For anyone who’s interested in this sort of thing, Experimental Cinema was basically an organ of Soviet avant-garde movie-making published in English. It includes articles written by Sergei Eisenstein, Béla Balázs, Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and numerous others from that milieu. El Lissitzky and Aleksandr Rodchenko were employed as photographers for the journal. You can download a few issues published between 1930 and 1934 courtesy of the Internet Archive. Movie posters for some of the films discussed in its pages can be found in my post from a few days ago on the Stenberg brothers.

The following review of Eisenstein’s unfinished masterpiece, Que viva México!, was written by the American filmmaker and studio producer Morris Helprin. At the time, both he and his wife were committed communists. Later, Helprin became president of London Films in Hollywood (one article in Experimental Cinema called Hollywood “the sales agent of American imperialism”). Still, quite a neat summary and some behind-the-scenes details. If you’re interested in reading more about it, you can download the following texts or watch the full-length movie below.

• Andrea Noble, “Seeing through ¡Que viva México!: Eisenstein’s Travels in Mexico”
• Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBTdUD0UOl8

Mexican peasants, watching from a hilltop the passing funeral

Production still showing Eisenstein, Aleksandrov, and Tisse at work on “Que viva Mexico!” Here Eisenstein’s collective production company is at work, Eisentein on the right

Eisenstein looking into the finder to gauge an angle closeup of a Mexican woman

Eisenstein and Aleksandrov on the ruins of Chichenita in Yucatan, Mexco (1931)

Still from Eisenstein’s “Que viva Mexico!”

Girl from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec

Funeral ceremony of the Mayan Indians

The dwellers of Yucatan, land of ruins and huge pyramids, have still conserved in feature and forms the character of their ancestors, the great race of ancient Mayas

Eisenstein and Tisse preparing a shot on the pyramids of Teotihuacan, Mexico (1932)

Mexican women mourning over the coffin of a dead boy, during the “Maguey” episode

Martin Hernandez, 21-year-old Mexican-Indian peasant and native of Apam, the principal character of the “Maguey” episode

On the Hacienda Tetlapayac, work hymn of the Mexican proletariat

In the country of the magueys

Daily ceremony at dawn

Death comes along dancing

Still from “Que viva Mexico!”

Youthful beauty blossoms on the screen

Angle closeup from the bull-fight sequence in the “Romance” episode

Closeup of Martin Hernandez, the Mexican-Indian

The film is a poem of a sociological character. Rather an interpretive essay of Mexico’s evolution – Agustin Aragon Leiva

This still and the shorts illustrating the synopsis of the scenario for “Que Viva Mexico!” were taken by Eduard Tisse

Martin Hernandez in the Maguey episode

Maria is forgotten

Eisenstein in Mexico

Morris Helprin
Experimental Cinema
September 1932

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“Que Viva Mexico!”

It is the first film made in the Western hemisphere to assume the mantle of maturity. The furthest step yet from the idiocies of corn-fed Hollywood. It turns its tail up at the banal; thumbs its nose at the benign. It is pictorial rhetoric of such vital force that it thunders and roars. Yet it contains every aspect of the popular cinema.

“QUE VIVA MEXICO!”

That day at Los Remedios, when we walked over the hills in search of a suitable location, served as an indication of Eisenstein’s preciseness, his exciting demands that his subject be even in quality. All Mexico around us was “beautiful enough to swoon in.” Here was no prettiness of the postcard cinema, none of your oak-paneled pictures that need but sprinklings of chemical brilliants to turn them into revolting chromes. The top of a mountain and an ancient aqueduct jutting at a seven-thousand foot height into a stilled canopy of swan-white clouds. You could set your camera down at almost any spot and grind. And have a beautiful scenic.

But the Russian, followed hastily by Tisse, his cameraman, Aragon, a young Mexican intellectual who serves as a guide, interpreter, and go-between, a camera boy, and myself, trailed by five peons who were the day’s actors at a peso each, led a frantic chase to find the spot. Following which were at least a dozen of the spots. Continue reading →