Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015)

In 1931, after an aborted attempt at making a film in Hollywood, acclaimed Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein received funding from author Upton Sinclair to go to Mexico and make a film there with his regular collaborators, co-director Grigori Alexandrov and cinematographer Eduard Tisse. That resulting film, Que Viva Mexico, was never completed (a version was edited together in 1979 by Alexandrov, to give an approximation of Eisenstein's vision). At the time, Eisenstein was riding high on the worldwide success of his trio of revolutionary films Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October, and the trip across the European and American continents provided an opportunity to meet with luminaries in all fields across multiple countries.

However, his stay in Mexico proved to be a transformative experience for Eisenstein, as he immersed himself in the culture thousands of miles from Soviet Russia and Stalin. It is this experience that Peter Greenaway explores in his avant garde biopic, Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015). Greenaway focuses not on the making of Que Viva Mexico, which quickly becomes almost a footnote to Eisenstein's trip. Rather, he examines Eisenstein the man (played by Finnish actor Elmer Back in a splendid performance), whom we initially see as a flamboyant, bombastic man in total charge of his public image. As production on his film continues to drag out, Eisenstein becomes intoxicated on the local culture and his admiration for the country's own recent revolution, but is also revealed to have extreme self-doubt about his body and his sexuality. It is through his relationship with his Mexican guide, the intellectual and academic Palomino Canedo (Luis Alberti), that Eisenstein goes through this personal transformation coming to terms with himself.

I had not heard of this film until doing some recent digging on the web about Eisenstein, and decided to watch it after just having viewed the entirety of Eisenstein's filmography. I wanted to see it while his films were fresh in my mind. Greenaway's avant garde approach is very well-suited to the subject of the revolutionary filmmaker, and conveys the swirling events that Eisenstein experiences as a stranger in a strange land.

It's interesting how this brief period of Eisenstein's life continues to hold such a fascination. Several years ago, film scholar Mark Cousins made a documentary video essay about his own stay in Mexico City, called What is This Film Called Love (2011), in which he walked around the city with a photograph of Eisenstein, attempting to experience something of Mexico as Eisenstein experienced it.