Que viva Mexico!

Eisenstein steeped himself in the history of this country, where modernity, the Middle Ages, and ancient Aztec culture lived side by side. He thought he could film a historical fresco with archaic rites and religious ceremonies in Catholic cathedrals built on top of Aztec and Mayan pyramids. He wanted to shift from showing matriarchal forms of society to the patriarchal story of the ‘right to the first night’. He would move from the daydreams of girls to male urges, to a story of violence and counter-violence and then to the 1910 Revolution. Finally, the epilogue would connect modern Mexico with primeval cyclical time in the carnivalesque festival of the Day of the Dead.