, the logistical difficulties he ran into, the telegram Stalin wrote to Upton Sinclair deprecating the director and calling him a traitor, and the way the American writer replied, and so on.
10 Greenaway claims that he has a profound ‘empathetic association’ with Eisenstein and that he is both attracted to the Russian’s film philosophy and his life. In the Preliminary Press Notes by the distributor, he acknowledges having bought all the Eisenstein biographies (PPN, 3).