¡Qué viva México!
Encyclopedia
¡Qué viva México! is a film project begun in 1930 by the Russian avant-garde director Sergei Eisenstein
(1898-1948). It would have been an episodic portrayal of Mexican culture and politics from pre-Conquest civilization to the Mexican revolution. Production was beset by difficulties and was eventually abandoned. Jay Leyda
and Zina Voynow call it his "greatest film plan and his greatest personal tragedy".
fell through, and Paramount released him from his contract. The Mexican film was produced by Upton Sinclair
and a small group of financiers recruited by his wife Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair
, under a legal corporation these investors formed, the Mexican Film Trust. Their contract with Eisenstein called for a short, apolitical feature film about or involving Mexico, in a scenario to be designed and filmed by Eisenstein and his two compatriots, Grigori Alexandrov and Eduard Tisse
. Other provisos of the contract, which Eisenstein signed on 24 November 1930, included that the film would be completed (including all post-production work) by April 1931, and would show or imply nothing that could be construed as insulting to or critical of post-Revolution Mexico (a condition imposed by the Mexican government before it would allow the three Soviets entry into their country). Filmed material was also to be subject to censorship by the Mexican government, at first after it was filmed and printed, later in 1931 during shooting via an on-site censor.
Eisenstein shot somewhere between 175,000 and 250,000 lineal feet of film (30 to 50 hours) before, for a variety of reasons, the Mexican Film Trust stopped production, and still was not completed as planned by Eisenstein. Again for several reasons, Eisenstein was not allowed to return to the United States to construct a finished film, nor could the footage be sent to the USSR for completion by him there.
The Mexican Film Trust hired producer Sol Lesser to produce two short features and a short subject culled from the footage, Thunder Over Mexico, Eisenstein in Mexico, and Death Day all released in 1934. Others, with the Trust's permission, attempted different versions, such as Marie Seton
's Time in the Sun (1939).
The title ¡Qué viva México!, originally was proposed by Eisenstein in correspondence with Upton Sinclair during the last months of shooting, but was first used for a version made by Grigori Alexandrov, released in 1979, about a decade after the footage was sent to the USSR by the Museum of Modern Art
in exchange for several Soviet films from the Gosfilmofond film archive. At least one other version followed Alexandrov's, and another has been proposed during the first years of the 21st century.
, for instance, Mexico was almost the incarnation of Surrealism. And as film historian David Bordwell notes, "like many Leftists, Eisenstein was impressed that Mexico has created a socialist revolution in 1910". His fascination with the country dated back at least to 1921, when at the age of twenty-two "his artistic career started with a Mexican topic" as he put on a theatrical version of the Jack London
story The Mexican in Moscow. Film scholar Inga Karetnikova details this production as a classic example of avant-garde aesthetics, an exercise in form rather than documentary realism; but "indirectly", she argues, "he did recreate the Mexican atmosphere". Above all, he saw in the Mexican revolution an instance of a "zealous idealism" that was also "close to Eisenstein, just as it was to the entire generation of Soviet avant-garde of the early 1920s".
Some years later, in 1927, Eisenstein had the opportunity to meet the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera
, who was visiting Moscow for the celebrations of the Russian revolution's tenth anniversary. Rivera had seen Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin
, and praised it by comparing it to his own work as a painter in the service of the Mexican revolution; he also "spoke obsessively of the Mexican artistic heritage", describing the wonders of Ancient Aztec and Mayan art and architecture. The Russian director wrote that "the seed of interest in that country . . . nourished by the stories of Diego Rivera, when he visited the Soviet Union . . . grew into a burning desire to travel there".
. Furthermore, although the film was to have been completed by April 1931, it wasn't until about that time that Eisenstein even settled on the basic idea of a multi-part film, an anthology with each part focussed on a different subculture of the Mexican peoples. Only later still would this idea resolve itself into the concept of a six-part film encompassing the history of the nation, its people and its societal evolution to the present time. Specific details and the contents of each section, and how to connect them, would evolve further over the ensuing months while Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Tisse shot tens of thousands of feet of film. Toward the latter part of 1931, the film was finally structured, in Eisenstein's mind, to consist of four primary sections plus a brief prologue and epilogue.
The modern theoretician Bordwell also claims that each episode would have its own distinct style, be "dedicated to a different Mexican artist", and would "also base itself on some primal element (stone, water, iron, fire, air)". The soundtrack in each case would feature a different Mexican folk song. Moreover, each episode would tell the story of a romantic couple; and "threading through all parts was the theme of life and death, culminating in the mockery of death". If true, these details were never communicated to the Sinclairs, who simply found themselves with recurring requests for additional funding as Eisenstein's vision expanded, with no attempt by Eisenstein to respect the economic realities involved in making such an epic work and the financial and emotional limitations of his producers, his contract obligations, and his inability or unwillingness to cogently communicate to them before acquiring permission to proceed away from those contract obligations. This was the ultimate legacy of the film and would be repeated in the similarly aborted Soviet Eisenstein project, Bezhin Meadow
.
Prologue
Set in the time of the Maya civilization
in Yucatán
.
Sandunga
Life including marriage and motherhood in Tehuantepec
. It follows the courtship involving a golden necklace as a dowry, and eventual marriage, of a Concepción and Abundio.
Fiesta
This part depicts the celebration of the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe, and then bullfighting
in the Spanish colonial era (played by real-life bullfighter David Liceaga Maciel and his younger brother). There is a brief pause between this episode and the following one.
Maguey
About the pulque
industry under the rule of Porfirio Díaz
. It follows a tragic romance between peon Sebastian and his bride Maria. Maria is held captive and abused by Sebastian's boss, an hacendado, at which point Sebastian and his fellow workmen devise revenge. They are eventually chased, shot down and those captured are buried in the sand and trampled by riders. Maria breaks free and holds Sebastian's dead body to her. Eisenstein repeatedly told Sinclair that the tale told in this episode would be threaded through the entire six-part picture, while contradictorily describing it as a separate intact episode in other correspondence.
Soldadera
Story of the Mexican revolution
as seen through the experiences of the woman soldiers who followed and fought with their men. No material for his episode was filmed, so it is the shortest and is constructed out of still photographs only.
Epilogue
Showing Mexico at the time of filming, and the celebration of the Day of the Dead
. Evidence indicates that Eisenstein secretly planned to compose this segment of satirical shots of fat priests, pompous generalissimos, girl scouts and football players, at least for the version to be shown in the U.S.S.R.
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...
(1898-1948). It would have been an episodic portrayal of Mexican culture and politics from pre-Conquest civilization to the Mexican revolution. Production was beset by difficulties and was eventually abandoned. Jay Leyda
Jay Leyda
Jay Leyda was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film historian, noted for his work on U.S, Soviet and Chinese Cinema. His The Melville Log was a day to day compilation of documents which he had painstakingly collected on the life of Herman Melville. He was a member of the Workers Film and...
and Zina Voynow call it his "greatest film plan and his greatest personal tragedy".
Overview
Eisenstein left for Mexico in December 1930—after various projects proposed by Charles Chaplin and Paramount PicturesParamount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
fell through, and Paramount released him from his contract. The Mexican film was produced by Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
and a small group of financiers recruited by his wife Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair
Mary Craig Sinclair
Mary Craig Sinclair was a writer and the wife of Upton Sinclair.-Early life and education:She was born Mary Craig Kimbrough in Greenwood, Mississippi on February 12, 1882, the oldest child of Mary Hunter and her husband Allan McCaskill Kimbrough, a judge...
, under a legal corporation these investors formed, the Mexican Film Trust. Their contract with Eisenstein called for a short, apolitical feature film about or involving Mexico, in a scenario to be designed and filmed by Eisenstein and his two compatriots, Grigori Alexandrov and Eduard Tisse
Eduard Tisse
Eduard Kazimirovich Tisse April 1897 - 18 November 1961) was a Soviet cinematographer born to a Swedish father and Russian mother in Liepāja, Courland. He grew up in Liepāja and started his career as a newsreel cameraman during the Russian Civil War...
. Other provisos of the contract, which Eisenstein signed on 24 November 1930, included that the film would be completed (including all post-production work) by April 1931, and would show or imply nothing that could be construed as insulting to or critical of post-Revolution Mexico (a condition imposed by the Mexican government before it would allow the three Soviets entry into their country). Filmed material was also to be subject to censorship by the Mexican government, at first after it was filmed and printed, later in 1931 during shooting via an on-site censor.
Eisenstein shot somewhere between 175,000 and 250,000 lineal feet of film (30 to 50 hours) before, for a variety of reasons, the Mexican Film Trust stopped production, and still was not completed as planned by Eisenstein. Again for several reasons, Eisenstein was not allowed to return to the United States to construct a finished film, nor could the footage be sent to the USSR for completion by him there.
The Mexican Film Trust hired producer Sol Lesser to produce two short features and a short subject culled from the footage, Thunder Over Mexico, Eisenstein in Mexico, and Death Day all released in 1934. Others, with the Trust's permission, attempted different versions, such as Marie Seton
Marie Seton
Marie Seton was a film critic and biographer of Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Satyajit Ray.In 1935 she helped to establish the reputation of Ronald Moody....
's Time in the Sun (1939).
The title ¡Qué viva México!, originally was proposed by Eisenstein in correspondence with Upton Sinclair during the last months of shooting, but was first used for a version made by Grigori Alexandrov, released in 1979, about a decade after the footage was sent to the USSR by the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in exchange for several Soviet films from the Gosfilmofond film archive. At least one other version followed Alexandrov's, and another has been proposed during the first years of the 21st century.
Eisenstein and Mexico
In the early twentieth century, many intellectuals and artists associated with the European avant garde were fascinated by Latin America in general, and by Mexico in particular: for the French artist and leader of the Surrealist movement André BretonAndré Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
, for instance, Mexico was almost the incarnation of Surrealism. And as film historian David Bordwell notes, "like many Leftists, Eisenstein was impressed that Mexico has created a socialist revolution in 1910". His fascination with the country dated back at least to 1921, when at the age of twenty-two "his artistic career started with a Mexican topic" as he put on a theatrical version of the Jack London
Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
story The Mexican in Moscow. Film scholar Inga Karetnikova details this production as a classic example of avant-garde aesthetics, an exercise in form rather than documentary realism; but "indirectly", she argues, "he did recreate the Mexican atmosphere". Above all, he saw in the Mexican revolution an instance of a "zealous idealism" that was also "close to Eisenstein, just as it was to the entire generation of Soviet avant-garde of the early 1920s".
Some years later, in 1927, Eisenstein had the opportunity to meet the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo . His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in...
, who was visiting Moscow for the celebrations of the Russian revolution's tenth anniversary. Rivera had seen Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin
The Battleship Potemkin
The Battleship Potemkin , sometimes rendered as The Battleship Potyomkin, is a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm...
, and praised it by comparing it to his own work as a painter in the service of the Mexican revolution; he also "spoke obsessively of the Mexican artistic heritage", describing the wonders of Ancient Aztec and Mayan art and architecture. The Russian director wrote that "the seed of interest in that country . . . nourished by the stories of Diego Rivera, when he visited the Soviet Union . . . grew into a burning desire to travel there".
Original vision
There is no evidence that Eisenstein had any specific idea for a film about or set in Mexico before his actual arrival there in December 1930, although he began shooting almost immediately. The Sinclairs had made it clear that they were expecting Eisenstein to concentrate on visual imagery, and anything by way of a plot would be secondary: they were looking for an artistic travelogueTravel literature
Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...
. Furthermore, although the film was to have been completed by April 1931, it wasn't until about that time that Eisenstein even settled on the basic idea of a multi-part film, an anthology with each part focussed on a different subculture of the Mexican peoples. Only later still would this idea resolve itself into the concept of a six-part film encompassing the history of the nation, its people and its societal evolution to the present time. Specific details and the contents of each section, and how to connect them, would evolve further over the ensuing months while Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Tisse shot tens of thousands of feet of film. Toward the latter part of 1931, the film was finally structured, in Eisenstein's mind, to consist of four primary sections plus a brief prologue and epilogue.
The modern theoretician Bordwell also claims that each episode would have its own distinct style, be "dedicated to a different Mexican artist", and would "also base itself on some primal element (stone, water, iron, fire, air)". The soundtrack in each case would feature a different Mexican folk song. Moreover, each episode would tell the story of a romantic couple; and "threading through all parts was the theme of life and death, culminating in the mockery of death". If true, these details were never communicated to the Sinclairs, who simply found themselves with recurring requests for additional funding as Eisenstein's vision expanded, with no attempt by Eisenstein to respect the economic realities involved in making such an epic work and the financial and emotional limitations of his producers, his contract obligations, and his inability or unwillingness to cogently communicate to them before acquiring permission to proceed away from those contract obligations. This was the ultimate legacy of the film and would be repeated in the similarly aborted Soviet Eisenstein project, Bezhin Meadow
Bezhin Meadow
Bezhin Meadow is a 1937 Soviet film famous for having been suppressed and believed destroyed before its completion. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein, it tells the story of a young farm boy whose father attempts to betray the government for political reasons by sabotaging the year's harvest and the...
.
Alexandrov's construction
In Alexandrov's 1979 version, which attempts to be as faithful as possible to Eisenstein's original vision, the film unfolds as follows:Prologue
Set in the time of the Maya civilization
Maya civilization
The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. Initially established during the Pre-Classic period The Maya is a Mesoamerican...
in Yucatán
Yucatán
Yucatán officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Yucatán is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 106 municipalities and its capital city is Mérida....
.
Sandunga
Life including marriage and motherhood in Tehuantepec
Tehuantepec
Tehuantepec is a city and municipality in the southeast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is part of the Tehuantepec District in the west of the Istmo Region. The area was important in pre Hispanic period as part of a trade route that connected Central America with what is now the center of...
. It follows the courtship involving a golden necklace as a dowry, and eventual marriage, of a Concepción and Abundio.
Fiesta
This part depicts the celebration of the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe, and then bullfighting
Bullfighting
Bullfighting is a traditional spectacle of Spain, Portugal, southern France and some Latin American countries , in which one or more bulls are baited in a bullring for sport and entertainment...
in the Spanish colonial era (played by real-life bullfighter David Liceaga Maciel and his younger brother). There is a brief pause between this episode and the following one.
Maguey
About the pulque
Pulque
Pulque, or octli, is a milk-colored, somewhat viscous alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of the maguey plant, and is a traditional native beverage of Mexico. The drink’s history extends far back into the Mesoamerican period, when it was considered sacred, and its use was limited to...
industry under the rule of Porfirio Díaz
Porfirio Díaz
José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori was a Mexican-American War volunteer and French intervention hero, an accomplished general and the President of Mexico continuously from 1876 to 1911, with the exception of a brief term in 1876 when he left Juan N...
. It follows a tragic romance between peon Sebastian and his bride Maria. Maria is held captive and abused by Sebastian's boss, an hacendado, at which point Sebastian and his fellow workmen devise revenge. They are eventually chased, shot down and those captured are buried in the sand and trampled by riders. Maria breaks free and holds Sebastian's dead body to her. Eisenstein repeatedly told Sinclair that the tale told in this episode would be threaded through the entire six-part picture, while contradictorily describing it as a separate intact episode in other correspondence.
Soldadera
Story of the Mexican revolution
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...
as seen through the experiences of the woman soldiers who followed and fought with their men. No material for his episode was filmed, so it is the shortest and is constructed out of still photographs only.
Epilogue
Showing Mexico at the time of filming, and the celebration of the Day of the Dead
Day of the Dead
Day of the Dead is a Mexican holiday celebrated throughout Mexico and around the world in many cultures. The holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. It is particularly celebrated in Mexico, where it attains the quality...
. Evidence indicates that Eisenstein secretly planned to compose this segment of satirical shots of fat priests, pompous generalissimos, girl scouts and football players, at least for the version to be shown in the U.S.S.R.