Feature film
Que Viva Mexico!
¡Que viva México!
Sergei M. Eisenstein · 1931
Synopsis
A film shot in Mexico in 1931 and 1932 and never completed. The project comprised a prologue, four narratives and an epilogue: the Mayan ruins and the faces of Yucatán; “Sandunga”, a courtship and a wedding on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; “Fiesta”, a bullfight and religious festivals; “Maguey”, the revolt of young peons on a hacienda, buried up to their necks as punishment; “Soldadera”, never shot; and finally the Day of the Dead, when people mock death.
Context
The shoot was financed by the writer Upton Sinclair, his wife and a few friends; the Depression led Sinclair to stop it in early 1932, and the filmmaker, recalled to Moscow, left Mexico in April without having edited the some seventy thousand metres of film. Others made films from it, including Thunder Over Mexico (1933). Deposited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the rushes were sent to the Soviet Union, where Grigori Alexandrov, his assistant, edited in 1979 the version now screened.
Who it is for
One hour twenty-five minutes in Alexandrov's version, between documentary and fiction; a posthumous edit, much debated.
Prizes and reception
The never-completed film that fixed an entire visual repertoire of Mexico, taken up by the filmmakers of the golden age of Mexican cinema.
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