Synopsis

Movie Name: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexican Footage
Language: Silent
Duration: 10 mins
Category:I
Director: Grigory Alexandrov, Sergei Eisenstein, Edward Tisse

Movie Name: Death Day
Language: No dialogue(No Subtitle)
Duration: 15 mins
Category:I
Director: Grigory Alexandrov, Sergei Eisenstein, Edward Tisse

Upon Charlie Chaplin’s recommendation, Sergei Eisenstein connected with writer Upton Sinclair, who helped establish the means for Eisenstein to embark on a film project in Mexico in late 1930. Accompanied by longtime collaborators Grigory Alexandrov and Edward Tisse, he shot dozens of hours of footage for what he planned as a multi-chapter film titled ¡Que viva Mexico! Funds from the Mexican Film Trust—a production company established by Sinclair, his wife, and other investors—were soon exhausted, and Eisenstein’s chances of finishing the film himself further diminished as his re-entry visa to the United States expired and he was unable to secure an extension to his permission to remain away from the Soviet Union. Much of the footage was brought back to the US by the producers, and Eisenstein never completed his work. This M+ Screenings programme presents excerpts from the original camera rolls of Dance of the Heads and Day of the Dead, shot by Eisenstein and his collaborators in 1931, and Death Day, one of three films derived from the footage and released by American producer Sol Lesser in 1933 and 1934.

Movie Name: Redes
Language: Spanish
Duration: 57 mins
Category:I
Director: Emilio Gómez Muriel, Fred Zinnemann

Sponsored by the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education as a docu-fiction film about the country’s rural populations, Redes centres on the story of Miro (Silvio Hernandez), a poor fisherman who organises a workers’ revolt against capitalist exploitation. Shot on location in Mexico’s Gulf Coast fishing communities and starring non-professional actors, Redes is not only a precursor to post-war neorealist cinema, but also a culmination of the unique talents intersecting around socially minded cinema-making during the early- to mid-1930s. The film marks the debut for its co-directors: Emilio Gomez Muriel, who learned about montage while living through the transition from silent films to talking pictures in the United States, and Fred Zinnemann, the influential Austrian American filmmaker who would go on to direct Hollywood films such as High Noon (1952) and From Here to Eternity (1953). Zinnemann’s realist, observational approach in Redes was heavily influenced by his apprenticeship to documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, and it counter-balances the film’s rigorously geometric and rationally compositional cinematography by Paul Strand, an established American modernist photographer.

Courtesy of Films Sans Frontieres