This fascinating study presents for the first time the full story of Eisenstein's disastrous attempt to make a great film in Mexico, a motion picture "symphony" of Mexican life, history, culture, and the perpetual Mexican fiesta of death. It clarifies the relationship between Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair, the American novelist who financed the picture, and reveals the causes and consequences of Sinclair's withdrawal of financial backing. Eisenstein was at the height of his creative powers when he began working on the Mexican film. The fiasco that ended the project was to leave a permanent mark on his life and work, while Sinclair was to be vilified on both sides of the Atlantic as the desecrator of the most important film of the world's greatest motion picture director. The book presents the story of these events in a unique manner by embedding the actual correspondence of the main participants in a commentary by Professors Geduld and Gottesman, who have endeavored to tell the truth about a tragic episode in the history of the cinema.

Few American writers have revealed their private as well as their public selves so fully as Upton Sinclair, and virtually none over such a long lifetime (1878—1968). Sinclair’s writing, even at its most poignant or electrifying, blurred the line between politics and art–and, indeed, his life followed a similar arc. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur weaves the strands of Sinclair’s contentious public career and his often-troubled private life into a compelling personal narrative. An unassuming teetotaler with a fiery streak, called a propagandist by some, the most conservative of revolutionaries by others, Sinclair was such a driving force of history that one could easily mistake his life story for historical fiction. He counted dozens of epochal figures as friends or confidants, including Mark Twain, Jack London, Henry Ford, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Camus, and Carl Jung. Starting with The Jungle in 1906, Sinclair’s fiction and nonfiction helped to inform and mold American opinions about socialism, labor and industry, religion and philosophy, the excesses of the media, American political isolation and pacifism, civil liberties, and mental and physical health. In his later years, Sinclair twice reinvented himself, first as the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934, and later, in his sixties and seventies, as a historical novelist. In 1943 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Dragon’s Teeth, one of eleven novels featuring super-spy Lanny Budd. Outside the literary realm, the ever-restless Sinclair was seemingly everywhere: forming Utopian artists’ colonies, funding and producing Sergei Eisenstein’s film documentaries, and waging consciousness-raising political campaigns. Even when he wasn’t involved in progressive causes or counterculture movements, his name often was invoked by them–an arrangement that frequently embroiled Sinclair in controversy. Sinclair’ s passion and optimistic zeal inspired America, but privately he could be a frustrated, petty man who connected better with his readers than with members of his own family. His life with his first wife, Meta, his son David, and various friends and professional acquaintances was a web of conflict and strain. Personally and professionally ambitious, Sinclair engaged in financial speculation, although his wealth-generating schemes often benefited his pet causes–and he lobbied as tirelessly for professional recognition and awards as he did for government reform. As the tenor of his work would suggest, Sinclair was supremely human. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur offers an engrossing and enlightening account of Sinclair’s life and the country he helped to transform. Taking readers from the Reconstruction South to the rise of American power to the pinnacle of Hollywood culture to the Civil Rights era, this is historical biography at its entertaining and thought-provoking finest.

A major influence on such filmmakers as Hitchcock, Godard, Fellini, and Scorsese, Sergei Eisenstein left an enduring legacy that was deeply informed by the political realities of early-twentieth-century Soviet Communism. In Sergei Eisenstein, Mike O’Mahony uses this historical lens to examine the richly diverse films, writings, and artwork of one of the foremost filmmakers of the twentieth century. Drawing on an extensive archive of Eisenstein’s published and unpublished writings, O’Mahony situates his oeuvre in the social and political context of the first three decades of Communist rule in the Soviet Union. The book analyzes his most influential films—including Battleship Potemkin, October, and Aleksandr Nevskii—as well as his uncompleted film projects, pioneering theories and methods, and copious archive of writings and drawings. O’Mahony examines how Eisenstein’s projects were generated or constrained by his volatile and complex personality, ongoing political events, and the conflict between his beliefs the Stalinist regime and his beliefs as a Bolshevik artist. The arcs of success and defeat in Eisenstein’s career, the book ultimately reveals, are inextricably intertwined with these fraught political and personal circumstances. An in-depth and thoughtful biographical treatment, Sergei Eisenstein gives us a new, richer understanding of this standard-bearer in modern filmmaking, making this an accessible and essential read for historians, scholars of film history, and movie buffs alike.

The pioneering film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein is known for the unequalled impact his films have had on the development of cinema. Less is known about his remarkable and extensive writings, which present a continent of ideas about film. Robert Robertson presents a lucid and engaging introduction to a key area of Eisenstein's thought: his ideas about the audiovisual in cinema, which are more pertinent today than ever before. With the advent of digital technology, music and sound now act as independent variables combined with the visual medium to produce a truly audiovisual result. Eisenstein explored in his writings this complex, exciting subject with more depth and originality than any other practitioner, and this is an accessible and original exploration of his ideas. Winner of the Kraszna Krausz Foundations' And/Or Award for Best Moving Image Book of 2009, "Eisenstein on the Audiovisual" is essential reading for students and practitioners of the audiovisual in cinema and related audiovisual forms, including theatre, opera, dance and multimedia.

Documenting the Documentary offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balance between theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.

In this unique book, William Richardson analyzes the descriptions given of Mexico by an assortment of Russian visitors, from the employees of the Russian-American Company who made their first contacts in the early nineteenth century to the artists, diplomats, and exiles of the twentieth century. He explores the biases they brought with them and the interpretations they relayed back to readers at home. Richardson finds that Russians had a particular empathy for the Mexicans, sharing a perceived similarity in their histories: conquest by a foreign power; a long period of centralized, authoritarian rule; an attempt at liberal reform followed by revolution.