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OVER MEXICO "ASA CHEAP DEBASEMENT OF " QUE VIVA MEXICO !"
As all students of the cinema are aware, Eisenstein edits (" mounts ") his own films. Contrary to the methods generally employed by professional directors in Hollywood, Eisenstein gives final form to the film in the cuttingroom. The very essence of his creative genius, and of his oft-quoted theory of the cinema, consists in the editing of the separate shots after all the scenes have been photographed. Virtually every film director of note has testified, time and again, to the revolutionary consequences of Eisenstein's montage technique on the modern cinema, and every student of the cinema knows how impossible it is for anyone except Eisenstein to edit his pictures.
" THUNDER OVER MEXICO " HAS NOT BEEN EDITED BY EISENSTEIN AND YET IS BEING EXPLOITED IN TOTO AS HIS ACHIEVEMENT. THE EDITING OF " THUNDER OVER MEXICO " IS NOT EISENSTEIN'S MONTAGE.
Out of approximately 200,000 feet of film shot by Eisenstein in Mexico, a picture of some 7,000 feet, cut according to conventional Hollywood standards, has been produced — an emasculated fragment of Eisenstein's original scenario which provided for six interrelated episodes, in which were included a dramatic prologue depicting the life of ancient Yucatan and an epilogue foreshadowing the destinies of the Mexican people. What has happed to this material ?
Eisenstein's original prologue, which was intended to trace the sources and primitive manifestations of Mexican culture, thus projecting the most vital cultural forms among the Aztecs, Toltecs and the Mayans, has been converted into a pseudo-travelogue.
Worse than this is the fate of Eisenstein's original epilogue, which was intended to establish the timeless continuity of types from ancient Yucatan to modern Mexica, and which was meant to anticipate the revolutionary urge dormant in the descendants of those ancient races. Under the guidance of Eisenstein's backers, who have never from the start shown a due consciousness of what the film is all about, the epilogue has now been converted into a cheerful ballyhoo about " a new Mexico," with definite fascist implications.
The remaining mass of material, consisting of more than 180,000 feet, is in danger of being sold piecemeal to commercial film concerns.
Thus, Eisenstein's great vision of the Mexican ethos, which he had intended to present in the form of a " film symphony," has been destroyed. Of the original conception, as revealed in the scenario1 and in Eisenstein's correspondence with the editors of EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA, nothing remains in the commercialized version except the photography, which no amount of mediocre cutting could destroy. As feared by Eisenstein's friends and admirers, the scenario, written in the form of prose poem, merely confused the professional Hollywood cutters. The original meaning of the film has been perverted by reproduction of the whole to a single unconnected