The venerated filmmaker Eisenstein is comparable in talent, insight and
wisdom, with the likes of Shakespeare or Beethoven; there are few - if
any - directors who can be elevated to such heights. On the back of his
revolutionary film Battleship Potemkin, he was celebrated around the
world, and invited to the US. Ultimately rejected by Hollywood and
maliciously maligned by conservative Americans, Eisenstein traveled to
Mexico in 1931 to consider a film privately funded by American
pro-Communist sympathizers, headed by the American writer Upton
Sinclair. Eisenstein's sensual Mexican experience appears to have been
pivotal in his life and film career - a significant hinge between the
early successes of Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October, which made
him a world-renowned figure, and his hesitant later career with
Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible and The Boyar's Plot.
