Idols Behind Altars: A Poetic Reverie for Anita Brenner

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein

Famed Russian revolutionary film director Sergei Eisenstein traveled to Mexico in December 1930 to experience firsthand its “geographical, ethnological, cultural and historical diversity” and to make the feature film known to the world as ¡QUE VIVA MÉXICO! After shooting 200,000 feet of 35mm film footage, drawing hundreds of outlandish sketches and writing volumes of theoretical texts, he departed in April 1932 without a completed film. We will never know what Eisenstein might have edited given the chance — perhaps he did not know himself — but we can show you what he actually directed and shot in Mexico. IDOLS BEHIND ALTARS is a two-screen rearrangement of images from Jay Leyda’s 1955 genre-breaking EISENSTEIN’S MEXICAN FILM: EPISODES FOR STUDY, now newly restored and featuring a new score by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky.