Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) spent just over a year in Mexico--from December 1930 to February 1932--a period during which he shot a huge quantity of footage for his (never-to-be-completed) film Que viva Mexico! This remarkable volume gathers the original script for Que viva Mexico!, dozens of photographs and drawings, and various short pieces of writing about Mexico, completed after Eisenstein's return to the Soviet Union.
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, In 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, In Excess provides the most complete genealogy available of major shifts in this modern master’s theories and aesthetics.
This fascinating study presents for the first time the full story of Eisenstein's disastrous attempt to make a great film in Mexico, a motion picture "symphony" of Mexican life, history, culture, and the perpetual Mexican fiesta of death. It clarifies the relationship between Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair, the American novelist who financed the picture, and reveals the causes and consequences of Sinclair's withdrawal of financial backing. Eisenstein was at the height of his creative powers when he began working on the Mexican film. The fiasco that ended the project was to leave a permanent mark on his life and work, while Sinclair was to be vilified on both sides of the Atlantic as the desecrator of the most important film of the world's greatest motion picture director. The book presents the story of these events in a unique manner by embedding the actual correspondence of the main participants in a commentary by Professors Geduld and Gottesman, who have endeavored to tell the truth about a tragic episode in the history of the cinema.
This script by British director Peter Greenaway (born 1942) follows Russian director Eisenstein to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1930, where he worked for ten days on a never-completed film called Que Viva Mexico.
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The first comprehensive book on the extensive, yet rarely seen, graphic works of pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein Sergei Eisenstein is regarded as one of cinema’s greatest revolutionaries. Less well known is that he was also a prolific graphic artist who drew compulsively as a means of expressing his ideas. Arranged chronologically, Eisenstein on Paper is divided into six chapters, each prefaced by short texts relating to the graphic works of each distinct period, and interwoven with excerpts from Eisenstein’s own essays and diary entries. In 1930 Eisenstein traveled to the United States and then Mexico, where he produced hundreds of drawings influenced by ancient and contemporary Mexican art. Forced to return to Russia in 1932, Eisenstein came under the scrutiny of the Communist government and, struggling to make further films without political interference, turned again to sketching for artistic freedom. By the end of his life, he had pared his style down to the utmost simplicity and sincerity. Despite completing relatively few films in his lifetime, Eisenstein made several thousand drawings. Eisenstein on Paper is the product of a groundbreaking collaboration with RGALI, the Russian State Archive of Arts and Literature, and is a fitting tribute to an incredible graphic talent.
Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) spent just over a year in Mexico--from December 1930 to February 1932--a period during which he shot a huge quantity of footage for his (never-to-be-completed) film Que viva Mexico! This remarkable volume gathers the original script for Que viva Mexico!, dozens of photographs and drawings, and various short pieces of writing about Mexico, completed after Eisenstein's return to the Soviet Union. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
A renowned Soviet director discusses his theory of film as an artistic medium which must appeal to all senses and applies it to an analysis of sequences from his major movies.
A classic on the aesthetics of filmmaking from the pioneering Soviet director who made Battleship Potemkin. Though he completed only a half-dozen films, Sergei Eisenstein remains one of the great names in filmmaking, and is also renowned for his theory and analysis of the medium. Film Form collects twelve essays, written between 1928 and 1945, that demonstrate key points in the development of Eisenstein’s film theory and in particular his analysis of the sound-film medium. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Jay Leyda, this volume allows modern-day film students and fans to gain insights from the man who produced classics such as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible and created the renowned “Odessa Steps” sequence.
