Burke Lecture Series, “Imagining Eisenstein Imagining Mexico” Dr. Dustin Condren

Sergei Eisenstein, one of the most important figures in cinema history, spent much of his career working devotedly on film projects (by some counts more than thirty) that were, for various reasons, never completed. Acutely aware of his orientation toward the unfinished, a filmmaker who regularly failed to make his films, Eisenstein saw these labors in the realm of the unrealized as an intrinsic stage of the creative process: the productive meeting place of theory and practice, of the ideal and the real. This talk will examine the director’s unrealized 1930–31 Mexican film—the most notorious of these unrealized projects, and the one for which we have the most available filmed footage—in the light of his larger unrealized body of work in order both to better understand the ambiguities of the project within Eisenstein’s full creative biography and to suggest how the film may be seen as a key indicator of cinema’s capacity for and categorical dependence on the unfinished.
Following the lecture, join us at IU Cinema for a screening of shorts of Sergei Eisenstein’s film stock ¡Que viva México!.