Avant-garde and Geopolitics: Diego Rivera and Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexican Fantasies

• In Event: Politics and Aesthetics: The Filmic Body and Moving Image

Abstract

The process of modernization in Latin America is characterized by the overlapping of traditional and modern ways of living, that at times has led to social upheaval. These moments of rupture and contradiction–namely revolutions or social marginalization–experienced in the region since the Conquest, are symptomatic of an uneven progression that has uncovered capitalism’s rhetoric of perpetual promise. The traditional definition of avant-garde is the integration of art into life, but I expand on this idea to argue that in Latin America, the avant-garde envisioned a socialist revolution as an alternative to capitalism through the intersection of politics and art. I view the complexity of this meeting between Pre-Hispanic and Western cultures from a simultaneous local and global perspective. This presentation examines the socialist fantasies projected in both Sergei Eisenstein’s film ¡Que viva México! and Diego Rivera’s murals at the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico City. Both works evince a mutual influence in addressing the masses (indigenous people) and cinematic techniques. Ultimately, their fantasies of modernizing Mexico differed, as they were informed by their Russian and Mexican views of a possible socialist revolution.

Author

• Mauricio A Castillo, Columbia University