¡Que viva México! Da zdravstvuyet Meksika!

This is the greatest documentary fiction I've ever seen, despite this movie was incomplete the beauty of the images is great, with a great culture you can make magic with the camera. The Mexican people have a wonderful big culture and personally I didn't know a little things about my own country.

About the part of fiction is great that this reality is happening know and the sense of revolution is present, i think that only a Russian could understand the sense of the work people.

The drama and the courage of the indians in the defense of the honor and the repression is a symbol of the revolution that needs the country.

Sergei Eisenstein's relationship with Hollywood was naturally doomed from the outset but a light appeared at the end of the tunnel when he was given the opportunity by Upton and Mary Sinclair of making a film in Mexico about that country's history and culture and contracted to deliver the finished product in six months. When he arrived in Tetlapayec he declared: "This is the place I have been looking for all my life!" Predictably his artistic vision kicked in and his ideas for the film became more grandiose. Like most great creative artistes Eisenstein felt constrained by neither time nor money but eventually both ran out. The plug was pulled, he was summoned back to Russia and lost control of editing thousands of feet of film. It was not until long after his death that his script advisor at the time, Grigori Alexandrov, was able to piece together what we now know as 'Que Viva Mexico!"

Although fragmented, enough remains to make this an engrossing and emotional experience. Contrasted with the lyricism of a courtship and marriage we have the brutal images of a bull's carcass being dragged from the ring and the trampling to death of the peons. It is to be regretted that nothing at all was filmed of what promised to be the most exciting episode, that of the Mexican Revolution. What little remains of the Epilogue is a filmic gem. How blessed was Eisenstein in having the services of cinematographer Edward Tissé.

We should be grateful I suppose to have this much considering the fate that befell his 'Bezhin Meadow'.

Eisenstein was a director of monumental stature but destined to be sorely tried. This Mexican misadventure must surely have been a bitter disappointment to him but his biographer Marie Seton has observed that as a result of this failed project "an entirely new filmic theory of composition came to him." Looking ahead to 'Alexander Nevsky' and 'Ivan the Terrible', she may very well be right.

Que Viva Mexico is an interesting (reconstruction of a) film by Sergei Eisenstein, the director of so many masterpieces. In fact, of all that I have seen, this is the only non-masterpiece of the bunch. Even the reconstruction of Beshin Meadow I like more. Que Viva Mexico is a semi-documentary. Most of it is uninteresting and, unlike Eisenstein's other films and Tisse's other cinematography, poorly composed. The only parts of real interest come near the end, with the rebellion, something that Eisenstein was used to creating on screen. There is a great gunfight with a woman participating, a precursor to Alexander Nevsky's Vasilisa, and there is a great scene where some rebels are buried up to the shoulders underground and then trampled by horses (by far the best scene in the film). The Day of the Dead celebration is also very interesting. There is also a bullfight that will demonstrate just how cruel bullfighting is.

I do have to complain about the reconstruction that I watched. This was supposed to be a silent film, I believe. The narration I did not mind, for Eisenstein would have had to find a way to communicate what the narrator did anyway. And the music is good, often great. But I object to the insertion of diagetic sound effects, like guns shooting and horses galloping. This is ridiculous. Obviously the only people who are ever going to see this film are Eisenstein enthusiasts, so to try to sell it to the public as a sound movie is ridiculous. Why?

I was going to skip this because Eisenstein never finished it. He filmed for months without completing what he wanted. He had to return to the Soviet Union, the film got impounded, and he had no access to the footage for the rest of his life. After his death, his codirector on October: Ten Days that Shook the World and The General Line, Grigori Aleksandrov got access to the footage and put together a short feature that approximated what Eisenstein was supposed to have wanted. This is that result. It reminds me of some of Orson Welles's abandoned projects, mostly Mr. Arkadin, in that it should be Eisenstein's, but no matter how hard you squint: it's not going to be.

It's supposed to be the history of Mexico, and considering that Eisenstein shot somewhere between 30 and 50 hours of footage, I doubt it was supposed to be only 90 minutes long. I mean...I don't expect a 20 hour film out of that, but since he wasn't even done filming and considering the large scope intended, I suspect he was going for a multi-part film, like how he originally started in the Soviet Union and had planned a series of films detailing the history of Russia from the revolution of 1905 to the October Revolution in 1917. That was never supposed to be a 90 minute film. It was supposed to be a series of films, and I suspect that what became Que Viva Mexico as supposed to be like that.

However, what Aleksandrov quickly threw together in a few months was a 90-minute long film, something that reminded more of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno with far less behind the scenes interviews (Aleksandrov does introduce and exit the film in small segments in an editing bay).

So, the story of Mexico is handled through vignettes. The opening, essentially pre-Spanish, shows local Mexican natives sitting on Mayan temples and mourning a dead person. The second is still pre-Spanish about the matriarchal organization of society, portraying a perfect native society where no one ever dies, no one ever fights, and no one ever has conflict (a Rousseau influence on communist thought which I've always found interesting since the Soviet experiment early was all about industry and wealth of the modern world). The third is all about a bull fight, a cultural introduction by the Spanish, and it's probably the most exciting part of the film. It's all done through editing of what looks to be predominantly a real bullfight, and Eisenstein just follows the action expertly. This feels like classic Eisenstein, Aleksandrov mimicking well the deceased Soviet filmmaker's editing techniques.

The next is the longest about a young peasant in Spanish controlled Mexico before the Mexican revolution who has to take his bride to the local landowner (there are obvious visual echoes of the main kulak in The General Line). The landowner steals the bride, kidnapping her to do with as he wills, and the peasant leads a small, unsuccessful rebellion against the landowner, leading to the peasant being buried alive up to his neck until he dies as horses stomp on him.

An interesting aspect of this is that Eisenstein shot silent. He shot in 1931, two years into the sound era, using funding from American sources, and he either couldn't or chose to not use sound. Since so much was filmed outside, it might have been a cost/benefit ratio aspect where getting sound outside with the primitive equipment, even top of the line stuff, was so hard and expensive to do well. So, in order to capture the "reality" of the situation, and to make the most of a relatively small budget, he chose to shoot silently. I only bring it up because the early sound era is my favorite period in film history.

So, the portraits of Mexican life are interesting in their idyllic manifestations. The bull fight is exciting. The story of the plight of the peasant looking for his girl is good ole fashioned underdog against the odds storytelling (with a downer ending because propaganda against the ancien regime). It's more of a fractured curio, a remnant of an incomplete film, partially reconstructed by the director's friend and compatriot in the Soviet film industry (another Soviet director, Sergei Bondarchuck, the director of War and Peace, provides some narration as well), than a completed film. However, on that scale, I actually found it quite interesting as a portrait of a production that will never see completion. Part entertaining, part informative, Que Viva Mexico is quite worth discovery for Eisenstein completists.

If you know about Sergei Eisenstein's "Que Viva Mexico! - Da zdravstvuyet Meksika!", you probably know that Eisenstein ran out of money and left the movie incomplete, so collaborator Grigoriy Aleksandrov organized the footage as close to how Eisenstein envisioned it. I personally thought that it was a fascinating movie, but one of many films where they throw so much at you that it's really hard to digest.

Knowing that Eisenstein met with the execs at Paramount Pictures but didn't see eye to eye with them, I get the feeling that he may have made this movie in part to indict US involvement in Latin America. As we Americans were supposed to view our southern neighbor as the land of sombreros and senoritas, he wanted to show that there was a more serious-intellectual side, and of course the indigenous aspect.

In my opinion, the combination of the Day of the Dead sequence and the rebellion at the end really constitute the movie's strength, sort of like the rebellion in "Battleship Potemkin". Much of the rest of the film consists of very exaggerated facial expressions (the Russians love those, don't they?). But either way, I still recommend the movie as an important installation in cinematic history, exactly the sort of thing to show in film classes. If anything surprised me, it was that they were allowed to show nudity; I always sort of assume that no major movie in any country was allowed to back then (but don't get me wrong: some of those women were really hot!).