Pierre Radulescu 1929: Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Aleksandrov and Eduard Tisse headed West in search for contracts. A short documentary (unfinished) for a German client, then in France their first sound movie (Romance Sentimentale). Nevertheless the target was Hollywood, where Eisenstein would not succeed to find a contract (neither would Leni Riefenstahl, a couple of years later).After one year, in 1930, Upton Sinclair sponsored the Soviet team for a movie about Mexico. The movie couldn't be finished: lack of more money, lack of more time. The guys went back to Moscow and the filmed material remained at Upton Sinclair.There are several contradictory versions about what happened and why it happened; anyway, the footage arrived eventually at Moscow, in the seventies. Eisenstein and Tisse were dead by that time. Only Aleksandrov was alive. He restored the material and asked Sergei Bondarchuk to be the narrator: the result was да здравствует Мексика! (¡Que viva México!).The movie has six episodes: a prologue (Tisse moving slowly the camera over pyramids, Aztec sculptures, motionless people along carved deities, a country that's extremely diverse, where all ages of history coexist, timelessly and motionlessly) - a wedding (in a place where the society is still living in matriarchate) - a religious procession (superb images again: three youngsters carrying the cross, toward three priests like Aztec masks, facing three skulls) - a corrida - a story with three young peasants killed by a landlord and buried alive (Tisse gave here a very shocking image, while one of the most powerful cinematic scenes I have ever seen) - the epilogue (a joyful festival for the All Souls Day, a fabulous celebration of the Dead). A seventh episode was no more shot, Soldaderas, Eisenstein had in mind to focus it on women, the female Revolution soldiers.The restitution made by Aleksandrov seemed to me very honest - he didn't add anything, and, very important, he didn't edit the film - I'm sure Eisenstein would have put the episodes in parallel like in Griffith's Intolerance; Aleksandrov let them sequential, which was fortunate - one needs the genius of Griffith or Eisenstein to not fail. Only a titan has that power to tell four or five stories in the same time, following their rhythm.

ruralplain The pleasure of the film is in the noble vistas of the kind Social Realist (aka Marxist) directors so excel at creating. It is horribly marred, however, by an absolutely puerile view of Mexican society and history. Not only are both viewed from a naive Marxist perspective, but the original material being twisted to fit a Marxist perspective is already twisted by Eisenstein's foolish inventions. His fascination with his own surreal idea of Mexican countrywomen walking around without shirts betrays a leering attitude toward women and an almost unbelievably patronizing attitude toward Mexico, which becomes a sort of south Pacific paradise of sexually liberated and smiling honeys. The purely pagan wedding ceremony in Indian dress including feathers belongs to the Hollywood genre of Shangri-la. The sequence in the maguey plantation is visually very interesting, but the narrative is about as unreal and stupid as was ever seen on film. This film is to be recommended only for its visuals, and even this will be enjoyed by very tolerant viewers.

MisterWhiplash Considering that Que Viva Mexico was (mostly) made by Sergei Eisenstein, and funded by Upton Sinclair, the most happy surprise is that the film isn't overloaded with the kind of communist/socialist propaganda that would be immediately expected. It's not that this would be a bad thing in the technical sense; Eisenstein, on the front of being a pure visionary, couldn't be stopped no matter how thin he stretched himself for his means as a director who had to stay to party/country guidelines. And for Sinclair, the meatier the context the better the hyperbole. But with Que Viva Mexico! we get a view of the people and customs like out of a measured fever dream. We're given more-so the customs and the traditions, the practice of a marriage, the bullfights, some of the context of the history behind those 'Day of the Dead' parades. Only here and there are any blatant pleas seen and heard loud and clear (mostly involving the poorest of the poor in the lot).Actually, it could be something, in a sense, comparable to Werner Herzog in attempting the documentary form. It's not quite fiction, but it's presenting documentary in a stylized manner, where things aren't simply stock footage but very much a set-up of the construction of drama in the scenes and scene-location specific shots and angles. And like Herzog, Eisenstein has a poet's eye for visions that many might only see in the most remote history books or travelogues. While the accompanying narration for Que Viva Mexico is a little on the creaky end, there's no lack of splendor for the senses as far as getting an eye full of carefully picked locals (i.e. the girl Concepcion for the marriage scenes) or for mixing real documentary footage of the bullfight with careful constructed shots of the bullfighter before and after the fact. Even the music plays a nifty role in the dramatization of events. And here and there, especially as the film rolls along in its last third, a subtle sensation of the surreal drifts into the proceedings.Unfortunately, like It's All True for Orson Welles, Que Viva Mexico remains something of a carefully plucked fragment from a lost bit in the director's career. It's a minor marvel, and certainly more than a curiosity for the die-hard documentary or Mexican history buff, but it's stayed obscurer than Eisenstein's more infamous pieces (Potemkin, Alexander Nevksy) for a reason. Despite all the best intentions to simply reveal the cultural day-to-day workings and a little of the socio-political context of the Conquistadors' impact, it's a cool curiosity at best.

Lee Eisenberg 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!).