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 expression and 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 new Stalin 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?”
A version of this article first appeared on The Calvert Journal, a guide to creative Russia
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion