speaking of Eisenstein

Video: ¡Que viva México! footage by Sergei Eisenstein

Come to find out Eisenstein set out to make a film in Mexico in 1932, during the depths of the Depression, bankrolled by the American author Upton Sinclair.

A mountain of reels were shot and Eisenstein expected that they would be shipped to him in the U.S.S.R. for editing. The Soviet government prevented their delivery, and the film was never finished.

But the footage -- most all of it quite stunning, if misguided in its portrayal of the modern Maya -- was cobbled together by another hand and has been posted in nine parts to YouTube by Documentales Mexico »



Update: The cameraman on ¡Que viva México! was Manuel Alvarez Bravo »

had Eisenstein replied

Video: Opening clip from Sergei Eisenstein's first full length feature Стачка (1925)

How I would like to go to Moscow and work under Eisenstein for a year. ... What I would learn under a person like Pudovkin is how to handle a camera, the higher trucs of the editing bench, & so on, of which I know as little as of quantity surveying.

Samuel Beckett in a series of letters to his friend Thomas McGreevy, cited in The Making of Samuel Beckett in the 30 April issue of the New York Review of Books.

Beckett wrote to Eisenstein and requested admission to the Moscow State School of Cinematography. He didn't hear back.

It's strange to speculate what kind of films the author of Play and Endgame and the just now running on Broadway Waiting for Godot might have made, had Eisenstein replied.