Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein is revered as one of
cinema’s founding fathers. So it’s no surprise that Russia – in its crackdown
on free expressionand its repressive
stance on homosexuality
– has been touchy about Peter Greenaway’s depiction of the figure in his new
feature Eisenstein
in Guanajuato, which premiered at the Berlin International Film
Festival last month.
The British auteur director displays his
typically transgressive irreverence in depicting the national hero’s 10-day
love affair with a male guide in Mexico, offending a Russia that previously
celebrated him for decimating capitalist vulgarity in his 1989 masterpiece The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
At the festival, Greenaway was in
cheerful, unapologetic form.
“Putin has encouraged this homophobia,”
Greenaway said. “I have lots of friends in St Petersburg and Moscow and they
don’t feel [homophobic] at all. It’s just a political and social phenomenon
invented by a man who’s scared and wants to be in control.”
While the film didn’t rely on any Russian backing, Greenaway’s
team approached the Russian film foundation for access to archive material for
a second feature he hopes to shoot this year on Eisenstein’s time in
Switzerland, but their enthusiasm faltered as soon as details about Eisenstein
in Guanajuato emerged. “When they retrospectively learned that we’d depicted a
homosexual relationship in the first one they got scared,” he said.
Eisenstein in Guanajuato is far from a
conventional biopic. It hones in on the director’s time abroad working on his
eventually abandoned project about the Mexican revolution ¡Que viva México!, which had been backed by
left-wing American benefactor Upton Sinclair and his wife after Eisenstein
struggled to get a film off the ground in Hollywood.
Eisenstein’s relationship with the Sinclairs broke down amid
Stalin’s suspicions that the director had deserted the USSR – and his
distraction by more carnal pursuits.
But Greenaway makes production tensions
mere background to the very personal tumult of Eisenstein’s intense affair with
his guide Palomino Cañedo, to whom he lost his virginity at the age of 33. This
is framed as nothing less than a personal revolution – the “ten days that shook
Sergei Eisenstein”, as Greenaway mischievously refers to them in a play on the
director’s commemoration of the Russian Revolution, October (Ten Days that Shook the World).
“I always felt Eisenstein’s first three
films were very different from the last three – why? I think the answer to that
is, when you go abroad, you become a different person,” said Greenaway, who
believes the personal transformation Eisenstein underwent in Mexico turned him
from the focus on mass action of Battleship
Potemkin, Strike! and October to a greater concern with
the individual, as evidenced in Alexander
Nevsky and the
two-part Ivan
the Terrible.
“He was away from paranoia, from
Stalinist persecution and really strange political eccentricities, and he was
faced with a brand new and different society. There’s a lot of evidence he
freed up, and became much more empathetic to notions of the human condition.”
In its exuberance, Eisenstein in Guanajuato seeks to capture the
force of passion that overwhelmed the Riga-born filmmaker. “Sergei must have
been looking for the sexual experience,” says Greenaway.
Finnish actor Elmer Bäck stars as the
iconic director, and taps his theatre background to bring a boisterous
physicality to his first major screen role, which demanded a frank approach to
nudity. Greenaway, with a mischievous glint, recalls casting him: “We said, we
need your heart, your mind, your body and your prick.”
The director is critical of the hypocritical timidity he regards
as standard in cinematic portrayals of sex: “Hollywood’s so coy. All the
genitalia are hidden behind a pillow, or someone holds up a blanket just at the
right minute. We’ve come through a sexual revolution – why are they still
playing these silly games?”
Death also takes centre stage, in the
form of white skulls and other visual motifs taken from Mexico’s rich
traditions of ritual and iconography surrounding the dead, and Guanajuato’s
famed museum of mummies.
“Eros and Thanatos
are really at the centre of all cinema,” said Greenaway. “Beginnings and ends
which are unknowable and un-negotiable are what fascinate us most of all. We
use actors and actresses as our emissaries to go into this territory where
perhaps we can’t go ourselves, or don’t want to go.”
The sense of earth-shattering tumult, and Eisenstein’s own
spirit of technical experimentation, find form in interiors which warp and
distort at a dizzying pace. “There’s a great delight in architectonic games,”
said Greenaway. “My position, and I don’t mean it sexually, is very missionary.
I come from a country which has a very high regard for realism. You can’t make
realism – it’s an absolutely ridiculous cul-de-sac. And why bother trying? God
has done it already.”
Amid the rush of effects, the film is
bursting with cinematic references. Eisenstein bounces on his bed in a nod to Renoir’s
The Rules of the Game, while iconic sequences from Eisenstein’s own
work, such as the Odessa steps sequence from Potemkin, are winkingly
referenced.
Such homage is not surprising as, for all his irreverence,
Greenaway deems Eisenstein “the greatest film practitioner we’ve ever seen”,
having discovered him as an art student in London in the 1960s and felt an
admiring kinship since.
Considering Greenaway’s disregard for
reality, is Russia right to put no stock in his portrayal of Eisenstein? The
director argues that any depiction of a historical figure is a subjective
interpretation, and that Eisenstein’s struggles with his sexuality are well
documented.
He suggests the director’s marriage to his secretary Pera
Atasheva was strictly one of convenience: “There was a newStalin
law which criminalised homosexuality, and there is a lot of evidence
that he was very susceptible, and anxious about his sexuality.”
Film historians have often pointed out
that homosexual imagery is rife in Eisenstein’s films. “Have you seen Potemkin
recently?” asks Greenaway. “It’s full of penises, shooting, ejaculating, and
naked sailors. If you’re interested in queer theory then it’s a delight for
you.”
And if the national hero’s homeland is
unhappy with his depiction, Greenaway throws down the gauntlet: “How is it that
Russia has never made a good film about Eisenstein?”
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