Que Viva Mexico!

First edition, first impression.  90pp, with black and white photographic plate illustrations.  Black cloth-covered boards with gilt titles on the spine. 8vo.  Cloth is a little marked, gently rubbed and rounded at corners and spine ends.  Internally neat, clean, bright and tight.  In its original rubbed, faded and edge-chapped dust wrapper, chipped and brittle over a sunned spine.

¡Que viva México! was  proposed film project, begun in 1930 by the Soviet avant-garde film director Sergei Eisenstein (considered one of the greatest film-makers of all time, perhaps best remembered for his Battleship Potemkin) and socialist writer and general muckraker, Upton Sinclair.  They planned an episodic portrayal of Mexican culture and politics from pre-Conquest times up to to the Mexican Revolution. Production was beset with difficulties and the whole endeavour eventually abandoned. The project , thought of as Eisenstein’s “greatest film plan and his greatest personal tragedy”, was picked and completed by others, being released in 1979, but this volume is Eisenstein’s own account of the failed project written in the early 1950s.