Between December 1930 and February 1932, Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) lived in Mexico while filming ¡Que Viva Mexico!, a film project that would ultimately remain unfinished. Despite residing in the vibrant urban metropolis that was Mexico City, the imperatives of this project led him to the rural peripheries of the nation, where industrialization and urban development were less pronounced than in the capital. This article examines how the Soviet/American production team attributed a sense of authenticity to the Mexican countryside, one seemingly absent from the nation’s urban spaces. I contend that these assumptions were shaped by patterns of movement and modes of observation inherited from nineteenth century gazing practices. Specifically, I argue that for Eisenstein, tourism and sightseeing — or, as literary scholar Persephone Braham frames it, voyage and voyeurism — functioned as montage practices in their own right, particularly when driven by the pursuit of the “authentic.”1Persephone Braham, “Adventures in the Picturesque: Voyage and Voyeurism in the Tourist Guidebook to Mexico,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 26, no. 3 (2002): 379–94, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27763778. I hold that these practices transcended the boundaries of cinematic form, emerging in Eisenstein’s travels as a phenomenon that I call the montage of authenticity — a mediated manner of seeing and moving through space that juxtaposed notions of savagery and primitivism with the rhetoric of industrial modernity to produce the illusion of authenticity.
Instead of assenting to the claim that rural Mexico was the site of the authentic, I complicate the notion of authenticity by viewing it as a process. To accomplish this, I turn to art historian Kirsten Pai Buick, who argues that, rather than accepting an object’s supposed authenticity at face value, we focus our analyses on the practices that manufactured such aura. This approach activates a dynamic language that moves us from notions of “authenticity” to the ways in which an object “authenticates” viewers, foregrounding what an object does rather than merely what it is.2Kirsten Pai Buick, “‘Race’ as Object Lesson: Objects of Rebellion,” in Object Lessons in American Art, ed. Karl Kusserow (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2023), 33. Buick explains, “authenticity seeks to persuade rather than describe; it is a strategy deployed to construct, police, and control boundaries of differentiation.”3Buick, “‘Race’ as Object Lesson”, 43. In our context, this framework enables us to see beyond the images of rural Mexico as ostensible pre-modern vistas, and to think instead of the cinematographic curation that framed certain views to the exclusion of others. Ultimately, it enables us to trace how the idyllic landscapes of rural Mexico became authenticating signifiers, a process which reveals more about Eisenstein and his collaborators than the subject depicted. Significantly, focusing on cultural creators, their visual grammar and their modes of mobility exposes the ideology of power that placid representations of non-urban areas often obscure.
While Eisenstein is recognized as an influential figure in the development of global cinema conventions, his Mexican project has often been left out of meaningful considerations of his larger montage oeuvre.4Two prominent exceptions are Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Andrea Noble, “Seeing through !Que viva México!: Eisenstein’s Travels in Mexico,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 12, no. 2–3 (2006): 173–187. The key reason for this is that the film was never completed.5This elaborate history is thoroughly documented in Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman, eds., Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: The Making and Unmaking of ¡Que Viva Mexico! (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), https://doi.org/10.2979/SergeiEisensteinandU. Initially lured to Hollywood by Paramount in 1930, Eisenstein turned to a new opportunity when that deal fell through: a contract from Mary Craig Sinclair and her husband, writer Upton Sinclair, to make a film about “primitive” Mexico.6Geduld and Gottesman, Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair, 33. The team consisted of Soviet compatriots, writer Grigoriy Aleksandrov and cinematographer Eduard Tisse, and the US banker Hunter Kimbrough, Mary Sinclair’s brother. After fifteen months of uneven progress — and a critical telegram from Stalin accusing Eisenstein of desertion — the Sinclairs withdrew funding. Because the film stock had been processed in Hollywood, Eisenstein never regained access to edit the material. However, there has never been a shortage of interest in the images he captured, and the footage has had long afterlives in several iterations — most notably in a series of versions released throughout the 1930s by the Sinclairs to recoup investment.7American Film Institute, “Thunder Over Mexico.” AFI Catalogue, accessed December 2, 2023. https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/8122. Prominent edits featuring portions of the filmed footage were released in 1934, 1935, 1940, 1955, 1958, 1979, and 1997. The project reached a conclusion of sorts in 1979 when Aleksandrov edited the footage approximating the director’s vision.
In what follows, I historicize Eisenstein’s montage theories alongside the nineteenth century ethnographic tourist practices that conditioned them to track how they manufactured an encounter between spectators and “authentic” rural space. Crucially, I show how Eisenstein adjusted his theories while travelling, accommodating an ethnographic dimension linked to imperial ideology — significant given his prior investment in critiquing class and power relations via filmic technique.
The Montage of Progress: Eisenstein’s Early Theories
In his early and renowned writings, Eisenstein argued that “montage … is fundamental to cinema, deeply grounded in the conventions of cinema and the corresponding characteristics of perception.”8Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions,” in Writings 1922–34, ed. Richard Taylor, 39–58, Vol. 1 of S.M. Eisenstein: Selected Works (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 41. For Eisenstein, montage’s metaphoric and rhetorical power jolted the audience’s psyche and controlled rhythm through meaningful cuts. The objective of this cinematic technique, he claimed, was to “exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of the audience … concentrating the audience’s emotions in any direction dictated by the production’s purpose.”9Eisenstein, “Montage of Film Attractions,” 41. It was with these intentions that Eisenstein ultimately identified five kinds of montage: metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual. As Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez recapitulates, “the first four produce strictly physiological effects on the audience, effects that Eisenstein considers ‘universally human.’ Only at … the level of intellectual montage, is perception ‘profoundly tinged by class.’”10Paul A, Schroeder Rodríguez, “Marxist Historiography and Narrative Form in Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México!,” Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 2 (2009): 237. In other words, the common labor of each kind of montage, whether working independently or jointly, was an emotional and social education, often serving the needs of a Marxist political agenda.
These imperatives are visible in Eisenstein’s early Soviet films, which championed the collective proletariat successes in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and strived for maximum educational impact to reorganize Soviet society. A demonstration of this comes while writing about his first full-length feature, The Strike (1925): “the most important consideration in my approach … was to give an account of and depict the technique of the underground [resistance movement] and to provide an outline of its production methods in individual characteristic examples.”11Eisenstein, “Montage of Film Attractions,” 45. This emphasis on process, for Eisenstein, diverted the emotional impact from the actors and the film’s protagonists. Instead, his employment of intellectual montage exhorted audiences to be invested in society’s progress. Crucially, neither the compositions nor the montage worked to incite a sense of bucolic authenticity when depicting rural spaces in his Soviet films. This is most evident in his agricultural drama The General Line (1929), which, he specified, “aims to strengthen the link between town and countryside.”12Sergei Eisenstein, “Cinema of the Masses (1927),” in John Biggart and Oksana Bulgakowa “Eisenstein’s ‘Cinema of the Masses,’” Cultural Science 13, no. 1 (2021): 244-247, https://doi.org/10.2478/csj-2021-0020. In the film, rural spaces and their inhabitants were not framed through the lens of tradition or of honorable poverty; instead, their depiction was politicized by collapsing the particularities between rural and urban citizens. Seeking to build transregional solidarity, the work highlighted the inherent strength of proletariat resistance and revolution.
I understand this overarching approach in his Soviet works as the montage of progress — a cinematic editing practice intended as social education, which stood in direct contrast to the montage of authenticity. It galvanized spectators to uphold a rhetoric of collective belonging and industrial progress by rechanneling emotional outputs from the individual to the collective. Laboring to uphold the ideals of socialist development, it normalized and celebrated the conquest of natural spaces via mechanization and technological innovation. These sentiments have long been understood as the foundation of Eisenstein’s montage practice,13For example, see David Bordwell, “Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift,” Screen 15, 4 (Winter 1974–75): 29–46, and Jacques Aumont and Lee Hildreth. “Montage Eisenstein I: Eisensteinian Concepts.” Discourse 5 (1983): 41–99. but they do not fully encompass the imperatives of ¡Que Viva Mexico!.
The Montage of Authenticity
Although the film itself remains unfinished, Eisenstein’s writings about the project show that it represented a major shift in his montage theories: namely, a fresh expression of the potential work that montage could achieve. Theoretically, the project “brought [the] problem of the shot into the foreground and which, at the compositional level, relegated montage to a purely auxiliary, narrative function.”14Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage 1937s,” In Writings 1934–1947, ed. Richard Taylor, 11–58, Vol. 2 of S.M. Eisenstein: Selected Works (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 13. This revelation highlights that beyond a mere formal restructuring, the project amounted to a profound ideological reconfiguration of montage.
Eisenstein’s strategic exaltation of composition over montage emerges as a method to aestheticize an atavistic land where multiple temporalities could be physically accessed and visually expressed. In his initial treatment for the film, Eisenstein referred to the sarape (a woven, color-striped shawl) as a central allegory for the nation itself:
Do you know what a “Serape” is? A Serape is the striped blanket that the Mexican indio, the Mexican charro — every Mexican wears. And the Serape could be the symbol of Mexico. So striped and violently contrasting are the cultures in Mexico running next to each other and at the same time being centuries away. No plot, no whole story could run through this Serape without being false or artificial. And we took the contrasting independent adjacence of its violent colors as the motif for constructing our film: 6 episodes… held together by the unity of the weave — a rhythmic and musical construction and an unrolling of the Mexican spirit and character.15Sergei Eisenstein, The film sense (San Diego: Harcourt, 1957), 251.
In his hands, the sarape becomes an ethnographic metaphor where time and space resist teleological development, existing outside the bounds of linear historical progress. To preserve the “Mexican spirit and character,” Eisenstein rejected his prior theoretical frameworks, seeking to invent new cinematic forms that would avoid diluting “rural authenticity” with artificial storytelling devices. The resulting montage of authenticity in the Mexican project did not endorse progress through social revolution, nor did it celebrate the success of industrialization and technological innovation for the collective good. Instead, it depicted rural landscapes as places where anti-modern experiences were attainable. Editing was employed to present the nation’s history as a simultaneous event — collapsing the possibility of a coeval, modern Mexico by insisting on its authentic essence.
The montage of authenticity took the particular example and universalized its significance, a strategy rooted in ethnographic practice where observation was used to interpret larger cultural formations.16Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 38. This approach is especially evident in the first episode, “Sandunga,” which at one point bore the subtitle “Paradise.” Set in the Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca, the segment follows a young couple preparing to marry. The area’s matriarchal social structure is emphasized as a key element of cultural distinction, foregrounding a romanticized image of gender harmony and premodern stability that marries the film’s broader search for the “authentic” with a Marxist focus on the gold dowry the women must raise before marrying. The rapid succession of shots in the festivities detaches individuals from narrative function and instead renders them timeless icons of cultural essence, reinforcing the idea of a Mexico suspended outside historical progression. “Real life” showed itself through the cracks of uneven development, and capturing authenticity photochemically became an apparent possibility.
Mexico as Experience
The image of rural Mexico as a deeply authentic space popularized cinematically by Eisenstein continues to exist in the popular imagination. However, this mode of seeing Mexico exceeds the specificity of his voyage and theories and connects us to a broader history of traveling and gazing in the nineteenth century. As will become evident, Eisenstein’s montage of authenticity materialized from his ethnographic touristic experiences around Mexico and was contingent upon his encounter with undeveloped landscapes and “underdeveloped” peoples — that is, upon the idea of the “authentic.”
In the early nineteenth century, the gaze was established as a commodity experience by combining voyage and voyeurism. Anne Friedberg describes commodity experiences as intangible configurations that possess “mystical qualities” that satisfy some aesthetic need, rather than a practical or physical use.17Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 53, 55. Gazing as a commodified leisure activity — like sightseeing as a tourist or wandering through a city with no clear purpose (a practice known as flânerie) — was seen as more than just a pastime. It was seen as an ontological exercise, or a deep intellectual experience believed to shape a person’s sense of self or way of being in the world. In essence, the gazing in voyage and voyeurism, “transforms anyone who enjoys it into a different person.”18Friedberg, Window Shopping, 56.
The most telling difference between metropolitan flanerie and ethnographic tourism, however, was the way authenticity and artificiality were expressed in each. As Friedberg demonstrates, European urban spectatorship depended on technological innovation, giving rise to what she calls the “virtual gaze” — a proto-cinematic spectatorial position that gives the observer an illusion of mobility through images and technological deception. The lure of urban spectatorial commodity experiences, such as those found in panoramas, dioramas, arcades or wintergardens, “was not in their verisimilitude with reality, but rather in their deceptive skills, their very artificiality.”19Friedberg, Window Shopping, 24. The conventions of proto-cinematic visuality were refined contingently with the allure of the unreal, with the knowledge one’s senses were being manipulated for the delightful effect of finding them truly tricked. With her focus on European urbanity, however, Friedberg gives limited attention to the colonial dimensions of travel, leaving her concept of the virtual gaze open to further development, particularly in relation to imperial flanerie.
Dean MacCannell’s theorization of sightseeing as modern ritual and John Urry’s concept of the “tourist gaze” both serve as complements to Friedberg’s virtual gaze that highlights this central difference.20Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: a new theory of the leisure class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 13, 42; John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1990). Tourism as a commodity experience is wholly dependent on the notion of authenticity, crucially organized by a quest for the “real.”21MacCannell, The Tourist, 8. Consequently, in tourism wandering cannot be truly aimless since its authenticity emerges from a selective framing, of choosing certain vistas over others. Here we begin to see why Agustin Aragon Leiva, the production’s Mexican guide, led Eisenstein and team to the rural peripheries when selecting which images of Mexico were the most authentic. The ethnographic imperatives of their tour guided the crew to places such as Chichen Itza in Yucatan, Teotihuacan in the State of Mexico, and Tehuantepec in Oaxaca — all rural sites especially marked through their connections to indigenous Mexico that are featured prominently in the project’s footage. In other words, tourism as a commodity experience activates the same impulses as Friedberg’s flanerie — both being gazes that supposedly transform beholders intellectually — but negotiate artifice in opposite ways.
Persephone Braham’s work on the visual culture of voyage and voyeurism enables us to connect Eisenstein’s images to the realm of the visual commodity experience. She argues that the genre of the travel guide deploys picturesque representations to frame “the unknown within a safe, legible text, while at the same time stimulating the apprehensions of the touring subject by accentuating opportunities for dépaysement (displacement, unfamiliarity).”22Persephone Braham, “Adventures in the picturesque: Voyage and voyeurism in the tourist guidebook to Mexico,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos (2002): 385. Images work both to pre-mediate one’s expectations of the journey and to document these experiences. By these connections, Braham contends touring amounts to,
a voyeuristic activity in which a series of sites (sights) is strung together according to a legible map or text. The tourist reads (map, text, site, and citizens) as he walks, inevitably erecting a barrier between himself and his object. The intervention of the guidebook translates a messy reality into a series of picturesque vignettes.23Braham, “Adventures in the picturesque,” 385.
This mode of moving and seeing is dependent on pictorial representations that, when coinciding with one’s experience, give the illusion of authenticity. The result is a reinforcement of stereotypical visions, images and expectations regarding the destination — a tradition traceable back to the picturesque travels of the Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and his league of followers in Latin America.24Emmanuel Ortega, “The Mexican picturesque and the sentimental nation: A study in nineteenth-century landscape,” The Art Bulletin 103, no. 2 (2021): 131. The perceived result of the authenticating tourist experience was the demonstration of a heightened aesthetic sensibility — an appreciation of the landscape that is more profound than that of local dwellers.
Eisenstein fits into this long lineage as both consumer and creator of images that produced classed, racialized and gendered representations of “authentic Mexico” — an imperial perspective distributed to international and domestic audiences. ¡Que Viva México!’s cinematic conventions turned traveling artists’ pictorial conventions into ethnographic reality. For Eisenstein, Mexico as a commodity experience became a quest for ethnographic authenticity. His tourist itinerary and the images that emerged from it can be seen as an atavistic endeavor where the goal was a regression to a pre-modern state.25Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 103. This quest for the authentic quickly gave way to ecstasy in the form of ethnographic and sensorial stimulation. Each sight, place, people or tradition inspired the Soviet director, becoming an invitation to immerse himself, as Marie Rebecchi and Elena Vogman put it, “beyond his own intellectual, political and cultural context, exposing himself to his ‘epistemic object’ with an emphatic closeness verging of identification.”26Marie Rebecchi and Elena Vogman, Sergei Eisenstein and the Anthropology of Rhythm (Nero, 2017), 16. In other words, ethnography and tourism were the means by which one became symbolically native (read, authentic) to the land. In this manner, touring itself became an articulation of the montage of authenticity.
The approximately forty to fifty hours of filmed footage depicting a myriad of Mexican locations, subjects, and themes stands by itself even without being edited. In fact, the failure to finish ¡Que Viva! Mexico! might translate to a richer field of possibilities. In the reels, we can see the “making of” that cinematic montage would have cut out: the repeated takes with minute adjustments give us glimpses of Eisenstein and crew directing the authentic. In these outtakes, which were never intended to be part of the main text, we see the selective framing of the tourist gaze. As the project of post-Revolutionary Mexico was still unfinished, it only makes sense that the film would remain so too. In a significant coincidence, “Soldadera,” the episode depicting the Mexican Revolution — emblematic of the social progress that marked the conclusion of the eternal, savage idyll portrayed in the rest of the film’s episodes — remained the only one that was never filmed, not even partially.
Conclusion
In a translation from experience to image — from tourist to virtual gaze — Eisenstein’s compositions solidified rural landscapes as the source of authenticity. The historical context of this expedition reveals how Eisenstein’s tourist commodity experiences framed the authentic at a safe distance, ensuring that both the allure and the anxiety of traveling continued to serve as inspiration for other imperial subjects. According to this reading, ¡Que Viva Mexico!’s raw footage becomes the souvenir of a particular commodity experience — but one that has transcended this status through its continued reproduction and dissemination. In this manner, rural landscapes came to feel more “real” or authentic because their images were repeated and shared over time — especially through the artistic style known as the picturesque. Over time, these sights developed their own conventions of representation, which ultimately become canonical. When these singular, fragmented and episodic views become part of a larger tourist checklist, the consumption of all these sights not only authenticated their viewers; the montage of authenticity came to be a commodity experience that could be repeated time and again. The aestheticization of tourism and ethnography — by their transformation into voyage and voyeurism — ultimately codified rural Mexico as the site of the authentic.
¡Que Viva Mexico! and Eisenstein’s voyage are fondly remembered as a pleasant episode where European-American modernity turned its gaze towards and included the nation in a global conversation of arts and culture. In this way, of Eisenstein’s souvenir images of his tourist experience have become integral representations of Mexico, both internationally and domestically.27Charles Ramírez Berg, The Classical Mexican Cinema: The Poetics of the Exceptional Golden Age Films (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 61–62, 65. Most scholars acknowledge Eisenstein’s influence on the Mexican film industry, with Ramírez Berg providing one of the most comprehensive formal examinations. Internally, Mexican notions of citizenship relied on a sentimental connection to an authentic past, while abroad, these images merely reiterated imperial tropes. As a virtual gaze, this footage bestowed Mexican landscapes with unprecedented mobility, consumed a priori by would-be tourists. Having garnered mythical status in the eight decades since their release, these images now invite viewers to engage with the very essence of the “Mexican spirit” Eisenstein sought to capture.
To end, I wonder if we can separate film technique from the nineteenth-century othering politics that have historically defined it. If we employed montage to carry out anti-colonial labor, would the carefully and aesthetically arranged compositions of the Mexican spirit give way to out-of-focus, sun-damaged, scratched, and double exposed footage? If we withheld montage’s ceaseless and sensual explosions to the senses, would the sequence be one only of film leaders, trimmings, odd ends and fragments? By removing every frame where indigenized people are in clear focus, would the only shots remaining intact be those featuring the filmmakers? These questions render visible the pursuit of ethnographic authenticity made possible via an imperial logic seeking the total conquest of nature. The challenge is to achieve this labor without falling prey to the aesthetic allure of cinematic technique.28I am indebted to Kirsten Pai Buick and Emmanuel Ortega for their knowledge and for offering methodological frameworks that were crucial in structuring this argument. I am likewise grateful to Lynn Spigel who offered feedback on drafts of this article, portions of which were written in her Media Places seminar in the Fall of 2023.
Notes
| ↑1 | Persephone Braham, “Adventures in the Picturesque: Voyage and Voyeurism in the Tourist Guidebook to Mexico,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 26, no. 3 (2002): 379–94, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27763778. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Kirsten Pai Buick, “‘Race’ as Object Lesson: Objects of Rebellion,” in Object Lessons in American Art, ed. Karl Kusserow (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2023), 33. |
| ↑3 | Buick, “‘Race’ as Object Lesson”, 43. |
| ↑4 | Two prominent exceptions are Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Andrea Noble, “Seeing through !Que viva México!: Eisenstein’s Travels in Mexico,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 12, no. 2–3 (2006): 173–187. |
| ↑5 | This elaborate history is thoroughly documented in Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman, eds., Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: The Making and Unmaking of ¡Que Viva Mexico! (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), https://doi.org/10.2979/SergeiEisensteinandU. |
| ↑6 | Geduld and Gottesman, Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair, 33. |
| ↑7 | American Film Institute, “Thunder Over Mexico.” AFI Catalogue, accessed December 2, 2023. https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/8122. Prominent edits featuring portions of the filmed footage were released in 1934, 1935, 1940, 1955, 1958, 1979, and 1997. |
| ↑8 | Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions,” in Writings 1922–34, ed. Richard Taylor, 39–58, Vol. 1 of S.M. Eisenstein: Selected Works (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 41. |
| ↑9 | Eisenstein, “Montage of Film Attractions,” 41. |
| ↑10 | Paul A, Schroeder Rodríguez, “Marxist Historiography and Narrative Form in Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México!,” Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 2 (2009): 237. |
| ↑11 | Eisenstein, “Montage of Film Attractions,” 45. |
| ↑12 | Sergei Eisenstein, “Cinema of the Masses (1927),” in John Biggart and Oksana Bulgakowa “Eisenstein’s ‘Cinema of the Masses,’” Cultural Science 13, no. 1 (2021): 244-247, https://doi.org/10.2478/csj-2021-0020. |
| ↑13 | For example, see David Bordwell, “Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift,” Screen 15, 4 (Winter 1974–75): 29–46, and Jacques Aumont and Lee Hildreth. “Montage Eisenstein I: Eisensteinian Concepts.” Discourse 5 (1983): 41–99. |
| ↑14 | Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage 1937s,” In Writings 1934–1947, ed. Richard Taylor, 11–58, Vol. 2 of S.M. Eisenstein: Selected Works (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 13. |
| ↑15 | Sergei Eisenstein, The film sense (San Diego: Harcourt, 1957), 251. |
| ↑16 | Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 38. |
| ↑17 | Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 53, 55. |
| ↑18 | Friedberg, Window Shopping, 56. |
| ↑19 | Friedberg, Window Shopping, 24. |
| ↑20 | Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: a new theory of the leisure class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 13, 42; John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1990). |
| ↑21 | MacCannell, The Tourist, 8. |
| ↑22 | Persephone Braham, “Adventures in the picturesque: Voyage and voyeurism in the tourist guidebook to Mexico,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos (2002): 385. |
| ↑23 | Braham, “Adventures in the picturesque,” 385. |
| ↑24 | Emmanuel Ortega, “The Mexican picturesque and the sentimental nation: A study in nineteenth-century landscape,” The Art Bulletin 103, no. 2 (2021): 131. The perceived result of the authenticating tourist experience was the demonstration of a heightened aesthetic sensibility — an appreciation of the landscape that is more profound than that of local dwellers. |
| ↑25 | Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 103. |
| ↑26 | Marie Rebecchi and Elena Vogman, Sergei Eisenstein and the Anthropology of Rhythm (Nero, 2017), 16. |
| ↑27 | Charles Ramírez Berg, The Classical Mexican Cinema: The Poetics of the Exceptional Golden Age Films (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 61–62, 65. Most scholars acknowledge Eisenstein’s influence on the Mexican film industry, with Ramírez Berg providing one of the most comprehensive formal examinations. |
| ↑28 | I am indebted to Kirsten Pai Buick and Emmanuel Ortega for their knowledge and for offering methodological frameworks that were crucial in structuring this argument. I am likewise grateful to Lynn Spigel who offered feedback on drafts of this article, portions of which were written in her Media Places seminar in the Fall of 2023. |
Emmanuel Ramos-Barajas (he/him) is a doctoral student in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. His work focuses on 19th-century painting and print culture and 20th-century cinema that center Mexico and the United States. He examines how this visual culture shapes our understanding of national identifications, un/belonging, and history. Moreover, his creative endeavors bridge the realms of academia, remix culture, and the digital humanities. As a research-based image maker, he navigates the intricate connections between cultural production, visual technologies and landscape representation, underlining the pivotal role images play in shaping collective perceptions of nature and the past.
