Despite having films to his name such as Strike, Battleship Potemkin and October, the Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein was thwarted in his attempts to set up films in Hollywood, so in the early thirties he planned to make films in Mexico. With the support of documentary film-maker Robert Flaherty, the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, the writer Upton Sinclair and his wealthy wife, the basis was laid to make Que viva México! This film was to be about the myths, the art (especially the typical murals), the religion, the death cult, the social struggle and the history of the Mexican people. Eisenstein was accompanied by Grigori Alexandrov and cameraman Eduard Tissé. During their fourteen-month stay in Mexico, the three became increasingly fascinated by the beauty of the landscape and the people. Eisenstein’s ideas about his filmic travelogue of Mexico became more and more megalomaniacal and the patience of his financiers ran out. The project was stopped and several sequences found their way in mutilated form into dubious documentaries.The detailed, very informative documentary Eisenstein in Mexico uses more than two hundred photos and fragments from the film to sketch a picture of what may be the most famous unfinished film in history. Those who see the tightly composed pictures of Mayan temples and cruel peasant punishment rituals will understand why the film has acquired that status.
