¡Que Viva Mexico! – Transnational Film and Audiovisual Art

Paulo C. Chagas
Music, Art
UC Riverside

Nikolay Maslov
Culver Center of the Arts
UC Riverside

The conference organized by the University of California, Riverside (UCR) Music Department in collaboration with UCR ARTS’ Culver Center of the Arts explores the contributions to transnational sound and vision, and new forms of audiovisual art in our current time. The event is structured around Sergei Eisenstein’s (1898-1948) unfinished silent film ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1930), which will be screened with a new commissioned electroacoustic music composition. Eisenstein didn’t fully realize his film project, but an edited version of his original footage was released in 1979. This remarkable film became emblematic in film scholarship, not only in the context of Eisenstein’s transnational aesthetics, but especially for its embodiment of the significant shift that occurred at that time from the sensory, experimental regime of modern art to the process of massification of the senses in the global mass culture. In addition to the premiere of ¡Que Viva Mexico! with a new sound/music track, the conference will present an artistic event with the screening of new audiovisual works curated through an international call along with a symposium featuring distinguished invited scholars on cinema studies, media studies, music, and the humanities.