From The Screen To The Wall Siqueiros and Eisenstein

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States
From the Screen to the Wall: Siqueiros and Eisenstein in Mexico

Author(s): Juan Carlos Arias Herrera
Source: Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Summer 2014), pp. 421-445
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the University of California
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From the Screen to the Wall: Siqueiros
and Eisenstein in Mexico*
Juan Carlos Arias Herrera

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia
The relation between Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and ‘‘The Three
Greats’’ of Mexican muralism has been widely discussed. The opposite
connection, the influence of Eisenstein’s ideas and techniques on Mexican
artists, however, has been less analyzed. This text examines the relation
between Eisenstein’s aesthetic theories and David Alfaro Siqueiros’ poetics
of mural painting. Through the analysis of the work The March of Humanity,
I propose that Eisenstein and Siqueiros established a productive dialogue
focused on the concept of dialectics that, according to them, was the key to
producing a new link between art and the masses.
La relación entre el cineasta ruso Sergei Eisenstein y los llamados ‘‘Tres

Grandes’’ del muralismo mexicano ha sido ampliamente discutida. La
conexión contraria, sin embargo, esto es, la influencia de las ideas y técnicas
de Eisenstein sobre los artistas mexicanos, ha sido menos analizada. Este
texto examina la relación entre las teorı́as estéticas de Eisenstein y la poética
de la pintura mural de David Alfaro Siqueiros. A través del análisis de la obra
La Marcha de la Humanidad, me interesa mostrar que Eisenstein y
Siqueiros establecieron un diálogo productivo centrado en el concepto de
dialéctica, el cual, de acuerdo con los dos autores, era la clave para la
producción de un nuevo vı́nculo entre el arte y las masas.
Key words: Sergei Eisenstein. David Alfaro Siqueiros. Mural painting.

Cinema. Dialectics. Movement. Politics. Revolution. Aesthetics. The March
of Humanity.
*I am grateful to Byron Hamann for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.
Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 30, Issue 2, Summer 2014, pages 421–445. issn 0742-
9797, electronic issn 1533-8320. ©2014 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights
reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.
ucpressjournals.com/reprint.info.asp. DOI: 10.1525/msem.2014.30.2.421.
421
422 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos
Palabras clave: Sergei Eisenstein. David Alfaro Siqueiros. Pintura mural.

Cine. Dialéctica. Movimiento. Polı́tica. Revolución. Estética. La Marcha de
la Humanidad.
‘‘ . . . My moving frescoes.’’ Sergei Eisenstein used those words in an

unfinished essay from 1935, ‘‘The Prometheus of Mexican Painting,’’
to refer to his own films. The text, dedicated to the figure of José
Clemente Orozco, was written two years after Sergei Eisenstein left
Mexico owing to several conflicts (personal and aesthetic disagree-
ments and cost overruns) with the American writer Upton Sinclair—
producer of the unfinished ¡Qué Viva México! Eisenstein’s direct
mention of frescoes and walls—‘‘We also work on walls!’’ is the sen-
tence that follows the one just cited—directly refers to his contact
with Mexican muralism during the almost two years he spent in the
country—from December 1930 to May 1932. Grigorij Aleksandrov’s
version of the film edited in 1979 includes a short introduction in
which, at that time, Eisenstein’s assistant and co-writer summarizes
their experience in that ‘‘unusual country.’’ Aleksandrov explicitly
mentions this proximity with the Mexican painters when he affirms:
‘‘the great Mexican painters Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco were our
guides and teachers.’’
Eisenstein’s Mexican journey, centered on the production of the
film, and his relation with los tres grandes has been widely discussed.
As Masha Salazkina (2009) affirms, in recent years, several authors
have analyzed the way in which Eisenstein’s experiences in Mexico
influenced his work and theory (9). Salazkina’s work, In Excess:
Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico, stands out among these studies as one
of the most complete accounts of the multiple relations the Russian
filmmaker established with the artists, intellectuals, and, especially,
with Mexican culture. Eisenstein knew the work of the muralists
before going to Mexico. In September 1927, Diego Rivera traveled
to the USSR. During his visit, the painter lectured in different spaces,
exhibited some reproductions of his works, worked closely with the
group ‘‘October,’’ and made a series of drawings about the celebra-
tion of the international worker’s day at the Red Square in Moscow.
Finally, because of some differences with Stalin’s regime, he left the
country in May 1928. During the nine months of his visit, Rivera met
with Eisenstein several times and described Mexico’s history and
culture. In his memoirs, Eisenstein recognized Rivera’s influence in
his desire to visit Mexico:
Stadé told me a lot about Mexico. And the seeds of interest in that country,
once sown in me by photographs of ‘‘The Day of Death’’ (in an issue of the
Kölnische Illustrierte, which I happened to pick up) and nourished by the
Arias Herrera, Siqueiros and Eisenstein in Mexico 423
stories of Diego Rivera, when he visited the Soviet Union as a friend, grew
into a burning desire to travel there. A few months later the desire became
reality. (1983, 194)
His contact with Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco in Mexico—Eisenstein

never knew Orozco personally but had a short correspondence with
him—undoubtedly influenced the realization of ¡Qué Viva México!
Diego de la Vega Alfaro (1997) cited a document presented by the
filmmaker and his assistants to the Mexican government in Septem-
ber 1931 in which they declared their intention to create a represen-
tation of Mexican history similar to the one depicted by Rivera in his
paintings in the Palacio Nacional:
In the production of the film in which we are currently involved, it is our

purpose and wish to make an artistic portrait of the contrasting natural
beauty, the costumes, the art, the human types in Mexico, and to show the
people in relation with their natural environment and their social evolution.
To combine mountains, seas, deserts, ruins of ancient civilizations, and the
people from the past and the present in a symphonic cinema from the point
of view of the structure and organization, in some sense comparable to Diego
Rivera’s paintings in the Palacio Nacional. Like those paintings, our film will
present Mexico’s social evolution from ancient times to the present, when it
emerges as a progressive country, with freedom and opportunities. (61–62)1
Although the group could use this reference to Rivera’s work as a way
to protect the film from the intervention and censorship of the Mex-
ican government, this mention also shows the direct influence of the
muralist’s paintings and aesthetic positions in Eisenstein’s film and
texts produced during those years (De la Vega Alfaro 1997, 45–72). As
Salazkina (2009) affirms, this was not simply an unidirectional influ-
ence from the Mexican painters to the Russian filmmaker, but a pro-
ductive dialogue that emerged from a coincidence of similar aesthetic
and political projects: ‘‘Intellectuals in both Mexico and the Soviet
Union in the 1920s and 1930s were engaged in the project of creating
a new post revolutionary modern identity to negotiate between rup-
ture and tradition, and between the cause of internationalism and
nationalism’’ (17). I am particularly interested in the consequences of
this coincidence for the work of the Mexican painters. If it is true that
Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros’s work influenced Eisenstein’s film,
and probably his later and most famous theoretical developments
about film form, I would like to trace a possible influence of Eisen-
stein’s stay in Mexico on the work and aesthetic ideas of the muralists.
1. All the quotes taken from texts in Spanish were translated into English by the
author for the publication of this paper.
I am not interested in showing how Eisenstein’s theory or artistic

methods were applied in Mexico, but in the dialogue those theories
and practices created with the theories and methods the Mexican
painters were using during the same period. Rather than a matter
of application, I am interested in this relation as a productive conver-
gence that generated a new concept of art. To explore this conver-
gence, I focus on the figure of David Alfaro Siqueiros.2
The relationship between Eisenstein and Siqueiros has been well
documented, and they both recognized the other’s influence. Eisen-
stein dedicated the prologue of ¡Qué Viva México! to Siqueiros in
honor of his painting Burial of a Worker—briefly commented on
by Eisenstein at the end of ‘‘The Prometheus of Mexican Painting.’’
Siqueiros, in turn, always recognized the impact of his encounters
with the Russian filmmaker. Inga Karetnikova (1991) affirms that
when Siqueiros visited Moscow in 1959, he told her that ‘‘in all his
life no one else had impressed him as much as Eisenstein with his
personality, as intriguing as a work of art and possessing the same
unexpected ‘montage’ as his films’’ (188 n.52).
My interest is to trace the dialogue between Eisenstein and Si-
queiros, not only as individuals, but also, especially, in the form of
two aesthetic theories that continued to coincide even after the Rus-
sian filmmaker left Mexico. Siqueiros did not assimilate Eisenstein’s
ideas immediately, but through a long process in which his own
perspectives on artistic practices and theories were reformulated by
the introduction of new concepts and techniques. My objective is not,
however, to determine with precision which ideas in Siqueiros’s aes-
thetic theory were taken from Eisenstein’s thought, but rather to
reconstruct the relation between two ideas of art, and the possible
way in which that encounter opened new paths of experimentation
for Siqueiros. My main argument is that this convergence was based
on the concept of dialectics, which Eisenstein theorized in the 1920s
and Siqueiros appropriated in the 1930s. Starting in 1931, the Mexican
artist undertook the creation of an aesthetic theory that would later
condense in the term ‘‘pictorial cinematographic art.’’ He devoted his
entire life to this project, focused on the problem of the creation of
a revolutionary public through a continued reflection on and experi-
mentation with the notion of movement. By understanding Siqueiros’s
2. I am not suggesting here that the muralism was a unified block exempted from
internal differences. There were radical differences between Siqueiros (the main subject
of this essay) and some of the members of the movement, both on an aesthetic and
a political level. Those differences, although important to understanding Siqueiros’s
project, are beyond the scope of this paper.
perspective on movement as a dialectical dynamic in which reality,

artwork, and thought become one single principle, I propose a way
to understand the relationship between Eisenstein and the Mexican
painter.
To trace this relationship, I will focus on Siqueiros’s last large-
scale project, The March of Humanity on Earth and Toward the
Cosmos. Located in the Polyforum Siqueiros in Mexico City, this
enormous mural was inaugurated in 1971. This work represents one
of the highest points in Siqueiros’s search for a dynamic art that
would create a new connection with the masses. The use of modern
materials and techniques and, in particular, the implementation of
the notion of dialectics both in the content and form of the mural,
allow us to understand the influence of Eisenstein’s theory of cinema
in Siqueiros’s aesthetic project.
1. Taxco: Art and the Revolutionary Masses

In the final months of 1931, Eisenstein and his assistants traveled to
Taxco, a relatively isolated town in the state of Guerrero, to film the
‘‘Day of the True Cross,’’ a fragment for Fiesta, the third part of his
film on Mexico. This town, described by Eisenstein (1983) as
a ‘‘dusty’’ place where the same natives had not changed ‘‘for hun-
dreds and hundreds of years’’ (211), had been chosen by the Mexican
government as the place of internal exile for David Alfaro Siqueiros,
recently released from the Lecumberri prison in Mexico City, where
he spent five months. The causes of his confinement are not com-
pletely clear.
After some years in Paris and several cities in Italy studying art,
Siqueiros had returned to Mexico City in 1922 to work on the murals
of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria commissioned by the Secretary
of Public Education José Vasconcelos. The next year, in 1923,
Siqueiros participated in the foundation of the Syndicate of Revolu-
tionary Mexican Painters, Sculptures and Engravers, and of the union
paper El Machete (in which he published several articles criticizing
the official politics of Álvaro Obregón’s government). During the
same years, he joined the Mexican Communist Party, and, in 1926,
after no longer receiving commissions from the government, he
decided to devote himself exclusively to politics. According to Philip
Stein (1994), Siqueiros was hiding from the police in the Uruguayan
consulate in 1930. On May Day, he decided to march in the parade
and was arrested under the pretext of having been involved in an
attempt on the life of the President Pascual Ortiz Rubio on February
4, a few months after his triumph in a controversial election.
Siqueiros was never questioned in jail about the assassination

attempt—an event that served, Stein affirms, as an excuse for the
police to intensify the persecution of and control over the commu-
nists (67).
He was released on November 6, 1930, under a judicial order to
reside in the town of Taxco, where the Mayor and the district’s mil-
itary commander would control his actions—a ‘‘golden prison’’ in
Olivier Debroise’s words (1996a, 37) that would eventually allow him
several clandestine trips to Mexico City to support the revolutionary
struggle. This government strategy to weaken Siqueiros’s political
militancy forced him to return to painting, and he produced over
100 works just in the first year (according to Debroise, this was his
most prolific period). It was during this return to art after almost six
years devoted to politics that Siqueiros met Eisenstein. This might
seem a simple biographical anecdote, but it could explain the theo-
retical convergence that emerged between painter and filmmaker.
The exile in Taxco forced Siqueiros to think again about the political
dimensions of art, a topic with which Eisenstein was already familiar
because of his active participation in the Russian revolutionary pro-
cess. Indeed, by 1931, Eisenstein had already published some of his
most important theoretical texts on cinema and politics. Their mutual
interest in this relationship was made clear during Siqueiros’s first solo
exhibition (organized at the Casino Español, Spain’s cultural center in
Mexico City) in January 1932. On opening night, Eisenstein publicly
affirmed: ‘‘Siqueiros is the best proof that a truly great painter is, above
all, a great social conception and an ideological conviction’’ (Ramı́rez
1997, 77 n.37).
Eisenstein and Siqueiros held long conversations discussing ‘‘the
commercialization of popular art in Mexico, the ancient traditions of
Mexican art, the graphic art of José Guadalupe Posada, and also about
aesthetics and the political role of art’’ (Debroise 1996b, 286). Among
several topics, one issue seems to have been at the core of the dialo-
gues between Siqueiros and Eisenstein on the revolutionary dimen-
sions of art: the relationship between the artwork and the masses.
Discussion about the disjunction between social art and pure art had
been at the very heart of the artistic avant-garde since the 1920s, not
only in Mexico but also throughout the world. Siqueiros knew of and
participated in this debate firsthand, thanks to the years he spent in
Europe dialoguing with important avant-garde artists. Since his re-
turn to Mexico and the creation of his first works commissioned by
José Vasconcelos in 1922, Siqueiros, like the other muralist artists,
expressed his interest in the social function of painting. Identifying
himself with some of the ideas promoted by the Secretary of Public
Education, Siqueiros proposed to use painting as a medium for the

education of the Mexican people. This was the main idea of the
‘‘Declaration of Social, Political and Aesthetic Principles,’’ which he
drew up for the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors
earlier in 1922: ‘‘We proclaim that at this time of social change from
a decrepit order to a new one, the creators of beauty must use their
best efforts to produce ideological works of art for the people ( . . . )
educative art for all’’ (Siqueiros 1975, 25).
In his closing discourse at the Casino Español show on February
10, 1932, Siqueiros reaffirmed this interest and clearly proposed
a task for this revolutionary art for the people:
A painter or sculptor should not subordinate his aesthetic taste to that of the
revolutionary proletarian masses, because, as we have already seen, the taste
of the masses has been perverted by the taste of capitalist class. In his painting
or sculpture the revolutionary artist should give expression to the desires of
the masses, their objective qualities and the revolutionary ideology of the
proletariat. (Siqueiros 1975, 37)
The main question Siqueiros had to resolve was how to compose an

artwork that expressed the desires of the masses, an artwork able to
transform taste alienated by capitalism into true revolutionary
thought. Eisenstein’s ideas seem to have influenced Siqueiros’s
approach to this problem. The title of one of his first lectures in Los
Angeles in the fall of 1932—‘‘The Vehicles of Dialectic-Subversive
Painting’’—suggests a direct connection with the ideas Eisenstein had
explored in some of his texts written in the late 1920s, especially in
his essay ‘‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’’ from 1929 (which I will
discuss in the fourth section of this essay). At the time of the Los
Angeles lectures, Siqueiros had decided to ask the Mexican govern-
ment for permission to complete his exile in the United States, argu-
ing that Taxco could not offer him enough sources to develop his
interests in painting techniques (Stein 1994, 72).
2. From the United States to Argentina: The Importance

of Movement in Mural Painting
‘‘The Vehicles of Dialectic-Subversive Painting’’ was delivered at the
John Reed Club on September 2, 1932. Rather than explaining the
concept of dialectics that defined his approach to art during those
years, Siqueiros focused on the notion of a ‘‘technical revolution’’ in
mural painting as the condition for a dialectical-subversive art. Through
the comprehension of this technical transformation, I will explain, in
the final section of this text, Siqueiros’s concept of dialectics.
This revolution implied a radical distance from the ‘‘anachronis-

tic aesthetics’’ of the ‘‘Mexican Renaissance,’’ represented by the
works of the muralist movement during the 1920s. According to
Siqueiros, the muralists, himself included, had failed to create a mod-
ern, subversive, and proletarian aesthetic. Instead, the muralists of
the 1920s had perpetuated a mystical, picturesque, and populist art.
His explanation of this failure was simple and direct: ‘‘it is not possi-
ble to produce revolutionary music, psychologically subversive, with
the organ from a church’’ (Siqueiros 1932). The muralists defended
a legitimate revolutionary theory but failed to find the correct lan-
guage and technique in which to express it. In short, Siqueiros rec-
ognized the importance of a revolutionary form as a vehicle of
revolutionary content. This connection was not a major concern dur-
ing the movement’s origins in the 1920s, but at the start of the 1930s,
Siqueiros began to focus his attention on the importance of form and
technique. It would not be inaccurate to suggest that this interest in
the form of art emerged from his dialogues with Eisenstein. After all,
this idea was the Russian filmmaker’s major contribution to history of
cinema: the importance of form as a tool to produce critical thought
in the masses.
Siqueiros proposed that technical revolution could create a new
art for the masses by following seven main principles: the use of
modern scientific instruments to create the murals; the supremacy
of monumental painting; the primacy of outdoor mural painting; the
importance of collective work; the scientific knowledge of nature and
the psychological elements of painting; a radical opposition to the
‘‘professional empiricism’’ that had defined Mexican art until that
day; and the supremacy of transportable, reproducible images over
the cult of the original work. The first of these elements was
described in his own words as the use of ‘‘the modern elements and
instruments of plastic production that modern science and mechan-
ics provide’’ (Siqueiros 1932). Although he did not explicitly mention
what he meant by ‘‘modern instruments of plastic production,’’ the
process he followed in creating his works in Los Angeles offers a clear
explanation.
In his first two murals painted in the United States, Workers’
Meeting (July 1932) and Tropical America (August 1932), Siqueiros
used nontraditional materials and techniques, including cement,
air-chisel, airbrush, stencils and templates, air compressors, and
photo-sketches. The most notable element he introduced in Tropical
America, however, was the use of a photographic camera. Siqueiros
photographed the wall where the mural was to be painted from
different angles and perspectives, attempting to reveal ‘‘the active
potential of the wall’’ (Ramı́rez 1997, 78). According to Laurance

Hurlburt (1989), Siqueiros’s interest in the artistic possibilities of
photography derived from his conversations with Eisenstein in Taxco
(207). For Siqueiros, photography embodied two key contributions
to the creation of a dialectical-subversive art: a new means to spread
the works and a source of realism.
The need to find new means and circuits in which to exhibit and
circulate innovative art works was made clear in Siqueiros’s con-
ception of a technical revolution in painting—especially when he
defended the advantages of the ‘‘transportable multi-copy painting’’
(pintura transportable multiejemplar). A single work, that is a non-
reproducible painting, only served its individual owner. In contrast,
a transportable and reproducible work could be distributed to a wider
audience and, therefore, work as an exceptional instrument for agi-
tating and educating the masses. In addition, photography allowed
the artist to create a ‘‘matrix’’ from which multiple works could be
reproduced. The single work could be easily destroyed, but the multi-
copy image guaranteed its permanent existence. In Siqueiros’s
words, ‘‘the police would gain nothing by seizing copies of a multi-
copy nature, for the corresponding matrix, safely stored, can continue
producing infinitely’’ (1932).
This rhetorical defense of the reproducible photographic matrix
is a reminder of the political character of the revolution described by
Siqueiros. The technical transformation of mural painting only made
sense within the broader intention of producing an effective trans-
formation of the masses. Reproducibility was not a simple technical
means to preserve the original work of an individual artist, but a polit-
ical tool to resist any attempt to repress revolution. Siqueiros had
experienced firsthand the effects of this police control and seemed to
be particularly interested in finding new means to escape from it
permanently. This idea is one of the main ones that Siqueiros de-
fended during these years: a true political revolution is only possible
through a technical revolution.
The second contribution of the use of photography was the pos-
sibility of creating dynamic and realistic paintings. Siqueiros devel-
oped this idea while he was working in Argentina, where he arrived in
1933 to hold three conferences in the Friends of Art Society (Socie-
dad Amigos del Arte). In the creation of his mural Plastic Exercise in
a private house in the village of Don Torcuato, near Buenos Aires,
Siqueiros returned to some of the techniques he had already used in
Los Angeles: mechanical brush, photographic camera, artificial light-
ing, and nontraditional materials such as silicates, stone, metal, and
plants. In this mural, however, Siqueiros introduced something he
had not used in his US works: ‘‘we broke with the tradition of static
photographic reproduction, and obtained dynamic photographic re-
productions by the use of a cine camera ( . . . ) We used the camera as
though it were the eye of a normal spectator. In this way we broke
away from the deadly, academic form of photographic reproduction’’
(Siqueiros 1975, 41). By 1933, Siqueiros seemed to consider the
photographic camera’s static point of view insufficient—remember
that when in Los Angeles, less than a year earlier, he had championed
the use of still photography as a revolutionary technique for
muralism.
Although at this point Siqueiros considered cinema to be simply
a dynamic photography, it represented the most advanced technique
of experimentation. On the one hand, Siqueiros used cinema in a way
similar to his use of photography: as a means to project images on the
walls and find new perspectives and relations with a specific space.
Unlike photography, however, cinema introduced a realistic depic-
tion of movement as a main tool for mural painting. Cinema reas-
serted photography’s reproducible character, but it also introduced
the possibility of reproducing the path of the spectator in his or her
perception of the work. This dynamic quality of film offered the high-
est potential for the popularization and dissemination of a mural, as
Siqueiros affirmed years later in his famous text Cómo se pinta un
mural (Siqueiros 1979, 121). With cinema, one could spread not
simply a static view of the work, but a reproduction of the spectator’s
experience through the imitation of his/her movement in space. Cin-
ema allowed him to create a ‘‘dynamic spectator’’ (Ramı́rez 1997, 85).
This exercise of appropriation opens up the complex question of
the relationship between painting and cinema. Cinema was the great-
est visual invention during the years Siqueiros was producing his
aesthetics of mural painting. Many artists did not perceive the rela-
tively new art as a break from traditional media like painting or sculp-
ture, but rather as a continuation of a ‘‘problematic tradition
of representation,’’ as Pietro Montani calls it (2003, 206). Jacques
Rancière (2006) has shown how European avant-garde artists cele-
brated cinema as an answer to a series of questions they had been
trying to solve through other means. Eisenstein, among them,
referred to cinema as the ‘‘contemporary phase of painting’’ (Montani
2003, 206). With this sentence, the Russian filmmaker was not affirm-
ing the idea of a technical evolution in the means of representation
that would lead from ‘‘primitive’’ painting to the modern cinemato-
graphic camera, but asserting the permanence of a body of problems
about the production of meaning and discourse. Eisenstein’s reflec-
tions on the concept of dialectics were not exclusive to cinema, but
rather part of a theory of art that needed to find a specific application in

the technical nature of film production. Siqueiros seemed to share this
perspective on the relationship between cinema and painting. Rather
than a displacement between two disparate disciplines, he perceived
this connection as the possibility of incorporating the technical spec-
ificity of one medium as an answer to particular problems posed by the
other.
According to Stein (1994), movement was the fundamental sub-
ject in Siqueiros’s aesthetics, from his first works in the 1920s to the
end of his life in the 1970s (346). When in 1933 Siqueiros talked
about the importance of movement in the creation of a new revolu-
tionary art, he seemed to refer both to the movement of the objects
depicted on walls and to the physical displacement of the spectator in
space. In this sense, cinema was an important tool precisely because
it allowed the artist to reproduce movement in the painting (by the
projection of filmed material directly on the walls) and to reproduce
the movement of a spectator in space (by filming the path of a viewer).
But cinema also opened the possibility of actively transmitting that
movement to a broader audience through reproducible images.
These three attributes of cinema seemed to be Siqueiros’s major
concern during the elaboration of the Plastic Exercise murals, which
he always considered as an important step toward the development
of a true modern art: ‘‘we still have to construct the living vision of
movement for movement by movement’’ (Siqueiros 1975, 42). This
remarkable statement summarizes Siqueiros’s perspective on revolu-
tionary art. Movement was the subject of the mural (of movement),
the effect it wanted to produce in the viewer (for movement), and the
means to reach that effect (by movement). I propose that this specific
perspective on movement was the main point of coincidence
between Siqueiros’s ideas on mural painting and Eisenstein’s theory
of film creation. To understand this coincidence, we need to under-
stand Siqueiros’s ideas on movement—the subject of the third part of
this essay—and Eisenstein’s concept of dialectics—which I will
develop in the final section.
3. The March of Humanity: the Materialization

of an Aesthetic Project
During the 1930s, Siqueiros especially valued the mimetic nature of
cinema, its capacity to document the events of the world. At the same
time, the combination of cinema and mural painting had the poten-
tial to create artworks superior to traditional documentary films
(films that simply registered and organized live materials). Instead,
a new ‘‘filmable art’’ or ‘‘cine-photogenic art,’’ as he called it, implied

the creation of the filmable subject matter (Siqueiros 1975, 41). This
meant that, beyond the technical register, cinema was also important
because of the effect it could produce on the audience. The relation
between art and the masses was, as I mentioned previously, one of
Siqueiros’s major concerns. The incorporation of cinema into mural
creation would give rise to a ‘‘pictorial cinematographic art’’ able to
replicate in the viewer the movement depicted on the wall. In simple
terms, the use of the cine camera could produce murals that would
invite the spectator to move inside the space, creating a dynamic
perception of the work. With the projection of film images, the artist
could create overlays and ‘‘poly-angular filmic forms’’ (Siqueiros
1979, 77) that composed a ‘‘multi-visual perspective’’ (96) accessible
only to a viewer in motion.
This necessary physical displacement was important for
Siqueiros because it implied a stronger emotive effect on the viewer.
The ‘‘activation’’ of the subject-viewer, as Mari Carmen Ramı́rez
(1997) calls it, was both external and internal. The material move-
ment only made sense as an expression of a psychological involve-
ment with the work, thought to be shocking and impressive for the
viewer. Siqueiros affirmed: ‘‘A mural has to make the spectator walk,
has to mobilize him/her, because in a wide format all surface becomes
active, and s/he who observes must become active, physical and spir-
itual’’ (Esquivel 2010, 154).
In the 1920s, Eisenstein had theorized this capacity of art to
create an emotional effect on the viewer. In 1926, he introduced the
concept of pathos to define the quality within the film to create a bond
of emotional identification with the spectator (Aitken 2001, 40). This
emotional effect, however, did not imply a passive role for the viewer
but, on the contrary, was the basis for achieving an intellectual awak-
ening of the spectator. Eisenstein condensed this process, which
went from a perceptive shock and an emotional bond to intellectual
activity, in the concept of dialectics. I argue that by using this concept
to define the character of revolutionary painting in Mexico, Siqueiros
also affirmed the capacity of an artwork to generate critical thought.
‘‘Movement’’ did not only mean, hence, the simple displacement of
the viewer in space or the creation of an emotional bond, but also the
production of intellectual activity.
I will use Siqueiros’s final large-scale project, the main mural for
the Polyforum Siqueiros inaugurated in 1971, to illustrate this point.
His widow, Angélica Arenal de Siqueiros, affirmed some years after
his death that Siqueiros ‘‘considered the Polyforum his greatest work.
Not in relation to its size, but for its contribution of new elements’’
(Stein 1994, 334). Importantly, I must note the more than thirty years
between Siqueiros’s encounter with Eisenstein and the conception
and creation of the Polyforum. My intention is not to ignore all the
transformations in Siqueiros’s aesthetics ideas because of a series of
historical events and theoretical influences, but to show a conceptual
connection between one of his most important works at the end of
his life and the ideas that emerged during the 1930s from his dialogues
with Sergei Eisenstein. Several authors have stressed the importance of
the Polyforum as a conceptual milestone, where the basic plastic prin-
ciples Siqueiros had defended since the 1920s were condensed—prin-
ciples that, as Debroise affirms, ‘‘vividly continued concerning him’’
(1996b, 189). Thus, instead of focusing on a historiographical corre-
spondence (between the dialogue with Eisenstein and the murals that
Siqueiros made in the 1930s), I am interested in a conceptual thematic
that remained present until the end of his life. I agree with W. A. J. Steer
(1968) when he affirms that a historiographical simplification is not
simply the price but the very principle of any critical approach (636).
In 1965, Siqueiros accepted a commission from Manuel Suárez y
Suárez, a Mexican businessman, to paint a mural depicting the history
of mankind in his Hotel de la Selva in Cuernavaca. One year later,
however, apparently by a direct suggestion of President Dı́az Ordaz
(who was interested in attracting more tourists to the capital city),
Suárez and Siqueiros agreed to move the mural to the Hotel de
Mexico, particularly to a multiple forum center for the arts and cul-
ture that was being built as part of the ‘‘Centro Urbano Turı́stico
2000’’ project. This change gave Siqueiros a unique opportunity to
create a large-scale work and, especially, to implement his ideas
about the integration of mural painting and architecture that he had
defended in some of his texts. Architects Guillermo Rossell and
Román Miquelajauregui designed the forum in a continuous dia-
logue with the painter who had all the walls at his disposal. Following
Suárez’s wish, the ‘‘Siqueiros Polyforum,’’ as it was called, was given
the shape of a cut diamond: a dodecagon on the exterior and an
octagon in the interior.
Each of the twelve 1018 meter panels on the exterior was cov-
ered with a painting depicting various human and natural actions.
The list of the titles is illustrative of the topics Siqueiros was inter-
ested in representing. If the spectator starts from the wall above the
Polyforum entrance and circles the building counterclockwise to the
right, the order of the scenes is as follows:
1. Leadership Calls the Masses to Action

2. The Dry Leafless Tree Reborn in the Spring
3. The Circus: Transition from Spectacle to Culture

4. Stop Aggression
5. Moses Enraged Smashes the Tablets of Laws
6. Christ the Leader: ‘‘What Have You Christians Done with My
Doctrine in Two Thousand Years?’’
7. The Dance—The Destruction of the Indigenous People Before the
New Divinity
8. Sacrifice for Freedom
9. Winter and Summer—The Drama of Nature
10. Mingled Races—The Drama Unleashed by Love During the
Conquest
11. Music—The Non-discriminating Art—From Primitive Begin-
ning to the Infinite
12. The Atom as Triumph of Peace over Destruction
According to Stein (1994), these panels can be considered an over-

ture to the main work on the inside of the building, to the extent that
they reflect the main theme of the interior mural explicit in its name:
The March of Humanity on Earth and Toward the Cosmos. This
work, located on the third floor, covers all the walls and the roof of
the Universal Forum, an octagon of 900 square meters designed to
host cultural events. Unlike the external panels, all of them painted
onsite, the interior mural was made up of 96 sections previously
composed in Siqueiros’s studio La Tallera in Cuernavaca:
‘‘Seventy-two measured 4 by 3.30 meters and 24 were 3.30 by 1.50
meters. The prefabricated wall sections were a mixture of cement and
asbestos, reinforced with angle-iron frames. Each section weighed
from 450 to 1000 kilograms’’ (Stein 1994, 329). Besides using exper-
imental techniques that he had employed in previous works, such as
the use of a film camera and projector, this time Siqueiros introduced
what he called ‘‘sculpture-painting’’ to create volumes and reliefs that
would increase the illusion of movement.
When all the sections were installed, their joints were filled with
an epoxy paste covering any visible break and creating the appear-
ance of a continuous ellipse. This mural-covered dome—45 meters
long, 30 wide, and 13 high—has been officially promoted as the
largest mural in the world since 1966, when Siqueiros began working
on it (Arenal de Siqueiros 1975, 189). In the floor, a revolving plat-
form 24 meters in diameter can rotate up to 1,000 seated spectators
around the mural in 15 minutes. Suárez decided to include a sound
and light show during weekends, in which the recorded voice of
Siqueiros explains the contents of the mural to visitors circling on
the platform.
The general topic of the mural is, as its name suggests, human-
ity’s desperate struggle to survive on earth. Its composition is not
easy to describe. Standing within the auditorium, the spectator is
completely surrounded with sculpture-painting, without any sugges-
tion of where to start. The show with narration by Siqueiros, and the
Polyforum’s official website, both propose an official order. Nonethe-
less, I find inadequate any attempt to give the mural a correct order or
linear reading, especially because the experience of the spectator,
unless he or she participates in the guided visit, is anything but linear.
The elimination of the divisions between the panels creates a contin-
uous space that can be approached from multiple points of view.
Some spectators might try to find an order and to decipher the con-
nections between the figures. Others, shocked by the magnificence of
the work—as I was—might prefer to move around the space contem-
plating the multiple scenes. In this sense, my following description is
just one of many possible readings.
The auditorium has two entrances, one east and one west. Enter-
ing either of them, the spectator immediately faces the entire dome
covered by hundreds of images. Although the auditorium was built
with the shape of an octagon, the mural is traditionally divided in
seven panels.3 The first panel located on the east wall is Man, located
behind the main stage. With his arms and hands outstretched, he
symbolizes the creation, domination, and use of science. Following
the north wall, left from Man, the spectator faces an almost apoca-
lyptic scene: a volcano erupts; the Nahual (which Siqueiros under-
stood to be an Aztec demon of evil) exerts its power; and a poison
tree dominates the landscape. Hope, however, seems to appear
immediately with the appearance of the amatl, the fig tree that
Siqueiros forces to bloom—in contrast to the actual tree that never
does. A new leader seems to emerge from the flowers followed by
a group of women who point out a new direction for humanity.
Another volcano erupts, ‘‘shooting flames of napalm on defenseless
people; a long figure extracts fire from it to light the torch of revolu-
tion’’ (Stein 1994, 332). Then the spectator’s gaze encounters Woman
3. I am following here the division proposed in the Polyforum website: http://

www.polyforumsiqueiros.com. Other descriptions of the mural have used different
divisions. A good example is the review published by P. Fernández Márquez in the
Mexican newspaper El Nacional on December 26, 1971, on the occasion of the inau-
guration of the Polyforum. Fernández divided the mural into four sections: the south
wall, which he called ‘‘The March of Humanity to the Democratic-Bourgeois Revolu-
tion’’; the north wall, called ‘‘The March of Humanity to the Revolution of the Future’’;
the east and west walls composed the third section; and, finally, the roof represented
the fourth portion.
directly opposite of Man. Also with outstretched arms and hands, she
is the symbol of culture, peace, and harmony toward a future society.
The south wall, like the north panels, presents a similar maelstrom
of suffering and struggle. The first section includes an enslaved mass of
hungry workers: particularly striking are the figures of pregnant work-
ing women and mothers with arms wrapped around their babies.
A hunchback, a primitive man, the mutilated torso of a lynched black
man, and again the Nahual complete the turbulent scene. This mass
seems to follow the words of the demagogue, a white-masked clown
depicted in a noticeable sculpture fixed to the wall. Despite this false
demagogue, a new leader seems to appear and the revolutionary
people—men, women and children—continue their progress facing
the repression of military forces aligned to prevent their advance. The
vault, the final section of the mural, represents a future victory over all
these struggles: the red star of communism (opposed to an eagle, the
symbol of capitalism) along with a group of astronauts (symbolizing
the progress of science) represent the climax of the composition.
As stated, the composition of the mural does not follow a histor-
ical linear development. Although a progression toward communism
and revolution as the highest ends of humanity is suggested, this final
goal is not reached by following a line but through several relations
of conflict and contradiction. Dialectics, the same concept that
Siqueiros had included—but not explained—in his lecture in Los
Angeles, is the organizing principle of the work. This principle is clear
both in the organization of the panels and also within the panels
themselves. The most obvious opposition is between panels one and
four, man and woman representing power and domination, and
peace and harmony, respectively. Panels two and three on the north
wall, and panels five and six on the south wall represent similar
contradictions. Both depict the struggles of humanity to survive and
to reach its own freedom. Thus, a man tries to cut the poison tree that
emerges in the middle of a deserted land. The bleak landscape of
volcanoes and demons contrasts with the blossoming tree from
which a new hope, the leader, emerges. The marching masses, once
they have found the correct path, face the opposition of repressive
forces. All these contradictions, however, seem to find a final synthe-
sis in panel seven, where communism and revolution wait for the
people above—literally—history.
Siqueiros proposed a perspective on history based on the notion
of material contradictions: only through permanent material contra-
dictions has humanity been able, and will continue, to progress
toward a higher goal. As the French journalist Jacques Michel pointed
out in a review for Le Monde in January 1972, the scenes recall
Eisenstein’s films, where the tense multitudes were dialectically

opposed to an unknown enemy (Arenal de Siqueiros 1975, 216).
Dialectics was not only the organizing principle for the mural’s con-
tents, however: dialectics also defined the mural’s formal composi-
tion and the spectator’s experience.
Formally, Siqueiros remained faithful to the reflections on move-
ment that he proposed more than thirty years before starting this
mural. With the Polyforum project, however, photography and cin-
ema were not the only means used to produce a dynamic effect:
Siqueiros also incorporated sculpture and an active integration with
architecture. Siqueiros worked with a team of painters and sculptors
to materialize his idea of a ‘‘total artistic integration.’’ The effect is
quite impressive for the spectator. Some figures in the mural seem to
jump out of the wall to occupy the space in which the viewer is
moving. This procedure reinforces the sensation of movement cre-
ated by the elongated and distorted figures that inhabit the mural.
Like these figures, the spectator him/herself is invited to move per-
manently. The moving platform is probably the best expression of
Siqueiros’s wish to produce physical displacement in the spectator.
Although it is not clear whether Siqueiros himself took part in the
platform’s conception—the sound and light show was introduced by
Suárez, as I mentioned previously—he was aware of the show’s exis-
tence and the moving floor that was used from the early years of the
Polyforum. As Alaide Foppa highlights in a review from 1972, the
spectator does not move but is moved (Arenal de Siqueiros 1975,
217–219). This almost forced displacement creates the illusion that
the figures on the walls are moving, as in an expanded movie theater,
and increases the impression on the viewer.
Rafael Squirru, among several authors and journalists, described
the experience of the spectator facing the mural in a short review
published in Américas in Washington D.C in 1972: ‘‘The tyrannical
scale of this work produces a sense of visual aggression that almost
forces the physical act of protection, as if the unleashed mob could
crush us in its furious movement’’ (Arenal de Siqueiros 1975, 223).
The description of the work as a ‘‘tyrannical’’ experience is quite
appropriate. In 1973, Siqueiros himself described his work as an
attempt to force the viewer to see and move within the space:
The public is going to see the mural even if they don’t want to see the mural.
The mural is in their path. In the process, they are forced to turn their
heads—to see one side, to the other side, to see the vaults. To see from up to
down, from right to left, even if they don’t want to. I think it is very easy to
understand that. It means the spectator cannot escape from the mural. (Stein
1994, 345)
If the viewer could not escape, it was because the mural was intended
to produce the emotional effect that Siqueiros considered to be the
core of a revolutionary art’s relationship to its audience. But there
was a deeper reason as well: only through a direct perceptual impres-
sion and emotional bond could the spectator apprehend the dialec-
tical vision of history reflected on the walls. Only the symbolic
experience of contradictions, of humanity’s struggle to reach its own
freedom, allowed the spectator to understand the hidden mechan-
isms of history and, ideally, to act toward that progress.
This particular connection between the work and the spectator
was, precisely, Eisenstein’s main contribution to film theory. He con-
densed that relation in the concept of dialectics, defining it as what I
will call a ‘‘structural analogy’’ between artwork, history, and
thought. By understanding this notion, comprehending the deep
theoretical convergence between Siqueiros and the Russian film-
maker is possible.
4. Toward a Pictorial Cinematographic Art: Eisenstein’s

Concept of Dialectics
As Annette Michelson (1976) points out, Eisenstein’s main interest
was always to create what he called an ‘‘intellectual cinema’’ that
would serve as a tool for creating a revolutionary consciousness in
the viewer. That objective implied a deep transformation of cinema
from a means to tell stories to an instrument of thought. Eisenstein
shared this intention of reforming cinema with most of the avant-
garde movements in his time. Their ‘‘enemy’’ was the traditional
narrative movie that occupied most of the theaters in Europe and
America. To oppose this ‘‘sick’’ idea of cinema, Eisenstein aimed at
creating films that operated through concepts and abstract ideas
overcoming a basic narrative level.
This ‘‘intellectual cinema’’ had a main purpose: to work as a cog-
nitive instrument for the people and, therefore, to function as a pos-
sible agent of social transformation. Thus, Eisenstein’s main objective
was to produce visual essays that made the viewer follow the same
analytic path that the filmmaker followed in the creation of the work.
An ‘‘intellectual cinema’’ was conceived as a process of thought that
would be replicated in the spectator, generating a particular con-
sciousness that would encourage revolutionary practice. According
to Eisenstein, this was the main difference between his new cinema
and traditional narrative films. Whereas the latter aimed at producing
only corporeal emotions in the audience, the ‘‘intellectual cinema’’
attempted to produce critical thought. How did Eisenstein expect to
achieve this goal? The main element in this new intellectual cinema
was the concept of dialectics. By understanding this concept, com-
prehending Eisenstein’s notion of cinema as critical thought is pos-
sible. I argue that this concept was the basis of Eisenstein’s idea of
cinema in three main senses: as method, as object, and as effect.
In a note written in 1928, Eisenstein expressed his intention to
use Marx’s concept of dialectics as the main method in his project for
a film version of Marx’s Capital (Das Kapital): ‘‘To show the method
of dialectics. This would mean (roughly) five-nonfigurative chapters.
(Or six, seven, etc.) Dialectical analysis of historical events. Dialectics
in scientific problems. Dialectics of class struggle (the last chapter)’’
(Eisenstein 1976, 10). But what did Eisenstein mean by ‘‘dialectics?’’
This concept has an extensive history in Western thought, from clas-
sical Greek philosophy to the well-known uses of the term in G. W. F.
Hegel and Karl Marx. Not surprisingly, Marx’s discussion is the most
important point of reference for understanding Eisenstein’s concept
of dialectics and its essential role in arts.
The concepts of dialectics and history are inseparable in Marx’s
thought. One of his major objectives was to determine the cause for
the transformations in history, not only to describe it, but especially
to determine a potential principle of action that could transform the
present conditions of humanity. Unlike Hegel, Marx’s concept of
history was not based on an essentialist assumption of being as dia-
lectical process, but on a real economic fact: the more wealth workers
produced, the poorer they became. The worker had been alienated
by an estrangement from the objects he or she produced. Thus, Marx
wanted to understand the history of humans as social beings. He was
not interested in thinking about humans as abstract entities
immersed in a spiritual process that determines them, but rather as
living and real individuals. And the most real aspects of these indivi-
duals were their material conditions of production. Thus, history was
not, according to Marx, the manifestation of the spirit but the devel-
opment of relations of production. These relations had a dialectical
character, evident in Marx’s concept of ‘‘class struggle.’’
In a text from 1880, Friedrich Engels argued that this materialistic
concept of history, and its distance from Hegel’s thought, was one of
Marx’s major contributions: ‘‘Hegel has freed history from metaphys-
ics—he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially
idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the phi-
losophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was pro-
pounded’’ (2003). In short, Marx’s historical materialism pointed out
that dialectical relations of production were the driving force of his-
tory. Therefore, creating a dialectical approach to the study of history
was indispensable in understanding history’s necessary dynamics—

which could then be used for the emancipation of the proletariat.
Thus, a dialectical method to the study of history was necessary
because history itself had a dialectical character. According to Marx,
understanding a dialectical object required the use of a dialectical
method. This is probably one of Marx’s major contributions: knowl-
edge has to assume the same form as its object. Knowing does not
mean applying an external method to a particular object, but deriving
a method from the nature of the object itself. Here dialectics, defined
as method, finds a direct connection with dialectics as the object of
knowledge. In other words, Marx’s thought was based on the possi-
bility of knowing dialectically the dialectical character of history.
At the end of the nineteenth century, this new materialistic per-
spective on history brought about a deep transformation in the mod-
els and methods used to think about reality. In the afterword to the
second German edition of Capital in 1873, Marx explained the cause
of this change and the common reactions it generated:
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it

seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational
form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire
professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recog-
nition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of
the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards
every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore
takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence;
because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and
revolutionary. (Marx 1873; emphasis added)
This critical character is the core of the dialectical method. It does not
seek to describe the present conditions of the people, but to under-
stand the material forces that have created those conditions and,
therefore, the necessary finality of history. By understanding dialec-
tics as the possibility of historical awareness, Marx linked the concept
with the notion of revolution: the dialectical method, as a critical
approach to the present, was the basis of transforming action. This
triple relation among dialectics, history, and revolution was the basis
for Eisenstein’s reflection on cinema and, I would argue, for Siqueir-
os’s implementation of the concept in the creation of a new aesthetic.
The main problem Eisenstein faced was how to apply Marx’s
concept of dialectics to the creation of a film. In April 1929, Eisenstein
published the aforementioned essay ‘‘A Dialectic Approach to Film
Form,’’ explaining how to comprehend the concept of dialectics in
the field of arts: ‘‘A dynamic comprehension of things is also basic to
the same degree, for a correct understanding of art and of all art-forms.
In the realm of art this dialectic principle of dynamics is embodied in
CONFLICT as the fundamental principle for the existence of every art-
work and every art-form’’ (Eisenstein 1958, 46). The notion of ‘‘con-
flict’’ as the main axis in artistic creation was not a novelty for the
1920s. In fact, much of Western dramatic production had been based
on that principle. A main character who had to restore a lost balance by
opposing antagonistic forces seems to have been the central element
that cinema inherited from classic theater and literature.
The difference introduced by Eisenstein is that this conflict, tra-
ditionally constructed as an opposition of dramatic forces, was
a method of formal composition instead of narrative structure. It did
not imply that Eisenstein denied the importance of narrative con-
flicts. In fact, most of his films were based on the same narrative
conflict between the people and their different oppressors. However,
he considered that the narrative composition of the film was not
enough to produce a critical effect in the audience. Conventional
narrative films only produced emotional effects. Eisenstein aimed
at going beyond to produce intellectual processes: ‘‘The conven-
tional descriptive form for film leads to the formal possibility of a kind
of filmic reasoning. While the conventional film directs the emotions,
this suggests an opportunity to encourage and direct the whole
thought process, as well’’ (Eisenstein 1958, 62).
This new emphasis on film form found its best expression in the
dialectical use of montage. A montage based on the principle of
conflict was one of Eisenstein’s main methods for producing a cine-
matographic critical approach to reality. In Marx’s terms, a dialectical
form of film would make understanding the dialectical nature of
reality possible. Dialectics was the method for comprehending a dia-
lectical object of knowledge.
In another text from 1929, ‘‘The Cinematographic Principle and
the Ideogram,’’ Eisenstein explained the reason for this dialectical
montage. By analyzing Japanese writing (which he understood to
be ideographic), he showed how the combination of heterogeneous
images could produce the representation of a concept, ‘‘something
that is graphically undepictable’’ (Eisenstein 1958, 30). Thus, the
juxtaposition of opposite formal elements in the montage of a film
made the depicting of abstract ideas possible. One of the most simple
and brilliant applications of this principle to cinema was the creation
of visual metaphors in some of his most remarkable films.4
4. In Strike (1925), for instance, there is a sequence in which the workers, who
have entered into all-out strike against the employers of factories, gather in the field to
This principle of creating formal conflicts through montage had

an explicit objective: to induce processes of critical thought in the
spectator. Eisenstein’s desire to depict the undepictable depended
on the possibility of producing an intellectual effect on the audiences
that allowed them to grasp the dialectical character of reality. Thus,
the dialectic method of the film’s formal composition depicted the
dialectical character of reality by producing a dialectical effect on the
viewer. This is the third sense of the concept: dialectics as method
and as object is, at the same time, a particular didactical effect. With-
out this third sense, the concept of dialectics would remain in an
idealized realm, which, of course, was what Marx found so problem-
atic in Hegel’s philosophy. Michelson (1976) highlights the impor-
tance of the notion of revolution in Eisenstein’s thought: ‘‘The notes
for Capital, then, are a program for the development of the cognitive
instrument in the service of revolutionary change, for a film in which
‘the established place of the theme is taken by the subject of basic
method’’’ (35).
We can now understand the singular character of the concept of
dialectics according to Eisenstein. Dialectics was defined by what
I like to call a ‘‘structural analogy’’ among reality, artwork, and
thought. The three elements ‘‘worked’’ based on the same principle.
Thus, film must follow a dialectical method of formal composition to
generate dialectical thought in the viewer that enabled him or her to
understand the dialectical character of history.
I argue that by producing a new aesthetic theory focused on
intellectual and, therefore, revolutionary effects on the viewer,
Siqueiros appropriated Eisenstein’s concept of dialectics as the core
-
discuss the main points they are going to demand from their employers to return to
work. Eisenstein shows in this sequence the strong influence exerted on him by David
Griffith’s parallel montage. He alternates the shots of the workers meeting with shots
of the factory owners discussing workers’ demands in a very fancy living room and with
shots of the police force getting ready to control the strike. The narrative content of the
sequence is very simple. The factory owners reject the worker’s demands while the
police suppress the strike’s meeting in the forest. Eisenstein uses a parallel montage
that gradually increases the rhythm of the sequence. When the police officers are in
control of the situation and the bourgeois factory owners have rejected the list of
demands, Eisenstein inserts an apparently trivial action that allows him to compose
a visual metaphor: one of the employers takes a lemon squeezer to make a drink for his
peers. Suddenly Eisenstein shortens the length of the shots and increases the rhythm of
the sequence, juxtaposing the action of squeezing with shots of the cavalry oppressing
the workers. The metaphor is simple: the owners of the means of production oppress
the people through the police force and exploit the workers as a lemon is squeezed. By
accelerating the montage, Eisenstein creates a conceptual content beyond the basic
narrative level. He transforms Griffith’s parallel montage into intellectual montage.
of artistic production. This appropriation, visible from his first lec-

tures in the United States in 1932, was not simply an application of
the formal principles of film composition as defined by the Russian
filmmaker to the creation of murals. Instead, this appropriation
involved the incorporation of the deeper idea of a ‘‘structural anal-
ogy’’ among artwork, thought, and reality as a condition for a revolu-
tionary art.
Siqueiros’s main interests in movement and a new pictorial cin-
ematographic art lay in this relationship. His objective was to develop
new techniques that were able to produce a mural form in which
a dynamic reality was depicted. As stated previously, he had already
recognized the difficulty of focusing only on the contents of painting
in the 1920s, when criticizing the first years of the muralist move-
ment, and had affirmed the need for a new means of representation.
This new language, as he called it during those years, would engage
the spectator through the creation of an emotional bond—expressed
through the physical movement of the viewer in the perception of the
work—that had to be transformed into intellectual thought. Only
through an active engagement was it possible for the spectator to
understand the dynamic reality that Siqueiros wanted to represent
in his works.
The March of Humanity on Earth and Toward the Cosmos illus-
trates this theory, a theory based on the concept of dialectics defined
by Eisenstein as the basis of a revolutionary art and which Siqueiros
placed at the core of his aesthetic project through his persistent
interest in movement. Movement appears in the mural as the subject
of the work (the march of humanity), the effect on the viewer (who
symbolically reconstructs the march through his or her physical, emo-
tional, and intellectual movement), and the main principle of the
composition of the mural (evident in the contradictions within the
different scenes and the shocking form).
To determine whether Siqueiros borrowed this concept of dia-
lectics from Eisenstein’s theory is not as interesting as thinking about
the production of a theoretical and practical convergence between
these two artists. Both the Russian filmmaker and the Mexican
painter developed an aesthetic theory—not only through their writ-
ings but also through their works—focused on the possibility of
awakening a revolutionary consciousness in the viewer. A dialectical
film form or a pictorial cinematographic art were parallel strategies
for linking art and revolution, and both were based on the same
principle: producing a revolutionary consciousness in the spectator
is not possible if the work itself does not take the form of the object
it wants to depict.
According to Ramı́rez (1997), Siqueiros’s main project until his

death in 1974 was the creation of this connection between art and
revolution through the notion of dialectical movement. This project
seems to have been left incomplete. His own reflections on mural
painting suggest that this new art was to be an unfinished work,
always open to innovative transformations. In his public interven-
tions, published texts, and letters, Siqueiros always referred to his
work as a process of continuous experimentation. The definition of
the pictorial cinematographic art was not an exception to this avant-
garde rhetoric. In several texts, rather than describing the current
characteristics of this new aesthetic, Siqueiros rhetorically ad-
dressed the reader with questions about a future art always in the
process of construction: ‘‘Can the sensitive reader imagine what
a true cinematographic colorful reproduction of a mural with spe-
cial and active sense, and with a deep topic at the same time would
be? ( . . . ) Painting and cinema, thus, have before them a path of
coalition, of convergence, positively wonderful’’ (Siqueiros 1979,
122).
Even during his final years, this open character that defined his
perspective on art remained present. The March of Humanity, far
from being a definitive and closing work, seems to have been inter-
preted by Siqueiros as a step in the creation of a new art. His encoun-
ters with Eisenstein can be read as the basis for that future coalition
between painting and cinema, for the production of that ‘‘wonder-
ful’’ revolutionary art.
References
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Eisenstein.’’ In European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical
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———. 1976. ‘‘Notes for a Film of Capital.’’ October 2 (Summer): 3–26.
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Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States

From the Screen to the Wall: Siqueiros and Eisenstein in Mexico

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, University of California Institute for

Juan Carlos Arias Herrera

La relación entre el cineasta ruso Sergei Eisenstein y los llamados ‘‘Tres

Key words: Sergei Eisenstein. David Alfaro Siqueiros. Mural painting.

*I am grateful to Byron Hamann for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.

Palabras clave: Sergei Eisenstein. David Alfaro Siqueiros. Pintura mural.

‘‘ . . . My moving frescoes.’’ Sergei Eisenstein used those words in an

His contact with Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco in Mexico—Eisenstein

In the production of the film in which we are currently involved, it is our

I am not interested in showing how Eisenstein’s theory or artistic

perspective on movement as a dialectical dynamic in which reality,

1. Taxco: Art and the Revolutionary Masses

Siqueiros was never questioned in jail about the assassination

Education, Siqueiros proposed to use painting as a medium for the

The main question Siqueiros had to resolve was how to compose an

2. From the United States to Argentina: The Importance

This revolution implied a radical distance from the ‘‘anachronis-

potential of the wall’’ (Ramı́rez 1997, 78). According to Laurance

rather part of a theory of art that needed to find a specific application in

3. The March of Humanity: the Materialization

a new ‘‘filmable art’’ or ‘‘cine-photogenic art,’’ as he called it, implied

1. Leadership Calls the Masses to Action

3. The Circus: Transition from Spectacle to Culture

According to Stein (1994), these panels can be considered an over-

3. I am following here the division proposed in the Polyforum website: http://

Eisenstein’s films, where the tense multitudes were dialectically

4. Toward a Pictorial Cinematographic Art: Eisenstein’s

was indispensable in understanding history’s necessary dynamics—

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it

This principle of creating formal conflicts through montage had

of artistic production. This appropriation, visible from his first lec-

According to Ramı́rez (1997), Siqueiros’s main project until his

Aitken, Ian. 2001. ‘‘Determinism and Symbolism in the Film Theory of

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