What is so amazing about Mexico is the vivid sense that there you can experience things which you only know about otherwise from books and philosophical conceptions opposed to metaphysics. I imagine that when the world was in its infancy it was full of exactly the same supremely indifferent laziness, coupled with the creative potential of those lagoons and plateaux, deserts and undergrowth; pyramids you might expect to explode like volcanoes …
As permission to travel to the West had in fact been granted to the three Russians for a maximum period of twelve months, their plans had been faithfully reported to, and approved by, the Soviet film authorities – Sovkino in Moscow and Amkino in the USA. It was assumed that after the Paramount contract had been cancelled they would return home at once.
There was a plan to go back to Russia via Japan to make a film there, a proposal that was not only supported by Ivor Montagu but formally approved by Lev Monosson, the Amkino representative in the USA. All was set for their departure after Paramount bought three one-way tickets to the USSR. However, before he left Hollywood, Eisenstein had a significant encounter with Robert Flaherty, ‘the father of the documentary film’.
In the last eight years, Flaherty had only made two features as sole director, Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926). He had left both White Shadows of the South Seas and Tabu because of disagreements with their co-directors (W.S. Van Dyke and F.W. Murnau respectively), and was now looking for another project. Despite his own struggles, Flaherty convinced Eisenstein of the virtues of independent film-making. He had a fund of ideas which cried out to be made into films. ‘There, I’ll make you a present of that one,’ he said to Eisenstein, referring to a story set in Mexico. Flaherty, in turn, was inspired by Eisenstein to go to the Soviet Union. ‘The old man [forty-six years old!] was fired … with determination to work in Russia on a series of films devoted to the national minorities.’1
Flaherty had an indirect influence on Eisenstein’s approach to Qué Viva México! with its synthesis of the style and structure of a fictional film, while filming real people and situations. Eisenstein wanted passionately to work in Mexico, a country that had gripped his imagination since 1922 when he had designed the sets for the Proletkult’s production of the Jack London story, The Mexican. He had read Ambrose Bierce, who went missing during the Mexican Civil War in 1914, the reportages by John Reed on Mexico and the stories of the American writer Albert Rhys Williams whom he had met in Moscow in 1928. Then there were the frescoes of Diego Rivera, who corresponded with Eisenstein and urged him to make a documentary film called Life in Mexico.
It was at the Hollywood Book Store that Eisenstein nurtured his attraction to Mexico. The shop was owned by a mysterious man called Odo Stade, either ‘a Hungarian Swiss’ or ‘Tyrolean Czech’, who was writing a book on Pancho Villa, with whom he had fought in the Mexican Revolution. Stade spoke to Eisenstein about Mexico, ‘and the offshoots of my fascination with this country, which took root when I saw some photographs of the Day of the Dead … I had a burning desire to go there.’2
Eisenstein recalled seeing a picture some years before, in a German magazine, of ‘a human skeleton astride the skeleton of a horse. He wore a broad-brimmed sombrero, with a bandolier over one shoulder … And there was a photograph of a hat-shop window – skulls sticking out of collars and ties. The skulls wore neat straw hats in the latest style … What could it be? A madman’s delirium, or a modern version of Holbein’s Danse Macabre? No! These were photographs of the Day of the Dead in Mexico City. The skeletons were … children’s toys!!! … This impression lodged with me like a splinter. My desperate longing to see this in reality was like a chronic sickness. And not only this. But the whole of a country that would take its amusements in such a way! Mexico!’3
He also read The Mexican Maze by Carlton Beals, whom Eisenstein subsequently met in a bookshop in Mexico City. Eisenstein quoted Beals’ definition of vacilada, a form of Mexican wit, not unlike his own. ‘The vacilada is a combination of the ridiculous and the sublime, of vulgarity and purity, of beauty and ugliness, of spirituality and animality, disconcertingly tripping over each other, showering the world with passing glory, like the spray of a rocket flame. The Mexican’s approach to life, death and sex … is shot through with poetic irresponsibility, it defies direct logic, takes serious things lightly, and insignificant things with great gravity. This is a gracious and self-protective distortion, a creative destruction of values cherished by the European mind.’4 Is not this description one of the most accurate summings up of the whole of Eisenstein’s oeuvre?
Suddenly, Hollywood no longer interested him (the feeling was mutual), and the idea of making a film in Mexico was now dearest to his heart. He expressed his desire to Chaplin, who told him to approach Upton Sinclair, the left-wing novelist and would-be governor of California, to help finance the project. (Chaplin had based his 1917 film The Adventurer on a work by Sinclair.) When the idea was put to Sinclair, he recommended it to his wealthy wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, persuading her to back the project, together with a number of her rich friends in Pasadena. The thought of financing a film by a great radical Soviet director appealed to the politically active author.
Eisenstein also tried to obtain the financial support of William King Gillette, the inventor of the safety razor, but the shrewd Gillette decided not to invest in the film. ‘He was obsessed with building villas in desert regions. A house, a palace would rise above the sand; he would plant orchards around it; but then the builder would dash off to a new part of the desert to construct a new palace, and so on and so on,’ Eisenstein wrote. ‘I have lived in much the same sort of way, in relation to the events in my personal life. Like a pack animal or horse that has a sheaf of corn hanging in front of him which he chases, headlong, hopelessly, for ever.’5 At the time, Eisenstein could not have foreseen that Qué Viva México! would be one of those abandoned palaces built on sand, the completion of which he would pursue in his mind forever after.
Delighted at the prospect of making a film in Mexico, Eisenstein paid little attention to the clauses of the contract, signed on November 24, 1930. It stipulated a period of three to four months of filming, which Eisenstein was determined to stick to. As he wrote to Esther Shub: ‘My leave of absence expires in February and I expect not to delay overmuch. I may perhaps stop off in Japan on the way.’6
The contract also stipulated that Eisenstein should have a completely free hand in the shooting, that the film was to be apolitical and that world rights as well as positive and negative copies should belong to Mary Sinclair. At Eisenstein’s request, the rights for the USSR were granted to the Soviet government. That neither Sinclair nor his wife knew anything about the economics of filming would play a detrimental role in the whole sorry affair that ensued.
‘I quarrelled with Eisenstein over the Mexican project,’ recalled Ivor Montagu in 1971. ‘I could not believe that the enterprise could succeed, and my reason was that Upton Sinclair tried to keep it in his own hands – not for bad motives (for his motives were the best) but partly in order to save money, and partly because his brother-in-law (Hunter Kimbrough), whom he appointed as production manager, knew almost nothing about how films are made and costed. Moreover, Eisenstein, strange as it may seem, knew absolutely nothing at all. He knew of film direction. He knew everything that in those days could possibly be known technically and artistically. But in the Soviet Union the essential elements of production had been in the hands of others. He had no idea how much a film would cost in his own country, and even less about its cost anywhere else. But Upton Sinclair had quite fairly asked that very essential question. What could he do? In the event what he did was a singularly silly thing; he went to a bookseller in Hollywood who was well known to us all and who fought with Villa in Mexico, and asked him how much it would cost to make a reasonably priced documentary film in that particular country. Of course he got an absurd answer, but he passed it on to Sinclair in all sincerity. So, when the costs began to rise, Sinclair began to worry, and in his panic he spread the legend that Eisenstein was ludicrously over-shooting and was running up costs that were quite unjustified. All of which was unfair and untrue. According to Sinclair, Eisenstein had shot 35 miles of film; but I myself can recall – and I think most of us who know anything about the cinema can recall – that for a normal feature film in those days we often shot 45 miles. In any case these were rushes designed to be cut to length in the editing room. But there was poor ignorant Sinclair, sitting in Hollywood and seeing shot after shot and re-take after re-take … and saying to himself, “Is this man mad?” Whereas in truth the work was extremely economical, and its total cost would have compared very favourably with such a simple documentary as the British film Man of Aran. Eisenstein’s Qué Viva México! was about the whole of a country and its social history, and was full of mass-scenes, whereas Man of Aran was concerned with a few people on a tiny island. But the eventual cost of Man of Aran was between £17,000 and £20,000; and Eisenstein’s completed Mexican project would have cost Sinclair, by his own admission, about £15,000.’7
On the day of his departure for Mexico, Chaplin showed Eisenstein the first edited version, without sound, of his new film, City Lights. While Eisenstein watched the film from Chaplin’s armchair, Chaplin himself sat at the piano, explaining his plan for the sound and humming the melodies. Then friends took Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Tisse to the station, where the former left, as one of them, the American journalist Seymour Stern recalled, looking ‘like a little boy taking his first long trip … Eisenstein, the king and master of flaming images of turmoil and the world’s war for freedom – seemed so completely, so pathetically and tragically, innocent. This was what stared from the Pullman window.’8
Eisenstein could have had no premonition of the tragedy that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Indeed, he set off for Mexico in a mood of innocent expectation. In a letter at the time of Eisenstein’s departure, Sinclair wrote, ‘This will be the first time in Eisenstein’s life that he has been entirely free to make a picture according to his own ideas.’9 And so it would have been.
Typical of the kind of improbable brief encounters in Eisenstein’s life were two on the train trip from Los Angeles to Mexico City. Eisenstein found his reserved berth in the wagon-lit already occupied. A vain attempt to sort out the situation ended up with Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Tisse forcibly ejecting the intruder, an incident which would have potentially serious consequences a little later. The second encounter on the train was the one in which Eisenstein shared a sleeper with Maurice Tessier, who, under the nom de plume of Maurice Dekobra wrote detective stories, including The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (La Madonne des sleepings, 1925), which, in Eisenstein’s words, ‘broke all records – in terms of both print run and banality. Dekobra had written an equally banal book about Indian rajahs, Les Tigres parfumés … This ‘Madonna’ wrote her books with particular ease on trains, and on sheets of complimentary hotel writing-paper.’10
About two weeks after their arrival in Mexico City, the three Russians were summoned before the Chief of Police, to be confronted by their adversary from the wagon-lit – who turned out to be none other than the Chief of Police’s brother, and on whose evidence they were arrested. It culminated in demands for Eisenstein’s deportation. Again it was Major Frank Pease and his ‘patriotic’ cronies who were responsible for having written to the Mexican authorities to warn them of the Communist ‘danger’ that Eisenstein represented. Mexico, which had recognised the Soviet Union some years before, had broken off relations with them in 1930.
Eisenstein and his two companions spent the night at the hotel under police surveillance. However, immediately the news reached Sinclair he contacted Chaplin, Fairbanks and some US senators, two of whom, Senators Borah and LaFollette, intervened with the Mexican authorities, and the detainees were released. According to Eisenstein, twelve American senators intervened, as well as Chaplin and Albert Einstein. The Mexican authorities apologised and declared the visitors honoured guests, the President himself shaking them by the hand at an anniversary celebration in Mexico City.
Eisenstein immediately set out to explore Mexico. He saw the thousand-year pyramids at Yucatan and sat at the foot of the ruins of the Temple of a Thousand Columns. He was impressed by the Catholic churches on the sites of Aztec and Toltec temples. At the same time he met many of Mexico’s leading artists: Fernando Gamboa, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siquieros and Diego Rivera, adding to his knowledge of the country.
‘People who have been to Mexico greet each other like brothers. For people who have been to Mexico catch the Mexican fever. Anyone who has ever seen the Mexican plains has only to close his eyes to picture something like the Garden of Eden … And this despite the mangy curs licking the dirty cooking pots with food, the universal graft and exasperating irresponsibility of incorrigible sloth, the terrible social injustices and rampantly arbitrary actions of the police force, and age-long backwardness, which coexist alongside highly sophisticated forms of social exploitation.’11
He then set about writing a rough outline of Qué Viva México!, which was sent to Upton Sinclair and approved by him. He prepared the earliest of his scenarios in April 1931. It consisted of a prologue, six novellas and an epilogue, each of which was to be dedicated to an artist. Eisenstein explained: ‘It was constructed like a necklace, like the bright, striped colouring of the serape or Mexican cloak, or like a sequence of short novellas. This chain of novellas was held together by a set of linking ideas, proceeding in a historically based sequence, but not so much by chronological epochs as by geographical zones.’12
The Prologue embodied the composition of David Alfaro Siquieros’ unfinished, mutilated fresco, The Worker’s Burial. ‘The time of the prologue could be today or twenty years ago or a thousand years ago; because the people of Yucatan, a land of ruins and immense pyramids, have preserved the features and forms of their ancestors, the great ancient race of the Mayas. Stones. Gods. Men. Act in the Prologue.’ After a ‘strange’ funeral ceremony, ‘a young girl with bare breasts drifting along the river in a boat. She combs her long black hair and goes to see her lover, offering herself to him with simple joy.’
The first novella was entitled Conquest, in which Eisenstein filmed the Stations of the Cross. ‘Preceded by three skulls, a group of penitent monks leads the procession. On the way to the cross, an old woman offers water to a thief.’ Sandunga was the marriage of a young Mexican Indian girl. ‘Old women examine the bridal dress while friends bring the girl gifts. After the ceremony, the men perform a marriage dance in honour of San Diego la Sandunga. Young girls watch the ceremony. The faces of the young couple are full of joy and tenderness.’
Fiesta (for which only part of a bullfight was filmed), was dedicated to Goya. It was a triangular drama – husband, wife and picador – which takes place during an afternoon of bullfighting. Maguey, set during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz at the beginning of the century, centred on the tragedy of the wedding of two young Mexican victims of Spanish colonialism. ‘The action takes place on the day of Corpus Christi. During the ceremony, cock fights mingle with Christian rites. A penitent submits himself to ceremonial chastisement. As the ceremony reaches its climax, the young peon Sebastian goes to present his fiancée, Maria, to the owner of the hacienda. Custom demands that any peon wanting to marry must ask his master’s permission. Maria is raped by one of the guests and kept prisoner. Guards beat up Sebastian and throw him out. At nightfall he returns with three other peons to free Maria. A volley of shots greets them, and they run away. One of them is killed, the others beaten and tied up. They stand waiting for their graves to be dug. Buried in the sand up to his chest, Sebastian is trampled to death by horses. Crazed with grief, Maria discovers the mutilated body of her lover.
Soldadera (none of which was shot), inspired by José Clemente Orozco’s fresco Las Soldaderas, was to have been the story of the wives of the soldiers of Zapata’s revolutionary army of 1910, and the overthrow of Diaz. ‘An army of soldiers is preceded by an army of soldiers’ wives … The soldadera scoured the deserted battlefield, searching among the corpses for the wounded body of her soldier-companion, side by side with whom she frequently fought, in order to carry him away on her shoulders, or bury him and make a cross of coloured stones on his grave, after which she would become the wife of another soldier.’
The epilogue was set during a carnival in contemporary Mexico on All Saints’ Day. ‘On this day, Mexicans show their contempt for death. Life reaffirms itself under the cardboard skulls; life surges forward, death retreats and vanishes.’13
Because Eisenstein’s fatal attraction to the Day of the Dead had first prompted him to go to Mexico, ‘it is natural enough that my last word on that country – the ending of the film – should be expressed in images from that same Day of the Dead. The more so as the theme of life and death expressed ultimately by a living face and skull, is the key, basic theme which informs the whole film.’14
Shooting actually started long before the script was sent to Sinclair. As his centre for filming, Eisenstein chose Tetlapayac, an old Spanish plantation situated eighty miles or so south-east of Mexico City and owned by Don Julio Salvidar, ‘an extremely kind and courteous man’. Between shooting sessions, Eisenstein would retire to the monastic seclusion of his room and bury himself in his studies and reading. Simultaneously he was working on his book of film aesthetics.
‘The stupefying aroma of fermented maguey juice filtered up from the pulque (the Mexican type of vodka) distillery, which was lit by candles and with a tawdry madonna, and permeated my temporary sleeping quarters on the first floor …’ It was there that they filmed the scenes of peon uprisings on the estates. ‘We filmed, many days running, episodes where the revolting peasants exchanged fire with the landowners’ police, the charros, in the overgrown cactus palms, or among the sparse foliage of agave bushes … the acting was unusually realistic. Because the actors were real peons and real charros, retained by the young Señor Julio [Salvidar]. Give both sides free rein, substitute the blank cartridges with loaded ones … The estate manager, Señor Nicolas from Santander, Spain, allowed only the owner, Señor Julio, to shoot off pieces of cactus (in close-up near his face) … At evening the tall gates were shut. And no one from the administration block dared to go out in the fields by night.’15
In the course of shooting, Eisenstein expanded his ideas in the scenario, sometimes developing brief passages into long and detailed scenes and transforming other episodes. On April 15, 1931, Sinclair wrote to Hunter Kimbrough, his brother-in-law and personal representative with the film unit, ‘We are not in the least worried about the design or story of the picture; we are quite cheerfully leaving that to him.’ The same day, Eisenstein wrote to Sinclair: ‘It is true that you are in the same position as was Sovkino when we were shooting Potemkin – we had such a lot to do that nobody in Moscow knew what we were doing! … The more because it is very complicated for me to expose on paper what and how the film will become and is becoming.’16
The fact that the film was taking much longer than scheduled could not be blamed on Eisenstein. Many of the delaying factors were the impossibly difficult filming conditions, the language barrier, the attitude of the Mexican extras who regularly turned up late or disappeared at crucial moments, and of the Mexican authorities whose permission to shoot certain scenes was required.
During the filming, Felix Olvera, who played the boy who witnesses the execution of his older comrades, was arrested for accidentally shooting his sister with the large-bore pistol, a 1910 model, which he used in the film. In order that Felix could complete his scenes, the police had to be bribed to bring him each day to the filming.
Then there was the torrid heat that had members of the unit literally falling over and frequently brought filming to a halt. This was followed by the rains and a new series of obstacles. Finally Eisenstein succumbed to an illness that immobilised him for a period. All the time, he was working in the dark with the help of only a few simple rushes, since the filmed material was sent straight to California for processing.
Still the filming was not finished and the time limit was extended again and again. The expenses too were mounting, and Sinclair once more sent his brother-in-law, who had returned to the USA, to supervise the activities of Eisenstein and his team. Kimbrough’s arrival was followed by a sharp clash with Eisenstein that gave rise to a whole crop of misunderstandings and arguments. In Hollywood, meanwhile, where Sinclair arranged a showing of some 10,000 metres of the rushes sent by Eisenstein, the film aroused the enthusiasm of everyone who saw it, including Seymour Stern, Chaplin and also, apparently, Albert Einstein.
But Sinclair had his doubts, as he expressed in a letter to Lev Monosson, the head of Amkino. ‘Things have come to a crisis with the Eisenstein picture … Having had the advantage of seeing the rushes so far, I can tell you pretty definitely that the hacienda story is the only one in the whole picture which is consecutive and interesting to the public. The so-called first story is nothing but pictures of Mayan ruins and an Indian funeral; the second story is simply a village wedding with a dance; the fourth story is the daily life of a bullfighter, with preparation for the ceremony and the scenes in the ring; the fifth story I cannot judge because this has not been taken. But the third story, which is the hacienda picture … is what Hollywood calls a “story”. It has some suspense and excitement, and so it will be possible to get the trade to consider it. I do not want for a moment to give the impression that I am discouraged about Eisenstein’s picture, as he plans it. I know that it will be a beautiful and magnificent work of art.’17
Although it is absurd to evaluate the quality of a film by its rushes, particularly one by Eisenstein, where the editing is so fundamental to the conception, Sinclair’s views were understandable in the circumstances.
On October 26, 1931, Sinclair wrote enthusiastically to Stalin: ‘You may have heard that I have taken the job of financing a moving picture which the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein is making in Mexico. It is going to be an extraordinary work, and I think will be a revelation of the moving-picture art … Some day you will see the picture which Eisenstein is making, and realise that Soviet technique has advanced another step and been crowned with fresh laurels.’18
Four days after Sinclair’s comments to Stalin, Eisenstein’s loyal friend, the Mexican critic, Augustin Aragon Leiva, confided to Seymour Stern in a letter, that Eisenstein was ‘facing troubles’, that he was ‘in danger of producing an unfinished symphony.’ Sinclair began to panic, and gave Hunter Kimbrough more authority to watch every penny spent. Kimbrough, a former stock and bond salesman, was a repressed, humourless Southern gentleman, who knew nothing about films or filming.
Eisenstein begged Sinclair in letter after letter (no less impassioned for his spelling errors) to get Kimbrough, whom he accused of spending the film’s money on women, drink and gambling, off his back. ‘At the actual moment all my personal contact with Hunter has seased – I think it quite natural after his declaring me a dishonest person and my behaviour towards you as blackmailing. You understand very well that these statements cannot affect me when said by a person who was put in jail in Merida for public indecency in a bordell, after a wild adventure with throwing whores in the swimming pool. Well in his story the rabelasian inclination towards liquor plaid its positive part.’19
Meanwhile, Eisenstein had lost the confidence of the Soviet authorities. On November 21, 1931, Sinclair received a cable from Stalin.
EISENSTEIN LOOSE HIS COMRADES CONFIDENCE IN SOVIET UNION STOP HE IS THOUGHT TO BE DESERTER WHO BROKE OFF WITH HIS OWN COUNTRY STOP AM AFRAID THE PEOPLE HERE WOULD HAVE NO INTEREST IN HIM STOP AM VERY SORRY BUT ALL ASSERT IT IS THE FACT STOP MY REGARDS STOP STALIN.
In a reply to Stalin, the very next day, Sinclair made a sturdy defence of Eisenstein.
‘… your statements concerning Eisenstein … have caused me both distress and bewilderment … I have never heard Eisenstein speak a word of disloyalty to the Soviet government … Eisenstein had a contract with Paramount by which they were to pay him $3,000 per week when he started work. This would have been a very comfortable start in the bourgeois world, and all he had to do was to sacrifice to a slight degree his artistic integrity. He was ferociously attacked in Hollywood by the Fascist element here … He made no attempt to protect himself from this, as he could very easily have done by making a few concessions …’20
Sinclair, who has always been cast as the villain of the piece, went on to explain to Stalin that the delays in filming were not Eisenstein’s fault, that he had insisted the rights of the film should be given to the Soviet Union free, and that he had every intention of returning to the Soviet Union when the film was completed.
Despite this defence, Sinclair continued to rely on reports from his brother-in-law on the spot, causing Eisenstein to react once more. ‘I cannot until now conceive how you could impose us Kimbrough with absolute and irrevocable autority [sic] after all the things that happened between us. Even the most hard-boyled [sic] business man would never do such a thing …’21 Kimbrough remained, writing to Sinclair that Eisenstein and Co were ‘a bunch of homos’.22 What provoked this remark, a specific incident or a general perception by Kimbrough of their behaviour, has never been adequately explained.
Salka Viertel explained the seriousness of the situation in her book, The Kindness of Strangers. ‘The year had passed quickly and the money was about gone … Eisenstein asked me to persuade his Pasadena sponsors to invest more money in the film. Through Upton I succeeded in the difficult task and the millionairesses agreed to increase the financing. But Mrs Sinclair insisted that the “irrational artist” be put under the strict control of her brother, Mr Kimbrough. There were telephone calls and letters, and finally Eisenstein agreed, appointing me to be his representative when the rushes were shown in Los Angeles … My job was to explain to the Pasadena ladies why Eisenstein had photographed this or that from different angles (for example, the bare breasts of a dark Mexican girl …)’23
But there was still a danger that the Sinclairs would withdraw all financial support from Eisenstein. He therefore wrote a desperate letter to Salka, whom he called Zalka, on January 27, 1932: ‘You know that instead of the four months schedule and $25,000, which would have merely resulted in a pitiful travelogue, we have worked 13 months and spent $53,000, but we have a great film and have expanded the original idea. This expansion was achieved under incredible difficulties inflicted upon us by the behaviour and bad management of Upton Sinclair’s brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough … Mr Kimbrough was recalled and then sent back with “increased powers” as my supervisor, which means that now he has the right to interfere with everything I do and make all the cuts! He presented me to Sinclair as a liar, a blackmailer, and God-knows-what-else … Now to our practical achievements: We have 500 soldiers, which the Mexican army has given us for 30 days, 10,000 guns and 50 cannons, all for nothing … We need only $7,000 or $8,000 to finish it, which we could do in a month, and then we would have a truly marvellous film … And all that has to be sacrificed because of $8,000 … Sinclair stopped the production and intends to throw before the people a truncated stump with the heart ripped out! I have exhausted my powers of persuasion. I shall do everything he wants … I accept Kimbrough, everything, anything … if only they let me finish this film. I’ve worked under most incredible harassment, no, not worked, fought … We, all three of us, are convinced that this is our best film and that it must not be destroyed. I beg you, Zalka, go to Sinclair … a film is not a sausage which tastes the same if you eat three-quarters of it or the whole Wurst … Our only hope is that meanwhile a miracle will happen and that the Soldadera episode will be filmed. Help us, Zalka! No, not us, help our work, save it from mutilation!’24
But the Sinclairs called a halt to the production in mid-January when Eisenstein was about to shoot Soldadera, the last of the six episodes. Among the reasons which influenced his decision was that he was clearly told that the USSR did not want the picture. In his autobiography, Sinclair explained that he broke with Eisenstein under pressure from his wife and family. There must have been further pressure on Sinclair to sequester all the material already shot, and to exclude Eisenstein from the editorial process.
‘I gnash my teeth with hatred for those film people who, through stupidity and lack of culture, have not allowed us to complete our 14 months of intensive work which, by all objective criteria, represents an enormous stage in the creative activity of our collective.’25
Consequently, without money and with all the film shot to date in Sinclair’s possession, Eisenstein was forced to leave Mexico for the USA. With his two friends he set off in their old De Soto but got no further than the small border town of Nuevo Laredo, where they were refused entry visas by the American immigration authorities.
‘Anyone who has seen the film Hold Back the Dawn will remember Charles Boyer’s confinement to the border,’ wrote Eisenstein. ‘Three weeks was not so long in Nuevo Laredo. Even four. Five. Six. People spent months here. Years, sometimes. The quota. And the whole flyblown town of Nuevo Laredo was made up of people like this, waiting. They have set up in business.’26 (In fact, the trio had to wait for their transit visas for almost a month, from February 17 to March 14.)
The situation reminded Eisenstein of another film, the final scene from Chaplin’s The Pilgrim (1923), which had the sheriff escorting the convict Charlie near the Mexican border. The sentimental sheriff wants Charlie to escape, and therefore asks his charge to pick a flower for him across the border in Mexico. ‘Charlie obligingly crosses the border. In relief the sheriff spurs on his horse. But … Charlie catches him up with the flower. The film ends with a kick up the backside and a shot of Chaplin running off with one foot in the USA and the other in Mexico. In the middle is the border. There is no solution …’27
Stranded in Mexico and unable to gain access to the footage he had sent to Hollywood for processing, Eisenstein tried, during this frustrating enforced stay, through official Soviet channels in America, to make arrangements for cutting the film in Moscow. Sinclair agreed to this in a telegram to Eisenstein in which he promised to ship both the film and his luggage to the USSR. However, he added a caveat. ‘Your statements that picture incomplete are damaging. Insist you do not make such statements again. If New York papers question you you will be wise and explain it was your proposal to cut in Russia.’
While in Nuevo Laredo, Eisenstein was paid a visit by the owner of a cinema in San Antonio in Texas, who had had the courage to show The Battleship Potemkin to his redneck audience, losing money in the process. The elderly German-born man asked Eisenstein if he would be interested in making a film of the 1945 war between Texas and Mexico. He told Eisenstein: ‘My friends who own the biggest ranches in these parts, will be only too glad to let you have as many horses as you need.’ When Eisenstein explained that making a film required more than horses, he came back with another idea. He had heard of a singer called Señora Montoya, ‘the idol of Latin America’. ‘Do you understand the magic in this name, the effect it would have on the film’s success in South America?’
Coincidentally, she happened to be performing the very next night in Monterey, not far to the south of Nuevo Laredo. Eisenstein declined to go, but Edouard Tisse who ‘did not mind where he went, or why …’ travelled to see Señora Montoya with the Texan.
‘My theatre lovers returned from the performance late. Tisse was bent double with mirth. The gentleman from San Antonio spat angrily and suddenly lapsed into the language of his forebears. “Alte Hure!!” [old whore!!], he furiously muttered through clenched teeth.’28 The man drove back to San Antonio in his old Ford, and they never saw him again.
The next day, the head of immigration control on the American border ran across to the Mexican side and shouted, ‘The visas are ready!’ In a few hours, they were driving through Texas, the beginning of a nineteen-day drive across the country to New York. En route, Eisenstein accumulated a number of comic books, and cut out comic strips and articles from newspapers in an attempt to analyse American humour. In New Orleans, he was invited to lecture to black audiences at the Negro Straight College there, making contact with a number of black intellectuals at the time.
While he had been waiting for sunshine in Merida, where he was filming the bullfight sequence, Eisenstein had begun to sketch key scenes for a film about the Haitian Revolution, an idea inspired by John Vandercook’s Black Majesty, something for which he had already thought of Paul Robeson before leaving Europe.
In New York, Eisenstein was determined to enjoy as much of the bourgeois delights of capitalism as he could before his return home. He saw the Ziegfeld Follies, the ‘college’ musical Good News, and the Barnum and Bailey circus; he visited nightclubs in Harlem, and was at the Max Schmeling-Primo Carnera heavyweight fight at Madison Square Gardens ‘in the presence of the Prince of Wales’, as he noted. He spent time with the dancer Sara Mildred Strauss, once improvising a ballet with her, Tisse and Alexandrov at her studio. He also introduced Sergei Yutkevich’s The Golden Mountains that had opened in New York.
‘The speech gave me a chance to say some harsh words about the emptiness and shallowness of American works, contrasting that with the problematic and deeply philosophical issues which, admittedly, are minor and embryonic, but at least touched upon in The Golden Mountains. In the same speech I mentioned the enhanced subject matter of ideology as the single and crucial means of escape from the dead ends of form and production, which was where American cinema was logically heading. You will appreciate the political significance that this speech had especially in the American context: the American press reacted quite violently to my statement.’29
But what preoccupied Eisenstein most was getting hold of the processed reels of film he had shot for Qué Viva México!, some of which he managed to see in New York in the form of rushes in the laboratory before it was edited and spliced together.
On April 19, 1932, Eisenstein left the USA permanently, on board the Europa. On the ship he shared a table with Noël Coward and Alexander Woollcott, two homosexuals whose waspish wit he enjoyed. Just before sailing he had received a cable from Sinclair, which cheered him up. BON VOYAGE. ALL FILM WILL FOLLOW ON NEXT SHIP. For the rest of his life, Eisenstein kept this broken promise in a black frame on display above his desk, along with a more positive reminder written on a card of the Europa – ‘“Réaliser!” – Cézanne.’30 For Cézanne, it meant ‘Create!’; for Eisenstein, it also meant ‘Direct!’, something he would find increasingly difficult to be allowed to do.
While on the Europa, Eisenstein was blissfully unaware of another storm raging around him. In Mexico, during the months of shooting, he had found time to make many of his finest drawings, most of them, in Ian Christie’s words, ‘delirious conflations of the spiritual and the erotic.’31 The fact that their eroticism was principally homosexual, mingled with blasphemy, added spice to the scandal that their discovery provoked. The drawings, as well as photos of nude males, were found in the trunks and boxes Eisenstein sent to Hollywood from Mexico and were seized by US Customs agents. Sinclair was alerted to these drawings when he was given some samples by Hunter Kimbrough. In an indiscreet letter addressed to the Soviet authorities dated March 19, 1932, Sinclair wrote:
‘It appears that Eisenstein spends all his leisure time in making very elaborate obscene drawings. I have a specimen of his work brought from Mexico. It is identified as Eisenstein’s by his handwriting on it. Believe me, it is not an anatomy study nor a work of art or anything of that sort; it is plain smut. Hunter tells me that Eisenstein presented a series of such drawings to the young owner of the hacienda, and they were so bad that this educated young Mexican refused to put them up in his den.’32
One drawing which Sinclair saw was ‘a parody of Christian paintings showing Jesus and the two thieves hanging on crosses; the penis of Jesus is elongated into a hose, and one of the thieves has the end in his mouth.’33 (Actually, this was Eisenstein’s private joke on the scene of the Mexican version of the Passion in the film.) The customs men apparently informed Sinclair on discovery of the drawings that ‘they were the worst they had ever seen in their lives,’ and ‘they wanted to confiscate the whole shipment’.34 As the trunks also contained property of Sinclair’s, he claimed that Eisenstein had put these drawings in there in the hope of damaging him. One of Eisenstein’s most endearing traits was his complete shamelessness with regard to his erotic/pornographic drawings, seeming not to care who saw them.
The fourteen-month sojourn in Mexico may not have produced a completed film, which, to make matters worse, was mutated in other people’s hands, but the country had a profound influence on Eisenstein as a man and an artist. In his private diary, in which he jotted down idle thoughts in Mexico, he attempted to analyse the mystery that Mexico held for him, trying to make a connection between the ideas of dialectical materialism and the reality of Mexico. He elaborated on his ideas of progress and regression, impossible in the Soviet Union, which knew only progress; the past was wrong, only the future was beautiful and the present only a time of transition before the Communist Millennium. The primitivism of Mexico made him call into question this interpretation of history.
‘I think that it was not that my consciousness and emotions absorbed the blood and sand of the gory corrida, the heady sensuality of the tropics, the asceticism of the flagellant monks, the purple and gold of Catholicism, or even the cosmic timelessness of the Aztec pyramids; on the contrary, the whole complex of emotions and traits that characterise me extended infinitely beyond me to become an entire, vast country with mountains, forests, cathedrals, people, fruit, wild animals, breakers, herds, armies, decorated prelates, majolica on blue cupolas, necklaces made of gold coins worn by the girls of Tehuantepec and the play of reflections in the canals of Xochimilco … Here my passions seemed to surge in the crimson groves of the cardinal’s robes, which were gilded by the incense smoke at high mass as autumn gilds the leaf. They bore fruit in the form of amethyst crosses and tiaras, whose split tops looked like overripe pomegranates that had burst open in the sun.’35
Qué Viva México! was shot by Tisse in black and white but Eisenstein invariably saw the film in his mind’s eye in colour. ‘The reason for this is very simple (I would say tragically simple!): its shots have remained in my memory not as photographic pictures but as the very objects themselves as they were caught by the lens as they actually appeared in front of the camera.’36 Mexico was a ‘paradise regained’ of graphic art; its elaborate primitivism and religiosity interlaced with sensuality clearly reconnected Eisenstein with some thread broken during the emotional traumas of his childhood.
‘It was in Mexico that my drawing underwent an internal catharsis, striving for mathematical abstraction and purity of line,’ Eisenstein declared.37 This was derived directly from the Mexican landscape, and from the outlines – square and round – of the dress of the peons.
According to the painter Jean Chariot, who watched Eisenstein drawing in Mexico, the sketches were done ‘very quickly so as not to disturb the subconscious elements.’38 Among the drawings he did in Mexico was a series of hundreds of variations on the killing of Duncan by Macbeth, emphasising the savagery of the regicide, and the erotic excitement produced by the act. Eisenstein never forgot that Shakespeare was a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible, as he himself was a contemporary of Stalin. There was also ‘Ten Aspects of the Death of Werther’, and Samson and Delilah, again concentrating on the violent facets of these stories, as well as a cycle of Salome sketches, one of which has Salome drinking through a straw from the lips of John the Baptist’s severed head.
These were slightly less directly influenced by his Mexican surroundings than those he called Adoration of the Matador, Crucified Bull, and Synthesis: Eve, Europe, Jesus, Torero. There were further series of drawings with equally sado-masochistic themes: the subject of the martyrdom of St Sebastian (the pre-eminent saint in homosexual mythology) merged with that of the bullfight, such as the crucified bull pierced with arrows, and St Sebastian as a dying matador. However, these drawings, though open to psychological interpretation (the Freudian Hanns Sachs thought they demonstrated that Eisenstein had a ‘womb complex’ or Mutterleibsversenkung), did not derive solely from the perverted psyche of a ‘blazing decadent’, as Kimbrough once described Eisenstein. As Eisenstein noted: ‘Do not blame me for any of this. It was Mexico: in one element of the Resurrection festival they mix the blood of Christ from the morning mass in the cathedral, with the streams of bull’s blood in the afternoon corrida in the city’s arena.’39
The tableau of male coupling, which takes place around the central figure that is identifiable as a self-portrait, with a vulture biting his penis, is a wry reference to Freud’s analysis of Leonardo’s dream of a vulture stinging him with a tail, considered a fantasy of fellatio.
Not only did Mexico liberate Eisenstein’s drawing, but also his libido. ‘The latent wanderings of sensuality seemed incarnate in the interweavings of bronzed bodies … Washed by moonlight, the regularly breathing abundance of bodies of the soldadaras and their husbands – soldiers – held in close embraces seemed embodied in me … the bodies breathed regularly and in unison; the very earth seemed to be breathing; here and there a white blanket showed up, modestly thrown over a pair lying among the others, black in the moonlight, bodies covered by nothing; bodies not knowing shame; bodies for whom what is natural is natural and naturally needs no concealment …’40
Eisenstein admitted to finding himself drawn to this ‘bronze race’ of Mexican Indian, seeing them as hermaphrodites. ‘The masculine frenzy of temper, the feminine softness of outline hiding a steel musculature and the outer muscles flowing around it; and the disposition to forgive coupled with a childish naughtiness … Adult men and women seem adolescent in comparison with other races; a race of young people, where the men have not yet lost their early femininity, nor the women abandoned their puerile pranks and both seem charmingly childish … Mexico is tender and lyrical, but brutal too,’ Eisenstein remarked, a composite that found an echo in his own character. ‘Physical brutality, whether in the “asceticism” of flagellant monks, or in their torturing of others; in the blood of bull or man, which after mass each week douses the sands of countless Sunday corridas in a sensual communion; or the pages of history telling of the unexampled brutality used to suppress countless uprisings of peons, whipped to a frenzy by unforced paid labour; and the brutal reprisals of the leader of the revolt: Villa who ordered the prisoners to be hanged naked so that he and his soldiers could be entertained by the sight of their last physiological reactions, peculiar to hanged men.’41
The subsequent history of Qué Viva México! was almost as brutal. Upton Sinclair never kept his promise to send the film material to Moscow for Eisenstein to edit. In order to recover his losses, Sinclair, no doubt under pressure from his wife and her Pasadena group, allowed several films to be mined from the material shot by Eisenstein in Mexico.
Even after learning of vicious attacks made on him by Sinclair with the aim of blackening his reputation with the Soviet authorities, Eisenstein, back in Moscow in May 1932, still hoped to obtain the film. In August, he heard of Sinclair’s shocking decision to allow the American producer Sol Lesser to assemble some of the raw material into a film called Thunder Over Mexico. It used footage from the Prologue, Epilogue and the Maguey episode, which was cut together by editor Don Hayes for Lesser.
At the opening performance in Los Angeles on March 1, 1933, Sinclair declared that the picture followed Eisenstein’s scenario and that the scenes had been selected in proper proportion to make practicable footage. An International Defence Committee for Eisenstein’s Mexican Film was set up, and the editors of the magazine Experimental Cinema immediately published a manifesto. ‘We decry this illegitimate version of Qué Viva México! and denounce it for what it is – a mere vulgarisation of Eisenstein’s original conception put forth in his name in order to capitalise on his renown as a creative artist … We denounce the cutting of Qué Viva México! by professional Hollywood cutters as an unmitigated mockery of Eisenstein’s intention. We denounce Thunder Over Mexico as a cheap debasement of Qué Viva México!’42 There was even a petition organised against Sinclair’s nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Eisenstein referred to it as ‘the ill-starred, emasculated version of my film, Qué Viva México! …. transformed by someone’s grubby hands into the pitiful gibberish of Thunder Over Mexico … [by] the enterprising Yankees.’43
The American producer Sol Lesser defended himself thus: ‘We had a mass of film, several hundred thousand feet, along with duplicate shots. I was able to make a film out of it, but the Communists started to attack me for invading the cutting rights of Eisenstein. They said I was desecrating the master’s touch. The night we previewed the picture in Los Angeles, they threw stink bombs in the theatre. I received all kinds of threatening letters. In any event we took the picture to New York. Everywhere I went there was publicity about it. And some organisations announced a boycott. At last, one of the theatres down around 14th Street agreed to run only the original uncut version as Eisenstein had delivered it, eighty or ninety reels of uncut film. I agreed, but under one condition: the exhibitor would really show it all. I numbered the reels, and the theatre advertised the original uncut version. People came and brought their lunches. After a couple of hours, they began to drift out and others came in. Before it was a third over, the house was empty. No one ever asked for the uncut version again. The boycott stopped. I went to Europe with a salesman, and we were able to sell the rights nearly everywhere. Upton Sinclair got out. I handled the picture for a while until there was no more demand for it. We deposited the film at the Museum of Modern Art; we gave it to them. They were making money on it, and they would occasionally send Mr Sinclair a little cheque. They were not obligated to do so, but they felt they should. The film is actually very good.’44
Lesser failed to add that he produced two short films, Eisenstein in Mexico and Death Day derived from different footage in 1934. Five years later, Eisenstein’s well-meaning British friend, Marie Seton, went to Hollywood and discovered original footage in a ‘stock shot’ vault. From there she went to Mexico to check with various Mexican advisers on the footage Eisenstein had shot, with the object of having it sent back to him in Moscow. She claimed, however, that the outbreak of World War II prevented her from doing so. Thus, without Eisenstein’s knowledge, she decided to edit the material as Time in the Sun, maintaining that she followed the basic scheme of Eisenstein’s screenplay. Though it was more faithful to the original conception than Thunder Over Mexico, the cutting was crude, the music mere accompaniment, and the narration banal. In 1941, there was Mexican Symphony (1941), a series of educational shorts issued by the Bell and Howell Company, taken from much of the same material. (In the late 1970s, Alexandrov re-edited it, with no more success.)
When Eisenstein finally saw some of these educational films many years later, he wrote: ‘Passer-by! Do not look for my thoughts here in cinematographic discordances cobbled together by the filthy hands of money-makers. Those films, which have been compiled from the material filmed by us on the wondrous soil of Mexico, do not belong to me.’45
Nevertheless, Qué Viva México!, even in these foetal forms, made a tremendous impact on Mexican cinema, which until then had exposed audiences to mostly popular melodramas and crude comedies, as well as Spanish-language versions of Hollywood movies. Eisenstein’s visit inspired directors like Emilio Fernandez and cameraman Gabriel Figueroa, and the number of Mexican-made films increased and improved in quality. Again, there is a direct line from Qué Viva México! to Buñuel’s Mexican films with their surreal images, anti-clericalism and ambivalent attitude to religion.
Since Eisenstein neither had the opportunity to complete the shooting nor to edit the film as he would have wanted, the various versions, no matter how mutilated, have enabled audiences to catch glimpses of some of the elements that would have made up the film. They disclose much of Eisenstein’s bizarre humour – setting profiles of the present-day Indians against the statuary of their ancestors, a group of mourners at a funeral with their chins resting on a coffin, from which breast-like objects protrude, and the death masks, revealing further death masks beneath during a danse macabre.
Eisenstein’s obsession with religious rituals is given full rein in the parade of penitents walking on their knees, while following three young men on their way to Calvary, later echoed by the three bound peons suffering their own Golgotha as they stand on a hill awaiting execution. Intermingled with religion are the rites of courtship and marriage, to which scenes Eisenstein and Tisse brought an exotic sensuality; as a young couple swing gently in a hammock, light and shadow play upon her bare breasts. (One remembers, in a very different context, the sweaty male bodies swinging in their hammocks below deck in The Battleship Potemkin.)
Fruitless as it is to speculate on how the completed Qué Viva México! would have turned out, the received wisdom is that it might have been Eisenstein’s masterpiece. Unlike the extant sequence of stills from Behzin Meadow, for which greater claims could be made, there is enough evidence – to judge from the over-ambitious, overly-episodic screenplay, with its didactic and pedagogical overtones, its travelogue element and the elaborate posing of the ‘noble savages’ – that the completed film might have been seriously flawed. There is also confirmation that the deprivation of Eisenstein’s montage, serious as it is, does not hamper our appreciation of the individual shots as much as its absence would have done in his previous films.
According to Eisenstein, ‘When I had finished investigating montage, and foreseeing a unity of laws both in montage and shot, which I examined in stages, I dedicated all my work (from its formally academic point of view) to the question of the nature of shot composition: Qué Viva México! – my film about Mexico. As if punishing me for virtually leaving montage out of the scheme of things, this picture is frequently open to the most diverse of montage interpretations by different editors, although it does bear up to audience perception, probably simply because it was planned primarily on the basis of the shot.’46
A letter from Eisenstein in French in July 1934 to Victorio Ocampo, the Argentinian writer, and editor of the literary periodical Sur, gives some idea of the agony Eisenstein suffered on account of the aborted film.
‘Very dear friend. My entire Mexican adventure ended in total disaster, as you probably already know. The photography (and it’s very beautiful) is all that remains – but the entire composition, montage etc are completely destroyed by the imbeciles who contrived it. As well as the total epic conception. I so loved Mexico and I find it painful not to be able to express it in this film which is destroyed … I hope you will discern where Eisenstein ends and Hollywood idiocy begins! This whole affair has broken my heart to the point where I have become disgusted with cinema and have not made a film since …’47
But this situation was not a matter of choice, and there was more heartbreak to come.