Saw Que Viva Mexico. This was an attempt by Aleksandrov to finish an unfinished film that Eisenstein was making about the Mexican revolution. He was unable to complete it due to budgetary constraints and Stalin running out of patience. I'm sort of annoyed at my movie list that recommended this film however. It lists this film as having been released in 1932, indicating that it's in fact recommending the original, unfinished, partially lost Eisenstein film! How am I supposed to lay my eyes on that?
Anyway, this film was a typically gorgeous Eisenstein film where characters with strong motivations, strong jaws, but zero personalities act out the beginnings of the revolution. It cleverly ties geography to history, moving out of the jungles into the deserts and north, towards towns which are more civilized, but where class struggle is more readily apparent.
Apparently Eisenstein was inspired to shoot the film this way by seeing the great variety of lifestyles and architecture readily available in Mexico. You can see how right he was: there are stone fortresses, cactus forests, jungles, and those strange agave plants, so huge and alien. The film is very pretty and contains a lot of striking visuals: a man's face looming over a Mayan pyramid, a man with a gun silhouetted against a door frame. Eisenstein has a great eye for conveying information and drama purely symbolically. As I kind of mentioned earlier, he's not the best at creating interpersonal melodrama (of which I am greatly fond) but he's good at creating sweeping historical, political dramas, which made him the ideal director for Communist Russia.
Worth a look!
No comments:
Post a Comment