¡Que Viva México!

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1931/1979) ***

Every great artist living in Soviet Russia was at odds with the fickle and oppressive Stalinist regime and Eisenstein, perhaps Russia’s greatest film director, teacher and theorist, was no exception. It’s surprising, then, that Stalin allowed the director free reign to travel the world and even odder that Eisenstein, while on this leash, attempted to make films for Paramount in Hollywood. The USA moguls were ultimately chilly to Eisenstein’s film proposals (including a treatment for Dreiser’s An American Tragedy — Eisenstein admired the novel and had met Dreiser in Russia). So, instead, using money provided by novelist Upton Sinclair and his wife, occultist Mary Craig Sinclair, the director traveled to Mexico with comrades Grigori Aleksandrov, as co-director and Eduard Tisse, cinematographer.

The goal was to film a quasi-documentary encapsulating the history of Mexico from the Pre-Columbian era to post-Revolution. The film was never completed. Kino video has released on DVD a 1979 reconstruction by Aleksandrov, based on Eisenstein’s notes and drawings (a meeting with Walt Disney in Hollywood had reignited Eisenstein’s interest in drawing and cartooning). Although accompanied by a dated music soundtrack that’s in some places makeshift and in others electronic and completely inappropriate, Eisenstein’s eccentric and powerful imagery shines through.

¡Que Viva México! investigates ancient ruins, courtship rituals, a Day of the Dead celebration, a staged drama of peasants vs. exploitative landlords and a rousing bullfight. It’s strange to see the same kind of camera angles and staging we associate with Russian revolutionary propaganda used instead to explore a land so different in temperament, but Eisenstein’s eye for telling details and evocative editing makes the travelogue compelling viewing. Some of the compositions are so stark and morbid, they seem to look back to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and almost certainly influenced the look of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and quite probably Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) and Santa Sangre (1989).

Kino’s DVD also contains two Eisenstein shorts: a bizarre fantasia, Romance Sentimentale and a Swiss instructional film, Misery and Fortune of Women. Misery is an incomplete propaganda film advocating for state-run instead of “back door” abortion clinics. Romance seems to be sourced from a darkened, flickering 16mm print and is nearly unwatchable in places. It employs, though, editing and sound experiments so radical, one is tempted to list Eisenstein with the great surrealist directors Luis Bunuel and David Lynch. Eisenstein’s artistic inclinations were so far adrift from the Socialist Realism Stalin was demanding, he might have been sent out into the world so that Stalin wouldn’t have to kill him!

—Michael R. Neno, 2014 Dec 22