Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Eisenstein shows us Mexico in this movie, its history and its culture. He believes, that Mexico can become a modern state.
Eisenstein's long-unfinished vision of Mexico, finally assembled by Alexandrov, is a visually stunning and historically significant work. The cinematography — shot by Eduard Tisse — is extraordinary, with iconic compositions of landscapes, skulls, and faces that influenced generations of filmmakers. The film's poetic, episodic structure organized around Mexican life cycles is genuinely novel and unmistakably Eisenstein in conception and tone. However, as a reconstructed fragment of an unrealized project, the narrative coherence suffers, the 'acting' in the propagandistic or ethnographic sense feels staged and thin, and the ending (being incomplete and assembled posthumously) lacks the satisfying closure of a fully realized work. Still a landmark of world cinema and a singular artifact.