by Masha Salazkina
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Cloth: 978-0-226-73414-9 | eISBN: 978-0-226-73416-3
Library of Congress Classification PN1997.Q37S25 2009
Dewey Decimal Classification 791.43

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK


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.




See other books on: 1898-1948 | Eisenstein, Sergei | Excess | Mexico | Salazkina, Masha
See other titles from University of Chicago Press