The film till now : a survey of world cinema (1960)

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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA Eisenstein and he could not agree on how to bring it to a conclusion, and that, as he held the rights, he proposed to make an arrangement with a commercial Hollywood producer, Sol Lesser, to edit the film and through whom it would be released. The resulting controversy was tumultous. Eisenstein's embattled partisans in the United States organised pressure groups, raised money, and threatened to seek legal means by which to take the footage away from its backers and send it to Eisenstein, who had already returned to the Soviet Union. Sinclair defended his actions on the grounds of economic commercial necessity. Shortly the controversy was embittered by the introduction of political issues. Meanwhile, Sol Lesser's version of the material, called Thunder Over Mexico, appeared at the end of 1933. This, one sequence of the original film, was praised or damned according to one's bias. It fell to Grierson to sum up what has become the final verdict : ' The clouds and the cactus will pass for great photography among the hicks, but they are, of course, easy meat for anyone with a decent set of filters .... The significance that Eisenstein might have added to the tale is not there; and types, acting and glycerined clouds cannot turn a simple tale of village rape into the passion of a people. There were other things up Eisenstein's sleeve, or he is not the dialectician I have always taken him for/1 The absurdity of calling Eisenstein's a film which he did not edit is now sufficiently obvious, and it was only confirmed by the subsequent release of Death Day, edited from the original material by Sinclair, and of Time in the Sun, edited by Eisenstein's disciple Marie Seton from instructions and scenario notes which were, one gathered, more or less posthumous to the project. Apparently there was at no time a complete original script, and it is useless even to speculate upon what the film would have been like if completed by Eisenstein.2 Perhaps another Birth 1 Grierson on Documentary, edited by H. Forsyth Hardy (Collins. 1946), p. 54. 2 Eisenstein's synopsis for Que Viva Mexico appeared in Experimental Cinema, No. 5. Reprinted with 36 illustrations (Vision Press, 1951). 563