Viva Mexico Research Articles

Viva Mexico! The Cultural Politics Behind the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Bid

Abstract This article is a case study of the vision of Mexican history, identity, and culture that won the 1968 Summer Olympic Games for Mexico City. The Mexican elites’ portrayal of Mexico as a modern, cosmopolitan nation contributing to emerging global institutions and ideals in the postcolonial era ensured the bid's success. The article's core is a close reading of the official bid and bidding process. This analysis is supplemented and sharpened by contrasting it with alternative visions of Mexican nationalism and the competing Buenos Aires bid. Guided by symbolic interactionism and theories of cultural politics, the study highlights the unique status of Mexico and Latin America in the Olympic Movement, reminds us of the role of the International Olympic Committee in constructing global order in the Cold War era, and shows the value of studying alternative and unsuccessful visions of nationalism, modernity, and global cosmopolitanism.

A sobrevivência da estátua

No poema de Manuel Bandeira o cacto é uma estátua. Essa estátua tomba e interrompe a vida na cidade. Na morte o cacto se historiciza e, nesse sentido, ganha vida. A montagem das imagens no poema e sua leitura vertical, livre, nos apontam para outras imagens como as da escultura negra de Carl Einstein e sua leitura por Chris Marker e Alain Resnais em As estátuas também morrem, ou imagens como as poses dos nativos em ¡Que viva México! de Eisenstein. A morte revolucionária e a intratabilidade fazem do cacto uma estátua sobrevivente.

Immersion Through Culture: Representations of the “Day of the Dead” in Film

The Mexican celebration of the “Day of the Dead” (Día de Muertos or Día de los Muertos) has been recurrently used in film, with three of the most notable examples ranging from the recent Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, 2017) and Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015), all the way back to the surviving footage of ¡Que Viva Mexico! (Sergei Eisenstein, 1931, unfinished). Though vastly different from one another in almost every respect, all three cases explore the topic of “in-between” both thematically and technically: the celebration that merges life and death becomes a visual metaphor and a tool for filmmakers to explore the ways in which film technique creates overlapping areas between cinema and reality. In each film, a visually powerful cultural asset such as the “Day of the Dead,” is combined with different aspects of film technique, explicitly, but differently, appealing to a kind of sensory immersion in order to attract viewers inside its world. By doing so, the “Day of the Dead” exemplifies the ways in which a common cultural element can help translate the personal visions of different filmmakers into distinct filmic events.

Sergei Eisenstein as Seen by Peter Greenaway: A Dialectic Representation of an (Anti-)Great Film Director

ABSTRACTPeter Greenaway’s recent biopic of the great Russian film director and master of montage Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, forms an important addition to filmic life writing. Greenaway ‘writes’ Eisenstein on screen through the film director’s actions as documented across an array of sources—including Eisenstein’s own autobiography—but he also reveals Eisenstein’s inner thoughts and feelings, using Eisenstein’s own voice (that is, his theories and film practice). Rather than portraying the Russian director at work, Greenaway opted to present Eisenstein’s directorial film philosophy, attempting to capture the essence of being ‘Eisenstein’. The film focuses on fourteen crucial months in the director’s life: the period he spent in Mexico, from where he was banished without completing what could have been his directorial masterpiece, the film Que Viva Mexico! Greenaway is laudatory of Eisenstein’s importance for the history of cinema, whilst depicting him in carnivalesque and corporeally grotesque terms. Thus, Greenaway simultaneously portrays Eisenstein as a great man and an anti-hero, in truly dialectical form. These apparently contradictory images of the cinematic master, functioning as thesis and antithesis, build up into something larger: a synthetic Eisenstein. The result is a larger-than-life, entirely ecstatic Eisenstein and an ode to his synaesthetic and dialectical approach to life and cinema. In doing this, however, Greenaway doubles his subject’s ‘voice’ with his own and also ‘writes’ himself through Sergei Eisenstein’s theory and practice.

When Peter Met Sergei: Art Cinema Past, Present and Future inEisenstein in Guanajuato

Peter Greenaway has established himself as one of British cinema's most distinctive film-makers. Yet he also remains one of its most controversial and problematic figures. In the 1980s and early1990s, alongside Derek Jarman, Greenaway came to embody British art cinema. He subsequently has taken on the paradoxical status of a major film-maker who simultaneously exists on the margins. He has also become a self-imposed exile who believes that his unique brand of art cinema is best appreciated on the continent. In effect, Greenaway has become British art cinema's prodigal son. This article focuses on Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015), a semi-fictionalised account of the ten days that Eisenstein spent in the city of Guanajuato while filming the uncompleted Que Viva Mexico! The article argues that what makes Eisenstein in Guanajuato so resonant is the way in which Greenaway both celebrates cinema's past while also daring to suggest a possible future. Indeed, while this article will show that the film is part of a new phase in Greenaway's career which is devoted to biographical films about artists, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is no simple biopic of Eisenstein. Rather, it offers a complex fusion of both the Russian and British film-makers’ theories about the cinema, particularly their shared interest in film aspect ratios and the concept of the total art work. Furthermore, it stands as a superb illustration of Greenaway's vision of cinema as an interactive and encyclopaedic medium. As this is a co-production between the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Finland and Mexico, which featured no British investment and, at the time of writing, has yet to be shown in the UK, this article will also show that we require new ways of theorising art cinema not only in British but also in international contexts.

The journalist and the other: on the vestiges of investigation and writing

Understanding and writing journalistic narratives as developments in a unique relationship with time itself as well as questioning issues intrinsic to the profession is healthy. The current research examines books written by journalists as a space to pursue such understanding. More broadly, we aim to stress the relationship between media narratives with contemporary issues in a lapsed conceptual space. Thus, our examination takes into consideration three works by Portuguese journalist and writer Alexandra Lucas Coelho: Afghan Notebook (2009), Viva Mexico (2013) and Tahrir! The Days of the Revolution (2011), exploring what they tell us about Journalism and its processes of writing and investigating the concepts of time and of the Other.

Cavendish, Philip. The Men with the Movie Camera: The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s (review)

SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 762 Cavendish, Philip. The Men with the Movie Camera: The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s. Berghahn Books, Oxford and New York, 2013. xii + 342 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Filmography. Bibliography. Index. £68.00: $110.00. Philip Cavendish’s fine new book invites us to look anew at a number of Soviet films from the 1920s, this time seeing them not as the product of solitary director-auteurs imposing their artistic vision on a crew of more-or-less pliant technical assistants, but rather as the result of the creative genius of the ‘men with the movie camera’, the camera operators whose abilities to select lenses, organizeeffectivelighting,andframeshotscontributedsomuchtoSovietavantgarde cinema during the silent era. Focusing on five particularly productive partnerships between cameraman and film director — Eduard Tisse and Sergei Eizenshtein, Anatolii Golovnia and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Andrei Moskvin and the FEKS directors (Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg), and Danylo Demuts´kyi and Oleksandr Dovzhenko — the author sets himself the goal of teasing out the ‘signature’ of the under-appreciated camera operator. The result is not just an informative education in the technical procedures of shooting a film in the Soviet 1920s, and not just a long overdue appreciation of the talents of these brilliant technical artists behind the camera, but also a fascinating reassessment of films we thought we knew well. Although in his first chapter Cavendish makes the claim that his argument ‘challenges the very notion of the auteur in relation to Soviet avant-garde cinema’ (p. 13), in practice his approach is not quite that radical. What he seeks for his cameramen is rather an expansion of the notion of the auteur that would include them: ‘It will be argued that the camera operator should be recognized as “co-director”, and thus co-author, of the many experimental classics of the post-revolutionary silent period’ (p. 13). Since his focus is on the camera operator’s role, of course Cavendish tends to give credit to the cameraman in question over the director in question, but much of the time it is difficult or impossible (despite Cavendish’s advocacy) to sort out which person should get the credit for which specific device or effect in a film. If the unedited footage of Que Viva Mexico shows Tisse experimenting with different lenses, for instance, that does not mean that Eizenshtein had no hand in the experiment, nor does it tell us what the effect of Eizenshtein’s choice from among these shots might have been, had he had the chance to work with this footage. Although the final calculus of authorship must have too many variables for us to settle these questions satisfactorily in all cases, Cavendish is undoubtedly right that camera operators have been given too little credit for their work, and his book comes as a welcome corrective. The great strength of this book is the way it looks so closely and carefully at the techniques — truncated camera angles, mirrors, specialized lenses — used REVIEWS 763 by avant-garde camera operators during the 1920s. Cavendish is particularly attentive to the cameraman’s lighting choices. He points out, for example, that the intense ‘natural’ beauty of the apples in Dovzhenko’s Earth was the product of Demuts´kyi’s skill with artificial lights, mirrors, and the monocle (single-element soft-focus) lens (p. 274), while Tisse’s use in The General Line of ‘core lighting’ (‘sources striking the face from the sides and slightly from the rear’) was intended to add drama and ‘an impression of naturalism’ to the faces of the untrained actors the practice of typage had brought onto the set (p. 109). Seeking to soften the focus of his portrait shots, Golovnia placed a thin layer of gauze over the lens at times in Mat´ (p. 149). Anybody who teaches early Soviet film will want to consult Cavendish’s detailed, technical descriptions of the devices employed by particular cameramen for particular films. Indeed, attentive description is Cavendish’s forte, and for the most part he avoids interpretation, almost as if answering Susan Sontag’s plea in Against Interpretation for ‘essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking...

Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage

Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage

In excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico

During the 1920s and '30s, Mexico attracted an international roster of artists and intellectuals - including Orson Welles, Katherine Anne Porter, and Leon Trotsky - who were drawn to the heady tumult engendered by battling cultural ideologies in an emerging center for the avant-garde. Against the backdrop of this cosmopolitan milieu, Excess reconstructs the years that the renowned Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein spent in the country to work on his controversial film Que Viva Mexico! Illuminating the inextricability of Eisenstein's oeuvre from the global cultures of modernity and film, Masha Salazkina situates this unfinished project within the twin contexts of postrevolutionary Mexico and the ideas of such contemporaneous thinkers as Walter Benjamin. In doing so, Salazkina explains how Eisenstein's engagement with Mexican mythology, politics, and art deeply influenced his ideas, particularly about sexuality. She also uncovers the role Eisenstein's bisexuality played in his creative thinking and identifies his use of the baroque as an important turn toward excess and hybrid forms. Beautifully illustrated with rare photographs, Excess provides the most complete genealogy available of major shifts in this modern master's theories and aesthetics.

Addressing the dialectics of sexual difference in Eisenstein's Que viva Mexico!

Addressing the dialectics of sexual difference in Eisenstein's Que viva Mexico!

Seeing through ¡Que viva México!: Eisenstein's Travels in Mexico

Of the many illustrious foreign travellers who flocked to Mexico, allured by the cultural renaissance taking place in the aftermath of the 1910 revolution—Andre Breton, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, amongst others—few have bequeathed as controversial a legacy as that left by Sergei Eisenstein. The Soviet filmmaker’s arrival in Mexico on 9 December 1930 and his travels through the Republic over the course of a year, during which he filmed some 40 hours of material for his famously unfinished film iQue viva Mexico!, have become part of Mexican film-lore. Indeed Eisenstein is frequently invoked as an enduring influence—for better or for worse—on Mexican visual culture more generally. In 1931, as Eisenstein was compiling his footage, in one of a series of articles published in the prestigious cultural magazine El universal ilustrado, playwright Adolfo Fernandez Bustamante evaluated Eisenstein’s impact on Mexican culture in the following terms:

Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking by Anne Nesbet (review)

MLR, 100.2, 2005 585 pieces on television and advertising are translated, so that there is no 'outsider's' view on these areas. University of Bristol Birgit Beumers Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking. By Anne Nesbet. London and New York: Tauris. 2003. xii + 26opp. ?45. ISBN 1-85043-330-5. Anne Nesbet provides a sympathetic yet incisive companion to the filmsand writings of S. M. Eisenstein. Unlike other critics, who have tended to 'shy away from the heterogeneity underlying his work' (p. 1), she is undaunted by his infamous lack of decorum (his willingness to combine seriousness with obscenity, high- and low-brow culture, the sacred and the profane). She manages to make sense of 'the unruliness of his "immense curiosity"' (what David Bordwell termed a 'baggy monster' of ma? terial) and notes that 'more than 50 years afterEisenstein's death, the vast quantities of written work left in his archive still remain largely unpublished' (p. 16). As any Eisenstein scholar must, she engages equally with his pictorial thinking, evinced in his own drawings and in his longstanding interest in graphic art. Chapters are usefully organized around individual film texts. In her discussion of Stachka [Strike] (1925) Nesbet identifies Eisenstein's photogenic eye, abetted by the camera (though some contemporaries thought otherwise) as a prosthetic aid, en? abling the rewinding of action. The eye here appears as both meat and machine. With Bronenosets Potemkin [The battleship Potemkin] (1925) she turns her attention to the spectator, 'not merely dazzled and stunned but re-made' (p. 47) towards 'a socially useful effect' (p. 50). Nesbet (like other authors in this Tauris series) links scientific knowledge with artistic knowledge and metaphysics, presenting film as an ideal medium forexploring a shared interest in the Fourth Dimension. With Oktiabr [October] (1928), Nesbet discusses Marxist notions of history, acknowledging Eisenstein's expedient citation of an Eisensteinian Lenin. She covers the controversy surrounding the casting of Nikandrov as Lenin and the cutting of Trotsky (at the behest of Stalin), engaging with Eisenstein's reading of Hegel. Nesbet discusses Eisenstein's iconoclasm (and his familiaritywith French Revolutionary ima? gery in satirical cartoons) and his own erection of substitute statues in his film. 'The lesson of October', she concludes, 'would seem to be that objects and images can never be entirely tamed' (p. 89). 'Philosophy and picture-thinking cannot do without?but tend unexpectedly to undo?each other' (p. 92). Both GeneraVnaia Liniia [The ge? neral line] and the alternative title Staroe i novoe [The old and the new] (1929) are drawn from Stalin's speeches and party rhetoric, Nesbet notes. But she convincingly demonstrates Eisenstein's figurative exposition of a political theme (by 'taking politi? cal discourse literally [. . .] Eisenstein gets himself into potential difficulties' (p. 114)): 'a cream separator could become the very embodiment?no mere illustration?ofthe transformation of "quantity" into "quality"' (pp. 1-2). In Eisenstein's exploration of the Flatworlds of Mexican art and Disney, Nesbet discovers keys to his ill-fated Que viva Mexico (1931/1979) and Time in the Sun (1939) (laboriously assembled by Marie Seton) and to Ivan Groznyi [Ivan the Ter? rible] (1944-46/1958). She comments on the eventually unhappy collaboration with Eisenstein's patron, Upton Sinclair, and their correspondence from the 1920s on? wards. While marking the parting of the ways between Eisenstein and his former as? sistant director, Grisha Alexandrov (his 'friend and fiend' (p. 198)), Nesbet compares their common enthusiasm for American popular culture. With Aleksandr Nevskii [Alexander Nevsky] (1938), she discusses Prokofiev's score as a skeleton (or carcass), articulated and fleshed out by the film. Nesbet persuasively argues that Eisenstein's 586 Reviews later work (on Ivan) practically pursues ideas raised more than a decade earlier in his theoretical speculations. She thus (via careful archival and contextual enquiry) finds coherence and structure where others have seen only the superficial 'bagginess'. Nesbet's primary achievement is to take seriously and examine critically Eisen? stein's 'unexpected junctures': 'The "juncture" that played such a key, but diverse, role in Eisenstein's intellectual landscape was sometimes, as in the essay on the Kabuki, a kind of copula, a binding joint where two elements came...

Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda by David Gillespie (review)

MLR, 99.1, 2004 273 and one might question the 'authenticity' of Kusturica' s identification with the Roma, but this is an instructive, stimulating, and productive exploration of his work. Staffordshire University Peter Hames Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda. By David Gillespie. (Short Cuts) London: Wallflower Press. 2000. xii+ii4pp. ?11.99. ISBN 1903364 -04-3. The Short Cuts series is designed forstudents and enthusiasts of cinema and popular culture. David Gillespie's contribution to this series, as he states in his preface, has a rather more specific goal: 'This book is intended to help all students of Soviet cinema through an examination of the major works by the directors of what has come to be known as the "golden age" of Soviet cinema' (p. xi). His monograph contains chapters on Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Vertov, and has an introduction which attempts to contextualize their works in relation to pre-Revolutionary cinema and some of the more mainstream films of the 1920s. The aim is clearly to absorb some of the scholarly writing on these directors which has appeared over the last thirtyyears, and to make it accessible and interesting to the contemporary reader. Bearing in mind the intended audience of this book, it would be churlish to criticize its lack of originality or the superficiality of its observations. Nevertheless, it is disappointing to note that the opportunity has been missed for a more dynamic presentation of this period, away from the tired old stereotypes of yesteryear. The FEKS films of the 1920s certainly merit a more detailed discussion than is offered here (it is not true, as the author claims in mitigation, that they are better known for their work in the 1930s). In addition, it would have been nice to see much greater emphasis on films which, for reasons of ideological hostility, are less well known, and for this reason artistically underrated?such as Dovzhenko's Zvenigora (1927) or Eisenstein's unfinished Que Viva Mexico! (1930). Despite the author's declared intent to approach the films in terms of their visual aesthetic, much of his book consists of plot recapitulation; indeed, it is well nigh impossible, given the author's limited ambitions, to distinguish properly between these important directors, and to explore fully the poetics of their respective cinematic worlds. Neither can Gillespie do justice to the complexity of their many innovative ideas (it is symptomatic that, despite selective listing of Eisenstein's works in the bibliography, there are hardly any references to his writings, and his concept of montage is dealt with only superficially). This sense of disappointment is compounded by a number of questionable and (for students certainly) misleading statements in relation to individual directors and/or their films. Gillespie's view that Abram Room's Tret'ia Meshchanskaia (Bed and Sofa, 1927) is essentially about an 'urgent social problem' (housing shortages in Moscow) is rather naive, since it suggests that, ifnot for the conditions, the sexist assumptions of the two male protagonists during the supposedly liberated 1920s would not exist. This is not a film about conditions but about culture and psychology. Elsewhere, we encounter assertions which are erroneous. The idea that Kuleshov's use of fade-ins and fade-outs is evidence of 'stylistic exuberance' (p. 30) overlooks the fact that these were conventions that had been established by 1915. The view that the mechanical division ofthe peasant hut in the opening sequences ofEisenstein's Staroe i novoe (The Old and the New, 1929) is an image of 'coercion and misery' (p. 50) ignores the fact that it records an authentic and voluntary practice in the Penza district, thus seeking to satirize the peasant obsession with private property. The view that Dovzhenko's Arsenal (1928) is largely static, 'in contrast to Eisenstein's fluid and dynamic camera movement' (p. 84), ignores the fact that, firstly,Eisenstein's films are not noted in 274 Reviews general for their camera movement, and secondly, that Arsenal contains one of the most extraordinary tracking shots in the history of Soviet cinema (the sequence in which the Bolshevik soldiers take their dead comrade back to his village on galloping horses). The assertion that Pudovkin's career...

Eisenstein in America: The Que Viva Mexico! Debates and the Emergent Popular Front in U.S. Film Theory and Criticism

Eisenstein in America: The Que Viva Mexico! Debates and the Emergent Popular Front in U.S. Film Theory and Criticism

<sc>William H. Beezley</sc> and <sc>David E. Lorey</sc>, editors. <italic>¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva La Independencia! Celebrations of September 16</italic>. (Latin American Silhouettes: Studies in History and Culture.) Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources. 2001. Pp. xviii, 261. Cloth $60.00, paper $21.95

William H. Beezley and David E. Lorey, editors. ¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva La Independencia! Celebrations of September 16. (Latin American Silhouettes: Studies in History and Culture.) Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources. 2001. Pp. xviii, 261. Cloth $60.00, paper $21.95 Beezley William H. and Lorey David E., editors. ¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva La Independencia! Celebrations of September 16. (Latin American Silhouettes: Studies in History and Culture.) Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources. 2001. Pp. xviii, 261. Cloth $60.00, paper $21.95. Barbara A. Tenenbaum Barbara A. Tenenbaum Library of Congress Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 108, Issue 2, April 2003, Pages 549–550, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.2.549 Published: 01 April 2003

Reviews of Books:[Inverted Exclamation Mark]Viva Mexico! [Inverted Exclamation Mark]Viva La Independencia! Celebrations of September 16 William H. Beezley, David E. Lorey

Reviews of Books:[Inverted Exclamation Mark]Viva Mexico! [Inverted Exclamation Mark]Viva La Independencia! Celebrations of September 16 William H. Beezley, David E. Lorey

"I Don't Think I Exist": Interview with Richard Rodriguez

I conducted this interview with Richard Rodriguez in February of 2000 in his San Francisco Victorian home. Born in 1944, Rodriguez has crafted a career encompassing the production of literary as well as journalistic discourse. Rodriguez first came to national prominence with the publication of Hunger of Memory in 1982, a work which would become part of a triptych alongside Days of Obligations: An Argument with my Mexican Father and, most recently, Brown: The Last Discovery of America. This interview anticipates the publication of Brown. It is well-known that the first work did not endear him to the Chicano and Chicana intelligentsia. Rodriguez's conservative stance toward affirmative action and bilingual education spelled a major breach with the ideology that the Chicano Civil Rights movement constructed through its political activism in the 1960s. Critiques had already been leveled at the Chicano movement for its patriarchy, but Rodriguez's text exposes a further breach. Rodriguez writes in bold language his opposition to those gains of the movimiento and in so doing exposed huge differences in class position among the Chicano and Chicana, Mexican American, Hispano population of the US. The ten-year interval it took for Days of Obligation to appear saw some revisionism of this initial hostile reception, this second work receiving a friendlier, even conciliatory, reception. Rodriguez's stylistic finesse seems to have won him a more sympathetic audience. The friendlier reception is all the more significant in light of the fact that his controversial views on bilingualism and affirmative action have not substantially changed with the passage of time. Side by side, the triptych solidifies Rodriguez's place in American literature. Today, Rodriguez's essay Aria stands shoulder to shoulder with America's finest writers in The Best American of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Rodriguez's work in the field of broadcast journalism also comprises a complex body of work. As an editor for Pacific News Service, Rodriguez scripts broadcasts for the Jim Lehrer NewsHour. In 1997 Rodriguez won television's highest honor, the George Foster Peabody Award, for his NewsHour Essays on American Life. His work in broadcast journalism includes A Dialogue on Race with President Clinton and the recent Danger and Grace--September 11 and America's Religious Movement. Having won the Frankel Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the International Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council of California, Rodriguez occupies the position of a public intellectual in American life and letters. Langue(s) HT: Richard, can we begin by talking about when and where you were born? RR: I was born in San Francisco, about a mile from where we are sitting now, in a place called St. Joseph's Hospital. My mother and father lived over on O'Farrell Street, which was only about five blocks from where we are. They were married in a church, which is also about four or five blocks away. But I grew up in Sacramento. I came to San Francisco and live in this neighborhood quite coincidentally, but my sense of hometown is Sacramento, and that's where all my childhood memory resides. I was a child of the 1940s and 50s; my conscious life begins in the 1950s, within Spanish, the Spanish language, within working class Spanish. Both of my parents come from western Mexico. My father is from the state of Colima--a small village within the state of Colima. He was in Mexico during the revolution, and his disgust with Mexico came out of that revolution and the way he saw Mexican kill Mexican. Viva Mexico! My mother, on the other hand, is a great Mexican patriot to this day. She grew up in the state of Jalisco and she's always been the patriot in the family, and that side of my conscience which always calls me to the past. My father is completely unconcerned with Mexico, has no emotional tie to it, has no interest in it, but in some way his darkness is very Mexican and I grew up within these two polarities: my very Mexican-loving mother, my Mexican-hating father. …

William H. Beezley and David E. Lorey (eds.), Viva Mexico! Viva Independencia! Celebrations of September 16 (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2000), pp. xviii+261, $60·00, $21.95 pb.

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Viva Mexico! Viva La Independencia! Celebrations of September 16. Edited by William H. Beezley and David E. Lorey. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2001. Pp. xxiii, 261. Notes. Suggested Readings. Index. $60.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Viva Mexico! Viva La Independencia! Celebrations of September 16. Edited by William H. Beezley and David E. Lorey. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2001. Pp. xxiii, 261. Notes. Suggested Readings. Index. 21.95 paper. - Volume 58 Issue 4

Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1898-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy

Raack !Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1889-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy R. C. Raack, Professor Emeritus California State University- Hayward Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1898-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy "Cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. The task is to take it into our hands." Joseph Stalin, 1924 Stalin Eisenstein With these words, Stalin entered on a task that he would, within a few years, wholly accomplish. He sought to capture the new forces of technology, the moving picture among them, to help him realize the domestic and yet grander dreams ofhis Party, and of his recently deceased spiritual mentor, V. I. Lenin.1 Stalin, with a few years, took the Soviet cinema, its makers, and Lenin's Bolshevik party wholly into his hands. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was the Russian cinematographer who, perhaps as much as any other practitioner of the arts, suffered tragically the depredations Stalin effected on his work and in his personal life. Not a few of his contemporary artists and literateurs, just as famous as he, were executed or died in the Gulag. Eisenstein had, in his youth, subscribed to the program of the Bolsheviks, producing heavily political films like Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Ten Days that Shook the World (1928) to propagandize the cause. These films came well before the dreary conformity soon imposed by Stalin, through his cultural tsars, was set firmly in place as a kind of opaque ceiling above individual creative imagination. In his later career (he died in 1948, aged 50), Eisenstein was to be effectively entrapped in the Kremlin boss's ukases that narrowly prescribed the propaganda directions of Soviet cinema. Stalin constantly meddled in every aspect of Soviet creative life, cinema being perhaps his favorite amateur playground . His continuing program of arrests, imprisoments, and executions of citizens of all walks of life brought terror to the entire society,—including the creative elite. When he demanded films celebrating national heroes, Eisenstein, after being publicly mauled in 1936 and 1937 for countless infractions of the rules of Soviet artistic expression, was offered what was in effect the redeeming task of revivifying in film an antique Russian hero, Alexander Nevsky (1938). This opportunity to exculpate himself by plunging into another politically risky production followed the shredding ofhis almost completed film Bezhin Meadow. That he had to endure while pathetically apologizing for his alleged misdemeanors . A few years later, when Stalin saw himself victorious in war after takingover large neighboring territories, Eisenstein was called in to reproduce in film the story of another Russian conqueror, Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny, part 1 [1945, commissioned in early 1941]). It is likely that Eisenstein was, in some ways, more vulnerable to being caught up in the dictator's whims than most members of the elite.2 The executioner's blade cut close to Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, but, though it took some out of the ranks of the Soviet artistic elite personally 48 I Film & History Eisenstein Anniversary Essays | Film & Politics close to him, he was spared—not, perhaps, unaccountably , given his international reputation and the effectiveness of his films at conveying the Soviet message abroad. Now, one hundred years after the birth of the great cinematographer, some heretofore far less known aspects of his artistic biography as it intertwined contemporary Soviet cultural history, and even diplomatic history, should be told. What should amaze those only familiar with Eisenstein's major film work is the level of professional engagement of this artist in every imaginative, and even scholarly, task of production, whatever he did. In his short life of political restriction and drastically limited opportunities he was only able to complete few productions (six major films, one in two parts—albeit all grand international successes). Some ofhis oeuvre was in fact cancelled while in production or, like Bezhin Meadow, the worst case, actually physically destroyed. One vitally important cinema work, Que viva Mexico^ was wholly emasculated in Hollywood as a result ofa tragicomedy of ill will, lack of communication, lack ofbudgeting experience and fiscal discipline on Eisenstein's part.3 Most writers have in the past highly sung Eisenstein's glory as a filmmaker, overlooking the close political...