Department of Art History

Students in this graduate seminar will explore the dramatic circumstances surrounding the production of (as well as critical issues that arise in considering) Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished film "¡Que viva México!", nearly 200,000 linear feet of which was filmed (by Eisenstein and Eduard Tisse) on location in Mexico before production was abandoned in 1931. In making use of the Lilly Library's "¡Que viva Mexico!" collection, a subset of the Upton Sinclair Papers and the largest repository of archival materials related to the film, the seminar provides an extraordinary opportunity for graduate students interested in the history of art and visual culture, cinema and media studies, Indigenous studies, Hispanic studies, and Russian studies to work directly with primary source materials on campus. IU Cinema will screen several little-known films made without Eisenstein's permission from film footage that remained in Sinclair's possession, as well as "Eisenstein's Mexican Film: Episodes for Study", a film assembled by Jay Leyda for the Museum of Modern Art, where what remained of Eisenstein's film footage ultimately was deposited. Over the course of the semester, students thus will experience the complete existing visual record of "¡Que viva México!" as it exists on film and in the archive.