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

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements This essay grew as a side-shoot out of a chapter of the author's book Mexican National Cinema (2005). The author would like to thank John Kraniauskus, Claire Lindsay and Paul Julian Smith for helpful comments on versions of the essay delivered at seminars at Birkbeck College and Cambridge University, and the Leverhulme Trust for the generous research fellowship that allowed her to complete both projects. Notes [1] Rushes from the Soviet director's footage were sent back to the United States and according to De la Vega (1997 De la Vega, E. 1997. Del muro a la pantalla: S.M. Eisenstein y el arte pictórico mexicano, Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara/Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura/Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía. [Google Scholar], p. 41) incorporated into the following films: Thunder Over Mexico (Donn Hayes, Carl Himm, and Harry Chandlee, 1933); Death Day (Don Hayes, 1933); Eisenstein in Mexico (Donn Hayes and Harry Chandlee, 1933); Time in the Sun (Marie Seaton and Paul Roger Bunford, 1939); Mexican Symphony (William F. Kruse, 1942); Eisenstein's Mexican Film: Episodes for Study (Jay Leyda, 1957); and ¡Que viva México! (Grigori Alexandrov, 1979). Although the filmed material totalled some 200,000 feet, as Goodwin (1993 Goodwin, J. 1993. Eisenstein, Cinema and History, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. [Google Scholar], p. 130) observes, this vast output also includes precautionary duplicate takes for, filming on location, the Soviet team was unable to review the rushes. John King (1990 King, J. 1990. Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America, London: Verso. [Google Scholar], p. 45) notes that the British Film Institute holds some five hours of these rushes, edited consecutively. The most readily accessible is Alexandrov's 1979 version (now available on DVD), on which my analysis is based. [2] See Geduld & Gottesman (1970 Geduld, H. M. and Gottesman, R., eds. 1970. Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: The Making and Unmaking of Que viva México!, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar]); Karetnikova & Steinmetz (1991 Karetnikova, I. and Steinmetz, L. 1991. Mexico According to Eisenstein, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. [Google Scholar]); De la Vega (1997 De la Vega, E. 1997. Del muro a la pantalla: S.M. Eisenstein y el arte pictórico mexicano, Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara/Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura/Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía. [Google Scholar]) and Eisenstein (1983 Eisenstein, S. 1983. Immoral Memories: An Autobiography, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. trans. H. Marshall [Google Scholar]) for detailed accounts of the Mexican sojourn. [3] See Delpar (1992 Delpar, H. 1992. The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. [Google Scholar]) for an account of ‘the enormous vogue of things Mexican’ in the United States during this period. [4] In this sense ¡Que viva México! is but one example of a cultural process whereby national culture is validated on international cultural circuits in a gesture that confirms Mexico's legitimacy to itself. Although it could be argued that all nations are involved in this self-affirming pursuit of international cultural capital, the Mexican paradigm does seem to follow a particular pattern. This pattern is discerned in the geopolitical trajectory of two recent exhibitions of art originating in Mexico, namely ‘Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries’ (1991) and ‘Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti’ (1983). The former originally went on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the latter at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Having been legitimized in the metropolis, both exhibitions subsequently returned to peripheral Mexico for consumption by national audiences. See Bartra (2002 Bartra, R. 2002. Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. trans. M. A. Healey[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Wallis (1994 Wallis, B. 1994. “Selling Nations: International Exhibitions and Cultural Diplomacy”. In Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, Edited by: Sherman, D. J. and Rogoff, I. 265–282. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) on ‘Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries’, see Noble (2000 Noble, A. 2000. Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. [Google Scholar]) on the Whitechapel exhibition. [5] See Stam (2000 Stam, R. 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwells. [Google Scholar]) for a concise and cogent overview of the Soviet montage theorists. See also Aumont (1987 Aumont, J. 1987. Montage Eisenstein, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. trans. L. Hildreth, C. Penley & A. Ross [Google Scholar]) for a more detailed account of Eisenstein's theory of montage. [6] Robert Stam (2000 Stam, R. 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwells. [Google Scholar], p. 38) reminds us that montage is the ordinary word for editing in both Russian and the Romance languages. [7] For so long elided in cultural theory, we are currently witnessing the return of the real and, with it, an interest in the materiality of indexical technologies of representation. Long neglected in film theory, the renewed attention that André Bazin is receiving is arguably symptomatic of this phenomenon (Margulies's [2003 Margulies, I., ed. 2003. Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]] volume, for example, opens with two newly translated essays by Bazin.)