Que Viva Mexico!
Santa Sangre
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Que Viva Mexico!
Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein.
USSR/US/Mexico, 1932, 35mm, black & white, 85 min.
Russian with English subtitles.
Print source: HFA
In 1930, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein signed a contract with the novelist Upton Sinclair and various other investors (including the Gillette Razor Company) to shoot a film in Mexico. By the end of 1931, with some 50 hours of film shot, Sinclair became restive at the apparently unending flow of footage and suspended the project. Eisenstein left for the Soviet Union, expecting the rushes to be sent to him for completion. They never arrived, however, and the project languished for more than forty years until Grigori Aleksandrov, Eisenstein's former editor, obtained the material and constructed the most well-known of the many versions that imagine what Eisenstein might have done. The result is a glorious and compelling vision of a mystical Mexico, ravishingly photographed by Eduard Tisse. Told in five segments, with the ultimate ambition of creating "a poem of love, death, and immortality," Eisenstein explores different aspects of indigenous life, as well as the plight of the Indians after the Spanish conquest and Catholic indoctrination.
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Santa Sangre
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
With Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell.
Mexico/Italy, 1989, 35mm, color, 123 min.
Like some Fellini-esque nightmare, this heady mix of circus freaks and weird religious and hallucinatory images (an armless virgin saint, writhing snakes, zombie brides) is rife with disturbing psychological undercurrents. Traumatized at an early age by a violent argument between his knife-throwing father and trapeze-artist mother, former child magician Fenix, now twenty, escapes from an asylum into the outside world. Reunited with his jealous mother, Fenix becomes her "arms" in a bizarre pantomime act, a role which dangerously spills over into real life.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Ballad of a Soldier / The Forty-First
Nightfall / Great Day in the Morning
Verboten! / Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
I'll Never Forget What's 'is Name / The Jokers
Hearts of the World / True Heart Susie
Anna Christie / The Long Voyage Home
Suddenly Last Summer / The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
Quiet Days in Clichy / Henry and June
The Freshman / The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
The Sheep Has Five Legs / The Law is the Law
Hobson's Choice / Sidewalks of London
I Know Where I'm Going / Outcast of the Islands
An Inspector Calls / The Belles of St. Trinian's
Mother Joan of the Angels / Thérèse
Dawn of the Dead / Strange Behavior
