ABSTRACT
Looking at Eisenstein’s career from the time of his Mexican-American adventure of 1931-2 to his last film, Ivan the Terrible in the 1940s, we find —with one ambiguous exception-a discouraging succession of planned, half-realised and completely aborted projects. Film projects were initiated, then abandoned for lack of official support; sometimes the shooting was started; and in one case several versions of the film were actually finished, only for the whole project to be abruptly cancelled. Set-backs and reversals of this sort came to play an ever greater role in Eisenstein’s artistic life after the undoing of his Mexican film. Stalin’s telegram to Upton Sinclair in November 1931, which declared that Eisenstein had lost his comrades’ confidence and was regarded as a traitor who had deserted his country, effectively signalled the end of his American sojourn as well as the beginning of a period of hardship that unquestionably hastened his death. When Soviet representatives failed or refused to purchase the Mexican footage from Sinclair and have it sent to Moscow, the director lapsed into serious depression and had to be hospitalised in August 1933. To my mind, Eisenstein never really recovered from the loss of Que Viva Mexico!
