I came across this film tonight on netflix

 

WOW

 

what an interesting story

not just the movie itself but the story of how the movie got made

 

in 1930 the famous Russian director Sergei Eisenstein

 (Battleship Potemkin and The Ten Days That Shook the World among others)

 

 

came to Hollywood to make a movie

it is said it did not work out well as his and Hollywood's vision diverged greatly

Charlie Chaplin introduced him to the socialist writer Upton Sinclair

the Sinclair's decided to finance Eisenstein to make a movie in Mexico

 

 

 Eisenstein in Mexico during the filming

gotta love this guy

 

he shot hundreds of thousands of feet of film in Mexico

the movie was way over budget and way over it's time limit

and Sinclair pulled the plug

the film was sent to LA and Sergei planned to follow it and edit it

 

Upton Sinclair was so pissed that the movie took too long and was still not finished

he made sure that Eisenstein was not allowed back into the United States

in addition his foray into the West had made them suspicious of him back home in Russia

a suspicion that never went away

 

Sinclair had some of the footage made into shorts and a feature in 1933

 not very successfully

 

in the 1970's Russia finally got the footage back

Eisenstein died in 1948

but the cameraman who had worked with him in Mexico, Gorgori Alexsandrove

 

 

 

put the film together - true to what he thought Eisenstein was trying to do

 

it is a series of vignettes,or as Sergei called them "a sequence of short novellas"

a loose history of Mexico

the old footage is fascinating, the faces, the cloths, the houses, the instruments, the music 

and the graveyards

 

 

 

narrated in Russian, English sub-titles, black and white, very powerful