Mr. Eisenstein Goes to Hollywood

December 10, 2018 5:06 AM

Eisenstein versus Sinclair: H. W. L. Dana and “¡Que Viva México!” (Angela Shpolberg, LA Review of Books).

IN THE SPRING of 1930 the experimental Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein left Stalin’s Soviet Union for Hollywood, at the invitation of Paramount Pictures, with a stop on the East Coast, where he was fêted by the leading artists and leftists. When Eisenstein and Paramount failed to agree to terms, socialist novelist Upton Sinclair, armed with his wife’s enthusiasm and her checkbook, stepped forward to sponsor the production of Eisenstein’s ambitious Mexican-American project, ¡Que Viva México! The venture was a colossal disaster. It strained relationships within the leftist movement in the United States and reverberated at the highest levels of power in the Soviet Union.

posted by sapagan (2 comments total)

Heh. I get a kick out of this story, not the least because the movie Eisenstein made in 1929, just prior to this whole fiasco, could have provided some clue to Eisenstein's state of mind before embarking on his journey. The movie, The General Line aka Old and New, is so outlandish that it suggests Eisenstein either had lost faith in the Soviet plan and created a movie as much a parody as support for collectivism, or that he had burrowed so far into his own genius that he'd completely lost touch with the basic reality of the situation.

One only need view The General Line to see how outre Eisenstein's vision had become since Potemkin. Here, for example, is the famous creamer scene, where the farmers have pooled their resources to improve their lot after much debate and some strife. The success of a separator being likened to sexual ecstasy, but that's not even as good as the "wedding" ceremony and, um, honeymoon scene between a cow and steer a little later in the film, which can be seen here at the 1.06 to 1.10 mark in the movie, the entirety of which is online. The whole movie is so exaggerated in its treatment of the characters and situation that it's difficult to read being meant at face value, but, who knows? Maybe it was. In any case, it definitely carried some hint of what was to come.

It might also be worth noting that Peter Greenaway, of all people, made a movie about these events, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, and is working on a sequel, Eisenstein in Hollywood, to add another layer of weird given how Greenaway's interests aren't really those of either Hollywood or Eisenstein but his own little bugaboos.

Que Viva Mexico is also online if anyone wants to see the (re)constructed version of Eisenstein's efforts.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:47 AM on December 10, 2018 [4 favorites]

"Sinclair received a telegram directly from Stalin" - wild, but definitely par for the course, given Stalin's focus on the arts.
posted by doctornemo at 7:55 AM on December 10, 2018