Eisenstein in Mexico: Greenaway’s post-modern representation of the Queer artist

In his film Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2016), British director Peter Greenaway pays homage to Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, a pioneer who helped to create the language of film. The biopic focuses on Eisenstein’s stay in Mexico. The film is also a meditation on Greenaway’s own aesthetic choices. Throughout his career, Greenaway has made extensive use of intermedia, expanding the vocabulary of “ideogrammic montage”, a theory of film editing first proposed by Eisenstein himself. The use of hybrid forms of artistic expression allows the film to discuss the very idea of authorship and individual creation. The biopic, as a genre, became over time a platform that allows for the domestication of the figure of the artist or author and for the representation of the creative process as a purging act of the creative body. Greenaway subverts expectations regarding the biopic genre by shunning realism when representing the artist and by associating a queer identity and Eisenstein’s body to the artist’s processes of sensorial exploration and aesthetic development.