THUNDER OVER MEXICO

In 1930, after an attempt to adapt Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy for Paramount Pictures fell apart owing to an anti-communist campaign directed against him by Frank Pease (who called him “a sadistic Jew steeped in Bolshevik atrocities”), Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein partnered with American author Upton Sinclair to leave Hollywood for Mexico to begin work on the film Que Viva México.

The film was grand in scope: an epic and episodic look at the symbolism, history and struggles of Mexico from the ancient Mayan civilization in the Yucatán through Conquest, the ascension of the Virgin Guadalupe cult, pulque production under Porfirio Díaz to the Soldaderas (women revolutionary soldiers) fighting in the 1910 Revolution, and masterfully shot by cinematographer Eduard Tisse, known for his work with Eisenstein on Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, and October: Ten Days That Shook the World. It is estimated that they shot 30 to 50 hours of film, before production was halted because the American Film Trust (comprised of Sinclair and other American investors) thought the scriptless film was too complicated for audiences. Tisse envisioned the film would succeed because of three key ingredients: “Mexican sun, American film, and German lenses,” and Eisenstein believed that the film would itself be a sort of cinematic mural, exclaiming, “We filmmakers too paint with light on the walls of the world!”

Eisenstein was never able to edit the film: the American investors would not send it to him in Russia for editing, and instead Upton Sinclair authorized two films to be produced from the staggering amount of footage: 1933’s Thunder Over Mexico (edited by Sol Lesser) and 1940’s Time in the Sun (edited by Mary Seyton), both of which Eisenstein found distasteful and a complete distortion of his project. There were subsequent attempts in later decades to edit the material into a film that would be more true to Eisenstein’s vision, utilizing the director’s correspondence and journals, such as the 1979 Mosfilm production ¡Que viva México!, made by Soviet filmmakers Grigori Aleksandrov and Esfir Tobak, and re-released on DVD in the early 2000s.

These photographs are publicity stills from the 1930 production, Thunder Over Mexico.