Storyline
The venerated filmmaker Eisenstein is comparable in talent, insight and wisdom, with the likes of Shakespeare or Beethoven; there are few - if any - directors who can be elevated to such heights. On the back of his revolutionary film Battleship Potemkin, he was celebrated around the world, and invited to the US. Ultimately rejected by Hollywood and maliciously maligned by conservative Americans, Eisenstein traveled to Mexico in 1931 to consider a film privately funded by American pro-Communist sympathizers, headed by the American writer Upton Sinclair. Eisenstein's sensual Mexican experience appears to have been pivotal in his life and film career - a significant hinge between the early successes of Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October, which made him a world-renowned figure, and his hesitant later career with Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible and The Boyar's Plot.
Cast: Elmer Bäck -
Sergei Eisenstein
Luis Alberti -
Palomino Cañedo
Maya Zapata -
Concepción Cañedo
Lisa Owen -
Mary Sinclair
Stelio Savante -
Hunter S. Kimbrough
Rasmus Slätis -
Grisha Alexandrov
Jakob Öhrman -
Edouard Tisse
Alan Del Castillo -
Mauro González -
Raino Ranta -
Meierhold
Country: Netherlands, Mexico, Finland, Belgium, France
Language: English, Spanish
Release Date: 3 Jan 2015
Filming Locations: Guanajuato, Mexico
Box Office Details
Budget: €2,472,000
(estimated)
Technical Specs
Runtime:
User Review
Author:
Rating: 8/10
Peter Greenaway's career is beyond any ambitions of commercial success
- his most successful (audience-wise) movies were made in the 80s. Even
then the combination of colors and music, architecture (he is an
architect by formation) and composition, his obsessions for sex and
death and his bluntness in approaching them were much out of the beaten
track. For the last two decades his projects became more and more
exploratory, with the moving images being only one of the tools in
combinations of multi-disciplinary explorations and experiments that
brought together almost every artistic discipline that was invented.
Eisenstein in Guanajuato can be seen almost as a return to the more
conventional tools of film making. It has a story, and it has a hero
and it has a theme, one of these themes film makers love to bring to
screen, maybe the ultimate film theme - film making!
If you listen to what Peter Greenaway has to tell about his film (and
he speaks a lot as he promotes the film in the international festival
tour) Eisentein in Guanajuato is before all a homage to one of the
greatest directors in the history of cinema who was Sergei Eisenstein.
It also is a social and political commentary, as it deals with what was
probably the most exuberant, liberal and care-free period in the life
of the screen director of the Soviet Revolution, and also with the
sexual orientation of Eisenstein which was kind of a well known secret
in his biography, tolerated by the Soviet authorities but maybe also a
tool of blackmail by the KGB. The period spent by Eisenstein in Mexico
while shooting material never gathered and edited for a film about the
country and its revolutions may have been the happiest time in the life
of the director already famous for Potemkin and October. It allowed him
not only a unique encounter with a culture that was so different from
some aspects yet so close from other compared with the Russian culture
he knew from home, but also an encounter with himself, with his own
demons, his self-denied homosexuality, his tendency to the luxury and
the decadence of the bourgeois life, so different from the austerity he
left in the Soviet Russia and to which he was condemned to return.
There is almost nothing in this film about Eisenstein's film making. At
no point does he shout 'Camera!' or 'Action!' - at some moment he even
refuses to do so. Peter Greenaway does not try to expose any secrets of
the film making art of Eisenstein, but rather deals with the
surrounding context that made his films possible. Finnish actor Elmer
Bäck brings on screen an Eisenstein who hides his doubts behind
exuberance, and his fears behinds carelessness, who is sure of his
artistic genius but unaware about his personal charisma. Mexican actor
Luis Alberti builds a fine counterpoint to Eisenstein's character and a
credible gay love interest. The camera work does not try to replicate
anything that Eisenstein has done on screen, but rather quotes and
incorporates fragments of Eisentein's movies with the visual
commentaries of Greenaway. I read some critical opinions about viewers
'getting tired' by the too intense camera work - I do not agree with
them. When what you see on screen is expressive and interesting you
cannot get tired, as one does not get tired of seeing more masterpieces
in an art museum, or of listening to fine opera or classical music.
Sets are as exuberant and as complex as an architect mind like
Greenaway's can conceive. Overall Eisenstein in Guanajuato was for me a
very satisfying and surprisingly entertaining experience.
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