Eisenstein/Mexico/the foetus/the skeleton (fragments)
“In cinema’s transformative potential (stemming not only from its rich repertoire of technical tricks, but also from its omnivorous approach to the myths and paradigms of all of human culture), Eisenstein discovered a perfect modern home for the exhilarating and savage game of thinking, in which ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, like bull and matador, circle each other warily, waiting for that ecstatic, painful moment of consummate penetration when even the most intellectual idea and its figure might hop finally to achieve the ‘complete synchronous identity’ of the Bororo parrot-men.”
[Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking, p. 20]
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“The figures ‘hover’ in space; that is, the atavism in them belongs to the period before being set upon solid ground, to the amoebic-plasmatic stage of movement in liquid. This is the graphic equivalent to the sensation of ‘flight’ among ecstatics: an identical uterine sensation of gyroscopicness...”
[Eisenstein on in utero life, November 1932]
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“There came a day when I both rose to the highest limits to which a person can hope to rise and descended to the lowest depths out of which a person emerges. It was on the same sunny day in Zurich. In the morning I flew with the now deceased Mittelholzer on the snowy whiteness of the Alps. In the afternoon we piled into the no less crystalline whiteness of one of the nest women’s clinics in Switzerland... Here for the first time, on a napkin, I saw a little living being, dying in my hands in about ten minutes after its premature appearance in the world. This stage of life interested me very much.”
[Eisenstein meets a foetus in the summer of 1930]
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“On these pages there are all the bones you could want and they absolutely won’t come together into a frightening combination!”
[Eisenstein on filming the Mexican Day of the Dead]
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EISENSTEIN LOOSE HIS COMRADES CONFIDENCE IN SOVIET UNION STOP HE IS THOUGHT TO BE DESERTER WHO BROKE OFF WITH HIS OWN COUNTRY STOP AM AFRAID THE PEOPLE HERE WOULD HAVE NO INTEREST IN HIM SOON STOP AM VERY SORRY BUT ALL ASSERT IT IS THE FACT STOP
[telegram from Stalin to Upton Sinclair, Eisenstein’s sponsor in Mexico, calling him home, 21 November 1931]