Eisenstein and his crew lingered in Mexico, with the director reputedly enjoying the charms of the local boys and occasionally shooting some film. Finally the Sinclairs ran out of patience and money, and Eisenstein had to return to Moscow. He and Joe Stalin made an effort to get Sinclair to send him the footage that had been shot so that it could be edited. I found out only recently that the Soviet representative in these negotiations was a young man named Thomas J. Brandon. (Brandon eventually became the entrepreneur behind Brandon Films, the most successful of non-theatrical/16mm film distributors, and his enormous catalog contained many European, Japanese, and Russian classics, although as a “fellow traveler,” he also distributed Soviet bloc items like Apple Blossom Time in Poland. This all has personal resonance because I was one of his last employees. In his capitalist disguise, Brandon took his cue from the Wizard of Oz, sending illegible tirades each day to staff from his estate in Westchester, to which a lucky few were invited for the privilege of raking his leaves. Rarely, he would personally descend upon the office, usually arriving around 5:25 p.m., as if to defy anyone to leave.) Anyway, TJB (as he fashioned himself) failed; only years after Eisenstein and Stalin were long gone did MoMA preserve the Que Viva Mexico! footage (much of which is exquisite) and dutifully send duplicates to Gosfilmofond, our Moscow-based colleagues in the International Federation of Film Archives.

Upon his return to Moscow, Eisenstein found that he was out of favor. His second collectivist farm epic, Bezhin Lug (Bezhin Meadow) was destroyed. Fortunately for film historians, one frame of each shot was saved, and Jay Leyda—onetime Eisenstein assistant, briefly a member of the MoMA staff, and later a distinguished professor of cinema studies at NYU—assembled the surviving stills into the short we are showing in this program. It was only when Boris Shumyatsky, czar of the Soviet film industry, was fired by Stalin that Eisenstein’s career experienced a rebirth.

Alexander Nevsky. 1938. USSR. Written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein

It has been observed by many that Leo Tolstoy renounced much of his early work in his later life. In some ways this could be said for Eisenstein (although he never reached an advanced age). Alexander Nevsky is more sedate and slower paced than his silent films, saving much of its montage for the climactic Battle on the Ice scene (where the Germans do, indeed, get their butts kicked). That battle sequence is rivaled perhaps only by Orson Welles’s Battle of Shrewsbury in Chimes at Midnight (Falstaff) (1966). The quality of Soviet sound recording at the time was not great, and central to the film is the beautiful score by Sergei Prokofiev. In recent years, the soundtrack was rerecorded, but the newer version lacks the hauntingly archaic quality that, to me, helps suggests the strangeness of the Middle Ages. MoMA’s print has the original track intact.