“My film shall be
a poem of love, death, and immortality,
for which I have chosen Mexico as the subject
matter."
Sergei
M. Eisenstein
The Russian
director Sergei M. Eisenstein is without doubt one of the most
influential creators of modern cinema. His films Battleship
Potemkin, Aleksandr Nevsky, and Ivan the
Terrible, are respected throughout the world and feature at the
top of cinema history’s all-time greats. One of his films, however,
is still missing: the epic Que Viva Mexico!, the only film
he ever was to shoot outside Russia.
Que Viva Mexico! was shot in Mexico in 1931 at the height of
the Great Depression. The famous novelist Upton Sinclair, his wife
Mary Craig, and a small group of likeminded friends were the
courageous financiers of this ambitious project.
Shortly after start of principal photography, the production
encountered difficulties in keeping on schedule and within budget,
and in early 1932, Sinclair was forced to call a halt to filming.
Shooting was stopped with most of the work completed. Only one
episode could not be filmed. At the same time, Joseph Stalin
insisted on Eisenstein's immediate return to the Soviet Union,
threatening the filmmaker’s life if he were to disobey
orders.
In early 1934,
Eisenstein left for Moscow with Sinclair's promise in mind that the
negatives would be forwarded so he could finalize the editing of
the film in the USSR. Several times Sinclair tried in vain to live
up to his word, unaware that the Soviet film industry had
instructions not to import the negatives. Eisenstein had left
Russia as a celebrity, upon his return three years later he was
denounced as a political renegade. In the eyes of Stalin,
Eisenstein had become renegade, and the Russian leader punished the
filmmaker by preventing him from finishing his most daring project.
For five years, Eisenstein was not allowed to make films and had to
revert to teaching at the State Film School. The Stalinist
propaganda that heaped all the blame on Upton Sinclair for the
tragic end of Que Viva Mexico! prevailed for decades to
come.
However, all is not lost thanks to the foresight of Upton Sinclair,
who deposited the unedited negative of Que Viva Mexico! with
the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, in the 1950s, and film
historian Jay Leyda, a former student of Eisenstein, who made the
footage subsequently accessible. Mexican Picture Partnership
believes that those seventy years of archival care and investment
in preserving the essence of Que Viva Mexico! will
eventually result in an authentic reconstruction. It is a lost
treasure that is waiting to be discovered and appreciated by a new
generation.