Abstract
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 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.
Keywords:
Eisenstein; Greenaway; Biopic; Intermedia; Queer Identities