1. Que Viva Mexico!
I’m from Russian Jewish immigrant grandparents and Eisenstein was Jewish from Riga [Latvia]. This film about Mexico never really got fully developed: it was supposed to be a big Hollywood film, and after they saw some of it, and they saw that it wasn’t going to be very commercial, they sort of let him loose. I love the way he looks at the Mesoamerican objects and architecture and then the people and it really shows the ancient Mexican civilizations in a very powerful way.
So you’ve talked about your "subjective" camera style and this film seems like a very subjective view of Mexico, like one which never existed.
it is very dreamlike, it is almost looks like science fiction, like Metropolis. These strange peoples, you could almost think that they were invented, but they’re not. And he found some fantastic representatives, descendants of this Mesomerican culture, who are in these films and he has them do these "portraits". It’s an extraordinary film. He’s finally out of his own Russian culture and it’s a strange kind of tourism.
