¡Que viva Mexico!

Mexico, Soviet Union, United States

1932

90 Min

Black and White

Russian

Currently 4.2/5 Stars.
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DIR Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Aleksandrov

PROD Kate Crane Gartz, S. Hillkowitz, Otto Kahn, Hunter S. Kimbrough, Mary Craig Sinclair, Upton Sinclair

SCR Grigori Aleksandrov

DP Gabriel Figueroa, Eduard Tisse

CAST Félix Balderas, Sara García, Martín Hernández, David Liceága, Julio Saldívar, Isabel Villaseñor

ED Grigori Alexandrov, Esfir Tobak

Synopsis

Having revolutionized film editing through such masterworks of montage as Potemkin and Strike, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein emigrated west in hopes of testing the capabilities of the American film industry. Quickly ostracized from Hollywood, Eisenstein, Grigory Alexandrov and photographer Eduard Tisse (at the urging of author Upton Sinclair) wandered south of the border where they began filming a highly stylized documentary on the people and volatile social climate of Mexico. Unfortunately, a lack of funds prohibited the film’s completion and the famed director was unable to edit the film. In 1979, by referring to Eisenstein’s extensive notes and sketches, Alexandrov assembled the most definitive version of the film; as close to Eisenstein’s vision as one is ever likely to see.

A blend of the ethnographic, the political, the scenic and the surreal, Qué Viva México! is nothing short of brilliant and remains superior to the legion of films it strongly influenced: Orson Welles’ It’s All True, Allejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo and the works of Sergio Leone. With sequences devoted to the Eden-like land of Tehuantepec, the savage majesty of the bullfight, the struggles of the noble peasant and the hypnotic imagery of the Day of the Dead, Qué Viva México! is a vivid tapestry of Mexican life which, thanks to Alexandrov’s careful restoration, takes its rightful place alongside Eisenstein’s other legendary works. —Kino Lorber

Director

Sergei Eisenstein

The son of a shipbuilder, Eisenstein chose a career in the arts over engineering or architecture. After W.W. I he worked as a designer and a director in the theater, where he developed his theory of “Soviet realism.” One of his plays was staged not in a theater but in a gasworks. It was inevitable that Eisenstein would gravitate toward cinema, with its natural potential for realism.

His 1st film, Strike (1924), was so inventive and vigorous that it drew immediate attention. The 27-year-old director filmed Potemkin in 2 months. It is remarkable for its maturity and masterly use of camera techniques. Eisenstein was also a pioneer in film editing, and the film is a virtual textbook of this art. In a famous scene, a baby carriage rolls down a long flight of steps while a horrified student watches helplessly from below. The images are intercut and the action slows down, alternating the separate images into one shocking scene. So original was his style that even though it has been… read more

When Soviet leaders became aware of the vast technical superiority of Hollywood production, it was only natural that the titanic young film maker should be chosen to study in the U.S. Eisenstein was lured by Hollywood as doggedly as a promising high school athlete is by American universities, but the promises of complete directorial freedom and vast sums of money never materialized. He signed with Paramount, whose executives were subsequently shocked that the Russian Cecil B. De Mille could come up with ideas so devoid of popular appeal. In 6 months Eisenstein and the studio proposed and rejected 7 projects before Paramount gave him a return ticket home.

By then, Eisenstein had been called a “defector” by the U.S.S.R. and was anxious to remain in America. He undertook filming a massive folk epic about Mexico, with the financial backing of the novelist Upton Sinclair. The stocky 32-year-old director was extremely temperamental. The project expanded from its 3-month schedule into a 2-year ordeal for the novelist, whose wife had mortgaged her house to finance the picture. Sinclair accused Eisenstein of maliciously discrediting anyone who stood in his way and of trying to stay in the U.S. regardless of the cost to his friends. “The most charitable interpretation that I can place upon Eisenstein is that he is an egomaniac,” Sinclair said. The project ended when Sinclair gave the editing of Que Viva Mexico to someone other than Eisenstein; the film was never completed. Eisenstein returned to Russia, completely dispirited, with nothing to show for 2 years’ work.

After he returned to the Soviet Union, Eisenstein was a man on a leash. As a teacher in the Moscow Film Institute and while directing his later films, he was under the watchful eye of Soviet censors. Eisenstein had to apologize publicly for forgetting “those great ideas that our art is summoned to serve”—namely, socialism. He died of a heart attack in 1948 while still working on a mammoth epic, Ivan the Terrible. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Eisenstein was once again honored in his native country. —Seagull Films

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Grigori Aleksandrov

Grigori Vasilyevich Aleksandrov or Alexandrov (Russian: Григорий Васильевич Александров – original family name was Мормоненко or Mormonenko; 23 January 1903 – 16 December 1983) was a prominent Soviet film director who was named a People’s Artist of the USSR in 1947 and a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1973. He was awarded the Stalin Prizes for 1941 and 1950.

Initially associated with Sergei Eisenstein, with whom he worked as a co-director, screenwriter and actor, Aleksandrov became a major director in his own right in the 1930s, when he directed Jolly Fellows and a string of other musical comedies starring his wife Lyubov Orlova.

Though Aleksandrov remained active until his death, his musicals, amongst the first made in the Soviet Union, remain his most popular films. They rival Ivan Pyryev’s films as the most effective and light-hearted showcase ever designed for Stalin-era USSR.

Aleksandrov was born Grigori Vasilyevich Mormonenko in Ekaterinburg, Russia in 1903. Starting… read more

Aleksandrov was born Grigori Vasilyevich Mormonenko in Ekaterinburg, Russia in 1903. Starting at age nine, Aleksandrov worked odd jobs at the Ekaterinburg Opera Theater, eventually making his way to assistant director. He also pursued a musical education, studying violin at the Ekaterinburg Musical School, from which he graduated in 1917.

Aleksandrov came to Moscow after studying directing and briefly managing a movie theater. In 1921, while acting with the Proletcult Theatre he met a then 23-year-old Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein and Aleksandrov collaborated on several plays before Eisenstein made his first feature length film, Strike, which Aleksandrov co-wrote with Eisenstein, Ilya Kravchunovsky, and Valeryan Pletnyov. Next came Eisenstein’s landmark The Battleship Potemkin, in which Aleksdanrov played Ippolit Giliarovsky. Aleksandrov co-directed Eisenstein’s next two features, October: Ten Days That Shook the World and The General Line, which were also their last works in the silent era.

Along with Eisenstein’s other major collaborator, cinematographer Eduard Tisse, Aleksandrov joined the director when he came to Hollywood in the early 1930s. He also traveled with them to Mexico for the filming of Eisenstein’s unrealized project about the country. An edited version of the footage, known as ¡Qué viva México!, was put together by Aleksandrov in 1979.

Aleksandrov returned to the Soviet Union in 1932 under direct orders from Stalin. He directed a pro-Stalin film, International (Интернационал), the following year and after a meeting with Stalin and Maxim Gorky, he embarked on making the first Soviet musical, Jolly Fellows, starring Leonid Utyosov and Lyubov Orlova, whom Aleksandrov would later marry. Orlova had been previoulsy married to an economist who had been arrested in 1930. She would go on to star in his most successful films: Circus, Volga Volga, and Bright Path.

Aleksdandrov’s first postwar film was Spring, another musical comedy starring Lyubov Orlova, as well as several other top-notch actors, including Nikolai Cherkasov, Erast Garin, and Faina Ranevskaya.

Popular public figures in the Soviet Union, Aleksandrov and Orlova had a difficult relationship with Stalin, who admired their films (he reportedly gave a print of Volga Volga as a present to Franklin Delano Roosevelt) but frequently harassed the pair, imprisoning or executing several of their close friends. Paradoxically, Aleksandrov found it harder to work in the more politically relaxed atmosphere that followed Stalin’s death. He taught directing at VGIK from 1951 to 1957 and made several films about the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, including several about Lenin.

His last narrative feature was Skvorets i Lira (Starling and Lyre) (1973), which starred Orlova in her last role and was not released. Orlova died in 1975. In 1983, he worked on a documentary about the career of his late wife. He died in December of that year of a kidney infection and was buried next to Orlova in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. —Wikipedia

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VENIMOS LOS JODIMOS Y NOS FUIMOS

12Mar13

Considerado como el más bello de los films inexistentes (muchos críticos aseguran que, de haber sido terminado y montado por su autor, éste trabajo sería por el cual Sergei M. Eisenstein hubiese sido más recordado que por otras obras como El Acorazado Potemkin), de fuertes reminiscencias pictóricas e impresionante en el aspecto visual, éste film maldito tiene además la meritoria particularidad de haber servido como fuente de inspiración formal y estilística de buena cantidad de trabajos de reconocidos directores mexicanos que iniciaron sus carreras durante la década de los treinta. (Es un hecho que las películas del Indio Fernández -el ejemplo más obvio- no hubiesen sido lo mismo de no haber existido en su totalidad esta cinta.) Seguramente Eisenstein nunca se imaginó que una simple invitación para venir de visita a México por parte de Diego Rivera y algunos otros intelectuales, terminaría convirtiéndose en uno de los capítulos más amargos de la historia de la cinematografía. Concebida originalmente como un mosaico fílmico sobre las tradiciones, la cultura y la historia de nuestro país, el talentoso realizador soviético decidió llevar a cabo este ambicioso proyecto como una manera de expresar la gran admiración que sentía por la nación azteca y, de paso, para sacarse la espina que significaron los frustrados intentos de concretar diversos proyectos en Estados Unidos. La empresa comenzó a ver la luz bajo los entusiastas auspicios financieros del escritor, político y empresario norteamericano Upton Sinclair (en cuya obra Oil! se basó el director Paul Thomas Anderson para su extraordinaria There Will Be Blood, 2007). Conforme avanzaba el tortuoso rodaje, el cual incluyó entre otros detalles desde un arresto por cortesía del Servicio Secreto mexicano al que se vieron sometidos Eisenstein y su equipo bajo sospecha de espionaje, hasta un asesinato ocurrido durante la filmación, se hicieron evidentes las diferencias creativas entre Sinclair y el director ruso, y al cabo de un tiempo el inicialmente bondadoso y alegre mecenas gringo se transformó en el principal detractor y enemigo del cineasta, llegando al extremo no sólo de detener la producción, sino de arrebatarle de las manos todo el pietaje filmado hasta ese entonces, el cual fue sujeto de múltiples ediciones apócrifas, siendo hasta 1979 (más de treinta años después de la muerte del cineasta) que Grigori Alexandrov, su más cercano colaborador, logró reunir todos los materiales y montarlos en la que, según parece, se trata de la aproximación más cercana a la idea original de Eisenstein.

Aguaespejo

24Feb13

Amazing that this butchered version is so eloquent, with Eisenstein's racialized view of Mexico as pure poetry. Faces act: peasants are pretty & landlords are fat & ugly. Languorous boys lounge about or prettify themselves for their deathly plays & women either earn gold or are coins to be traded around. I don't think it makes sense to question it as a view of reality; its triumphant when accepted as fantasy.

AKFilmFan

14Feb13

It's unfortunate the film fell through for Eisenstein but the reconstructed product is an adequate "travelogue" of Mexico but becomes another cinematic example "what if?" There are some fine moments to be had though that look like the work of the director.