In 1944 Sergei Eisenstein wrote: "Walt Disney's work is the most omni-appealing I've ever come across. In terms of material, Disney's pictures are pure ecstasy  bearing all the traits of ecstasy (the immersion of self in nature and animals, etc.). Their comicality lies in the fact that the process of ecstasy is represented as an object: literalized, formalized." Eisenstein met Disney in 1930; he admired him deeply and was influenced by his work. In his theoretical project Method (19321948), which he initiated in Mexico, he devoted a chapter to Disney. In the manuscript of this unfinished book, Eisenstein examines modernity in its relation to archaic structures and analyzes artworks as reified imprints of pre-logical mentality, as collective dream images. The ecstatic state induced by art is an important starting point for his investigation and Disney becomes a central object of this analysis, as in his work the plasmatic qualities of form, color, and rhythm, are combined with animism and totemism. The lecture by Oksana Bulgakowa analyzes Eisenstein's vision of Disney as being the utopian promise of freedom within the relationship between humans and nature.

"Que viva Mexico!", is the film Eisenstein came to shoot in Mexico, and he would tragically be excluded from editing it. The film's hybrid images depict Mexican life as a simultaneity of past and present. Reminiscent of, and yet surpassing the modern 'primitivist' fascination with the 'archaic', Mexico presented for Eisenstein a tableau of dialectic imagery that allowed him to re-conceptualize the role of modern art and revolutionary cinema in traversing the modern dichotomies of subject and object, rational and irrational, inside and outside, individual and collective, and even death and life. Oksana Bulgakowa is Eisenstein's biographer and, together with Anselm Franke, co-curator of Sergei Eisenstein: The Mexican Drawings. The lecture has been recorded on April 3, 2009 in MuHKA_media, Antwerp. http://www.extracity.org

.imp // intervention #2 -

Sat, 04/18/2009 14:00 - 19:00

Imaginary property // Intervention #2 will be delivered by filmmaker Eyal Sivan. He is going to present "Towards a common archives: Manipulating the enemies images". Eyal Sivan is a London based filmmaker, producer, essayist and research professor in media production at the school of social sciences, media and cultural studies at the University of East London (UEL).
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