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Eisenstein, Sergej (Sergei) and Ernest Lindgren:

Que viva Mexico! With an introduction by Ernest Lindgren.

Kirkegaards Antikvariat
kir59358
London: Vision Press Ltd., 1951. 8vo. Publishers hardcover with slightly worn but unclipped dustjacket. 89 pp. Illustrated with photographs, still from the movie. Very good copy.

First edition. Da zdravstvuyet Meksika! is a film project begun in 1930 by Eisenstein (1898–1948) under contract to socialist author Upton Sinclair and other supporters in the United States. It would have been an episodic portrayal of Mexican culture and politics from pre-Conquest civilization to the Mexican Revolution. Production was beset by difficulties and was eventually abandoned. Jay Leyda and Zina Voynow call it Eisentein's "greatest film plan and his greatest personal tragedy". In the early 20th century, many intellectuals and artists associated with the European avant garde were fascinated by Latin America in general, and by Mexico in particular: for the French artist and leader of the Surrealist movement André Breton, for instance, Mexico was almost the incarnation of Surrealism. As film historian David Bordwell notes, "like many Leftists, Eisenstein was impressed that Mexico has created a socialist revolution in 1910". His fascination with the country dated back at least to 1921, when at the age of twenty-two "his artistic career started with a Mexican topic" as he put on a theatrical version of the Jack London story The Mexican in Moscow. Film scholar Inga Karetnikova details this production as a classic example of avant-garde aesthetics, an exercise in form rather than documentary realism; but "indirectly", she argues, "he did recreate the Mexican atmosphere". Above all, he saw in the Mexican revolution an instance of a "zealous idealism" that was also "close to Eisenstein, just as it was to the entire generation of Soviet avant-garde of the early 1920s". Some years later, in 1927, Eisenstein had the opportunity to meet the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who was visiting Moscow for the celebrations of the Russian revolution's tenth anniversary. Rivera had seen Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, and praised it by comparing it to his own work as a painter in the service of the Mexican revolution; he also "spoke obsessively of the Mexican artistic heritage", describing the wonders of Ancient Aztec and Mayan art and architecture. The Russian director wrote that "the seed of interest in that country . . . nourished by the stories of Diego Rivera, when he visited the Soviet Union . . . grew into a burning desire to travel there". "It’s a really tragic film, because its ambitions were so great, it was spanning centuries of time, extraordinary resources were marshaled towards its production, and all we have is this ruin essentially, but it’s a glorious ruin." (Thomas Beard).
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