Beyond Montage: Sound and the Dialectic of Enlightenment in Sergei Eisenstein’s Film ¡Que viva México!
Sampling is collage is montage. Think about it for a moment. When the film company Kino-Lorber approached me to do a more contemporary score for the fragments of Eisenstein’s 1930 unfinished film “¡Que Viva Mexico!” the first thing I did was research other film scores that had influenced my thinking. Miles Davis’s classic “Ascenseur pour L’echafaud” from 1957, Sergei Prokofiev’s score for Eisenstein’s film “Ivan The Terrible” (1945-1958), Alejandro Jodorowsky’s score for his infamous film “Holy Mountain” (1973) and other more obscure and experimental films like Ennio Morricone’s score for Giulio Petroni’s 1969 film, “Tepepa,” set during the Mexican Revolution. There are so many intangible things that make the film score connect with Eisenstein. To me – collage is montage is assemblage – is dj’ing. The music score I created for “¡Que Viva Mexico!” is a reflection of my own experiences in Mexico and my own insights into how revolutionary cinema acts as a catalyst for social change.
