¡Qué viva México! - Sergei Eisenstein

il film ricomposto da  Grigori Alexandrov, nel 1979, sulla base del girato nel 1932 da Sergei Eisenstein, in Messico.
per quello che è nel film, e per quello che poteva essere, un capolavoro, sulla fiducia.
alcune immagini e sequenze sono epiche, immense.
gli occhi di Sergei Eisenstein sono bellissimi.
guardalo, non te ne penti - Ismaele

…Eisenstein ayant perdu la propriété de ses rushes, ce n'est qu'en 1979 qu'Alexandrov réalisera une version « la plus proche possible de ce que voulait Eisenstein ». Ainsi monté,¡Que Viva México! apparaît comme un mélange subtil de fiction et de documentaire qui replace le Mexique d'aujourd'hui dans la force de son Histoire. On peut supposer que les parties rituelles, un peu longues, auraient certainement été montées plus courtes si le film avait été complètement tourné. Ces parties opposent la vie et la mort, mort qui revient sous différentes formes dans les rites et les coutumes. Les images sont superbes. Mais c'est l'épisode « Maguey » qui est le plus remarquable, une histoire assez simple mais remarquablement mis en images. Il y a, dans cet épisode, une puissance et une force qui évoquent les plus grands films d'Eisenstein. Il ne fait nul doute que ¡Que Viva México! aurait été un très grand film s'il avait été achevé et monté par Eisenstein….

…Montage d'Alexandrov de 1979 en 4 parties :
* Prologue : relie le Mexique d'aujourd'hui à son histoire, notamment la civilisation Maya. Eisenstein met en parallèle les têtes sculptées de divinités et des visages de mexicains vivants.
1. Sanduga : montre les rites actuels du mariage à Tehuantepec.
2. Fiesta : rites de célébration de la Vierge de Guadalupe suivi d'une corrida. Etude de la transcription du christianisme au Mexique.
3. Maguey : met en scène une histoire tragique se déroulant dans une hacienda sous la dictature de Porfirio Díaz. Le maitre des lieux viole et séquestre la fiancée d'un jeune péon qui organise sa vengeance.
4. Soldadera (non tourné) devait mettre en scène le soulèvement de 1910, prélude à la Révolution mexicaine, avec une mise en avant des femmes et plus généralement du peuple, tentant ainsi de faire un rapprochement avec la Révolution soviétique.
* Epilogue : montre la célébration du Jour des morts, légèrement satirique.

da qui

…Mexico learned about Mexican history and its people through artists like Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and Jose Orozco, and it's obvious from the start that Eisenstein was enamored with the country. The genius of the film's Prologue is how Eisenstein successfully evokes an eternal Mexico in suspended cultural animation. The entire episode takes place in the Yucatan, a beautiful region of Mexico seemingly possessed by its stone gods, pagan temples and marvelous pyramids. Here, "time flows slowly" and Eisenstein's images evoke a certain near-frozen sense of evolution by placing the film's modern Mexicans beside their ancient stone counterparts. Immediately, the director has set up a fascinating struggle between the past and the present that permeates the rest of the picture and is indicative of what Eisenstein considers both the country's strength and devastating weakness…

da qui

…In short, the film is a strange, at times enthralling, but fundamentally unsatisfactory encounter between the Soviet avant-garde impulses of the director, the Hollywood and commercial imperatives guiding its backer Upton Sinclair, and the images of a revolutionary indigenism on which both converge.

Finally, as Gilles Deleuze quotes Fellini saying, "the film is over when the money runs out." Eisenstein went over budget, Sinclair couldn't raise any more cash, Stalin refused to buy up the footage shot, and the project languished, to become quite literally a museum piece, in the custody of New York's Museum of Modern Art…

da qui

…In the same year the great Mexican painter Diego Rivera also visited the Soviet Union. He and Eisenstein became friends, and Rivera spoke often about Mexican history, architecture and art. He believed that it was important for a country to preserve and draw from its cultural past, remarking at one point that it was a mistake for the Soviets to condemn their tradition of icon painting. This kind of thing went against the grain, and by the time Rivera left a year later, he was out of favor and sharply critical of Soviet ideology.

His influence on Eisenstein was profound. The young filmmaker's interest in Mexican culture now became an obsession, and for the first time the idea came to him of doing a film about Mexico. Mexico seems to have represented something vital and exciting to Eisenstein. Perhaps it symbolized a freedom that he had not felt since childhood. The call of Mexico might have been in part the call of parts of himself - imaginative, sensual, spiritual - that he had denied and that was denied validity in the new revolutionary culture. He was apparently not aware of any of these implications, but he continued to dream…

da qui