¡SERGEI EISENSTEIN MÉXICO!: "Death Day" / THUNDER OVER MEXICO / "Outtakes"

ABOUT THE EVENT:

Sergei Eisenstein travelled to Mexico December 1930 to experience firsthand its “geographical, ethnological, cultural and historical diversity” and to make a feature film. After shooting tons of beautiful 35mm footage, drawing hundreds of sketches and writing volumes of critical texts, he departed April 1932 without a completed project. This digital edition explores his unfinished cinema work available in partially edited fragments realized by others. The content and quality of the different releases vary greatly due to many factors none of which reflect poorly on Eisenstein. Viewed together with newly created interviews and reflections, the short and long films form a magnificent magical testament dedicated to the spirit of unbound creativity

Film notes by Bruce Posner

ABOUT THE FILMS:

“Death Day,” 1934, Dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 16 Mins, Kino Lorber

The third film completed and released by producer Sol Lesser for Principal Pictures, Death Day focused on the annually celebrated November 2 “Day of the Dead” festivities in an ebullient direct homage to the Mexican graphic street artist José Guadalupe Posada. Everyone pictured laughs and dances in the face of Death, who is present everywhere from the graveyard to the fairground. And to celebrate, the fermented agave liquor, pulque flows! Although Eisenstein did not edit this, his exquisite sense of México and its people, culture and traditions are clearly conveyed by choreography orchestrated by Eisenstein and Alexandrov and captured by Tissé’s wide-angle 28mm cinematography.

FORMAT: DCP

THUNDER OVER MEXICO, 1933, Dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 70 Mins, Kino Lorber

Upton Sinclair’s feature-length version of Eisenstein’s ¡QUE VIVA MÉXICO! was prepared by veteran film producer Sol Lesser from the miles of footage shot in and around Chichén Itzá, Hacienda Tetlapayac, and Mexico City. A disappointment if one expected montage à la Battleship Potemkin, even if it does deliver Tissé’s spectacular depictions of Mexican scenery and Mexican life sectioned into short and long thematic tableaux. The main body of the film exhibits a “good guys vs bad guys” Western melodrama of 1906 vintage with plenty of cowboy action, although hardly the profound epic envisioned by Eisenstein that we will never know. THUNDER OVER MEXICO is a direct result of Eisenstein’s absence from the editing room. Yet as finally released, the film deserves reappraisal for what it does do. The post-production team in Hollywood transformed the silently shot material into an intriguing early ‘30s sound film hybrid, one that freely mixes genres bouncing between exotic travelogue, narrative potboiler, experimental art and a political message. Beyond the stunning cinematography, the craftsmanship of its construction is impressive and undeniably displays a meticulously conceived series of shots. The matrix of glances, reactions, movements and asides blends hundreds of interlocking glimpses into the internal thought processes of its main characters as the film unfolds in time. The awkwardness produced by this cascade of impressions works against conventional storytelling and hints at a James Joycian stream of consciousness such as explored in Ulysses, a book deeply admired by Eisenstein. Definitely time to credit THUNDER OVER MEXICO as an important part of the fallout from the overall disaster of Eisenstein’s Mexican project.

FORMAT: DCP

“Outtakes,” 1930-1932, Dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 24 Mins, Kino Lorber

The aim of this present film is purely instructional: to summarize Eisenstein’s film plan, and to restore a few fragmentary sequences from the unfinished ¡QUE VIVA MÉXICO! as they came from Tisse’s camera, without attempting to convey the final form that this footage would have taken.… The proposed structure was complex. There were to be four “novellas,” framed with prologue and epilogue. These six parts touched wide contrasts of time, place and emotion – amounting to an epic poem of Mexican history and culture. The thematic link of the six parts was “the unity of death and life.” (Jay Leyda)

FORMAT: DCP